I’ve been working on an album exploring feelings of isolation and loneliness. When reading the project description, I decided to take those ideas and creating something new with more of a noisey approach, something with some edge. This is the result.
Technical things. I’ve been exploring some software synths and creating drones from them. For this track, I used Phasex run through multiple effects to degrade and add noise, stretching afterwards to create the drone. Several layers of that built up through the track.
Managed to get some time this week - it has been ages!
I used a new module (Argos Bleak) to create a slowly moving series of chords using four sequencers and four oscillators arranged as two pairs with each having its own filter to give extra movement to the patch.
I’ve been doing a lot of audio collage lately, probably due to pandemic-related temporary-layoff malaise… less interest in playing the real instruments? The usual technique: using snippets of sound to create loops, letting them phase in and out, throwing on a pile of plug-ins, creating textures. I put the finishing touches on this one just the other day. I pulled the audio samples from a recording we made of my partner testing out her new amplified viola. There are 4 loops made from her viola, and one sporadic narrator from an old public domain Coronet “documentary” called Heat and Temperature.
The video is constructed using loops from the same documentary - they start and loop at the same time as the audio loops.
Here’s what I’ve got happening in the woodshed right now: The San Francisco Saxophone Quartet’s recording of Debussy’s “Claire de Lune” warped out over beats sampled from Led Zeppelin, McCoy Tyner and Adam Makowicz.
Sounds great! My question is: do the figurines in the cover photo represent the looping sounds in some way? I’m trying to imagine how the sounds I’m hearing relate to a bead, a wire, crystals (?), etc.
Since the beginning of the lockdown here in Denmark, I have been recording for the project “What do you hear from your window?” Initiated by Gilles Malatray - a form of Sound Walking without leaving your house during the outbreak of Covid19 - There’s a playlist here: https://soundcloud.com/rizzi/sets/what-do-you-hear-from-your
So when the call for this week´s Junto came out, I thought I’d share a recording. I decided to make a new recording today as we’ve been having rain on and off all day - rain is a challenge and since this week’s call is about wood shedding (or just shedding as we called it when I played jazz in the late 90’ies )it would make sense to practice my technique. I spent all day recording - changing places, mics and covers. I ended up in front of my house under the big green bush you see in the picture. Good choice as it turned out - I got the rain, birds a couple of bees taking shelter from the rain. There’s a few sounds from my house as well as my neighbors.
I recorded with a pair of LOM Usi’s AB 40 into a Sony PCM D 100 - the track is unprocessed apart from adding a little gain.
@rrizzi perfect capture of the environment, i could be in my garden right now (if it was daytime). As I get older I more and more get transfixed by the gentle evolution of the sounds of the natural world. Good stuff
Rhetorical Difference was based on an abstract image which I found to be open to interpretation. As I tried to get my mind around it I decided to go with something inspired by Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question.
this is ¶radio hummingbird’s contribution to this week’s disquiet junto with the serial number 0435. in short, there was no other requirement for this contribution than to contribute a piece of music.
for this assignment i have chosen to create and submit an entirely new song with the following in mind: it is now one year that i left a wonderful place in south east asia, where i lived and worked for a number of years, to resettle to europe. so far, it has been difficult to make sense of the “old” world for me and thus i suffered a significant creative slump ever since. although, due to corona, i should have all the time in the world to just create anything and everything, it has been hard for me to get going. so i took this week’s junto as a chance to utilise my little 100hp travel/live eurorack synth, which i had with me during my time in south east asia and with which i spent many joyful hours, to finally try to get back on my feet…and funnily, what a large studio size eurorack synthesizer wasn’t able to do for me in the meantime, this little fella was…magic!
i only used 100hp of eurorack modules, the sony tcm-5000ev and the field kit to create this piece.
a daw or computers were only used, for a little mastering in ableton live. easy.
I had a couple of things I thought I might share but they were already done so I didn’t think it would be as useful to me as it could be. Instead I made something new using some techniques I wouldn’t ordinarily but had thought about doing in the past.
The first deviation is in length; I rarely make things over 5 minutes (or shorter than 3:30) so 8+ minutes is a significant change. Secondly it’s in the drone style which is something I don’t usually do. Third, instead of mixing and gain stage to get a clean, low noise output, I gain staged and mixed to get a noisey result. Finally, rather than using the recording directly from my mixer, I took some speakers into the garage and played that recording into the room and recorder into a second PCM recorder.
I didn’t have much of a thought about the end product here so it was more procedural than carefully constructed, though I iterated on the drone a few times (adjusting modulations and routings) but from that point I just did what I set out to do (rather than fine tuning for effect).
As for gear, the drone was made on a Peak (using its built in effect). Two volcas were used because they are noisey (no notes played), run into a mixer channel with a lot of gain and some EQ to get them sounding similar to raise the noise floor in stereo. A Zoom H5 was used for playback through some cheap computer speakers. A Zoom H6 with XY capsule at 120° was used for garage recording.
All in all the end result isn’t exactly an intentional piece of art, but more a technical experiment. In this regard it was a success as I wanted to take this week’s project as a chance to try something new. As usual, I’ll wait until Monday night/Tuesday morning and have a dedicated listening session to hear to what everyone submitted. Thanks for another inspiring week.
I’ve been sat down making music at more inconsistently during the quarantine - I seem to actually be sat down noodling with more frequency, but for shorter sessions, which results in less finished results and more just half baked ideas.
I’ve finished a couple of tracks to a rough mix stage, this is one of them. It’s a track called “The Office of Unspecified Services” and was made using a Digitakt, volca FM, 0-Coast, Minibrute 2. There may also be a bit of light synths from an OP-1 and Pigments soft synth (though I’ve forgotten now… I just vaguely remember using both recently ) and an Eventide Timefactor delay peddle.
Then I spent a while arranging and mixing in Ableton.
I wanted a lower tempo than usual - so its around 111BPM and I was also consciously trying to avoid using any vocal samples - from films, music etc - as I realised I was always relying on them in tracks to maintain interest and give a specific emotion rather than letting the instruments / sounds themselves convey that.
When I play it back it seems very loud on my system, but I’m right in middle of shaking up my tiny bedroom studio, so can’t judge properly. But just a warning!
I got a Grid a week ago, and after a few days on mlr I planned on spending this weekend with cheat codes. As luck would have it, @dan_derks hosted a live processing walkthrough last night, which was perfect timing (and this wouldn’t exist had that not happened).
I have a section of my OP-1’s tape with a single track recording that I keep going back to, so I decided to use that, as I know it back to front. I programmed a bunch of patterns in cheat codes, turned the volume up and went about the usual Saturday morning routine around the house. After a couple of hours I got back to it, reset everything, and after a while had 3 patterns in 2 of the buffers, while the other one was happily looping. I’m sure someone familiar with cheat codes will quickly spot when I’m struggling, but I’m quite happy with the end result and it felt really good.
In hindsight, it was good that I had the Fates Grid-less for a while, as it forced me to focus on scripts I could use without a Grid - the last few weeks have been filled with Otis, Cranes, and Compass, and it’s been bliss. Now with mlr and cheat codes, I feel I can achieve everything I want to do at the moment, which has never happened to me before with a single instrument (well, yes, each of those is an instrument, and there are 2 physical objects).
You hear an OP-1 patch fed to cheat codes. The sends on the mixer are the resonant filter on a Mirage, and a Polara reverb. The stereo mix is recorded to Live and a Marantz 430, the output of which ends in another Live track. Finally each Live track is slightly panned.
) and an Eventide Timefactor delay peddle.