Disquiet Junto Project 0495: Protip Etude

Disquiet Junto
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Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, June 28, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 24, 2021.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0495: Protip Etude

The Assignment: Share a tip for making music or working with sound, and record a track that employs it.

This is a sort of project we do on occasion. Last time we did was back in mid-December of 2020. It’s a great way to share experiences: to teach at the same time you’re learning. A virtuous circle, if you will.

Step 1: Think of a musical/sonic tip or technique you want to share with others. It might be something newly acquired, or it might be an old habit.

Step 2: In sharing the tip selected in Step 1, record a short piece of music that employs it.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0495” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0495” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your tracks in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0495-protip-etude/

Step 5: Annotate your tracks with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #disquietjunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, June 28, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 24, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0495” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 495th weekly Disquiet Junto project – Protip Etude (The Assignment: Share a tip for making music or working with sound, and record a track that employs it) – at: https://disquiet.com/0495/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0495-protip-etude/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this project is by AKT.UZ, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:

https://flic.kr/p/2bRbXCv

https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

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The project is now live. Can’t wait to learn from everyone.

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My track demonstrates the spooky sounds of the wind organs.

Here’s a tutorial on how to make these simple instruments:

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I’m sharing a rather strange field recording technique - “Dragged Mics”
I really love the organic and analog approach, and the almost processed sound you gain from it.
There’s a more thorough explanation on Soundcloud…

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Hi, I’m pretty straight forward, old school in terms of musical/sonic techniques.
But there’s this old habit that I carry on since my days as a young music student: I carry with me a music manuscript paper pad and I write any idea I have. Then, months, years, or sometimes decades in the future, when I’m looking for ideas for a certain project, I re visit that music pad and try to play the idea, if it’s good I record it and then develop it, expand it, orchestrating it etc

A couple of years ago I had a big commission for instrumental music and I had to show to the producer some ideas, so music paper won’t make it and it was useless to develop, so I just recorded a bunch of ideas from that notepad with no development or additional orchestration, just the basic idea. Then, the ones that would be accepted could be properly developed.

The raw recordings took between 45sec to 90sec length and were very simple, obviously.
The project (an international travelling exposition with music and images for the UNESCO) was abandoned due to the pandemic, so I found myself with a dozen of snippets to play with.

Somehow I had the feeling that there was a charm on this simple fragments, sometimes a tiny idea but some other times a fully formed micro-composition with A-B-A structure and all.

I started “finishing” some, avoiding any development in length or form, just overdubbing parts to orchestrate the original, forming a collection called “Miniatures”.

I’ve been sharing many of those for the past few months (if you visit my soundcloud you will notice that most of my recent shares, including my JUNTO tracks have the “Miniature” mention on the title). I kept the “miniature” concept for many new recordings (the junto pig-latin track among others) just keeping it simple and brief.

Are this ideas interesting like this, in a minimal form with no development? Are this proper musical statements that deserve a release or or just a lazy curiosity that should remain private? I don’t know…

If replaying these in the near future I found it lazy and banal I may shelf them on the “ideas” drawer or hand these understated masters to people who could develop it and make it more interesting, time will tell.

Advice and comments are appreciated.

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Yesterday I just shared one for the Haiku challenge and I would like to make it a “double-share” with this junto project if that’s ok with you?

This is an idea I played using artificial harmonics on my Drake Custom electric bass, then I overdubbed celesta, treated music-box samples and glockenspiel playing mostly the same thing in unison and octaves.

The photo is (c) Vasily Kozorez

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I’ m totally in love with these - and I’m making a bunch of them for a workshop I host in August!

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Excellent, thanks for the idea and tips.

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Cool, the idea of dragging something behind is kinda poetic and the gritty sound could have a variety of applications.

And @DeDe, making a miniature piece of music seems appropriate for a response to a haiku. I enjoy hearing your approach to instrumentation.

While we’re sharing tips, I recently made this series of videos with ideas for carers stuck at home with children. Seems to have been timely, as school holidays begin and parts of my state are going into quarantine.

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my tip is simple - export your track to audio then don’t save the project file

this stops me from tinkering, perfecting, altering.
record it, export it, done.

this was played in live10: two instances of ob-xd, supermassive, tape cassette 2, ddly. a bit of tinkering in audacity.

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I like to reuse everything: beats, basses, field recordings, synth bits, my own samples, and entire ambient tracks I’ve made. I do it often enough.

Every sound here has been used, re-used, buried, and re-buried in many of my tracks.

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Created using the deluge set to 21 bpm sending MIDI notes and CC’s to the Noise Engineering Cursus Vereor AAX plugin in Pro Tools then recorded directly to an audio track. Added a modulated reverb and modulated delay to provide some movement overall to the track.

Since this is my first submission and I’m fairly new to making electronic music I don’t know that I have a lot of Pro Tips to share. But I will say that I enjoyed the simplicity of making this track. It contains only 6 notes repeated over and over. I guess my tip would be that music doesn’t have to be complicated. I think that is a valuable lesson that we must learn over and over again.

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Hi all, here’s a track using Norns Flora script and Moog Subharmonicon. I started off unsure how I would get them playing together but I worked it out. So my tip is to try new things and see what happens. The question could be ,what combination of instruments have I not tried out together ?

Flora_Sub
Flora_Sub3936×1936 1.53 MB

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The playlist is now rolling. Thanks, everyone!

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One of the best way I’ve found to write music is to find a poem you like and then write a melody for it. After doing that, you can just throw away the poem and work from there. I used Anne Bradstreet’s “By Night when Others Soundly Slept”. as inspiration for this one.

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I do exactly this. It works so well.

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One thing I like to do is use Ableton’s Looper device on a return track and place an effects rack right after it. Then I set the feedback parameter to zero, and enable the send track to itself. This then acts as though any effects after the Looper are in the feedback loop, and I can continually overdub the loop, allowing the effects to gradually change it over time. This is effectively my way of achieving a destructive tape loop entirely within Ableton.

I recorded this track by playing a handful of notes on 2 instruments, and using the send control to vary how much of the signal is passed to the Looper track. Then I have some subtle distortion, a compressor and a gain control, and a reverb in the effects loop of the Looper, which I use to change the sound of the loop over time.

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An example of sounds recorded using a contact microphone, in this case attached to outdoor metal ‘furniture’ such as wire fences, field gates, signage, etc, subsequently mixed & edited using Audacity.
Contact microphones produce a unique sound quality &, of course, eliminate any extraneous noise.

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My advice was “take something you recently learned about and apply it immediately”. I find this an interesting thing in general, as it can often get you started but it always turns out differently, because you end up doing it slightly differently (or you mess it up and you get a pleasant surprise). In this case, I saw a Youtube video about the relative darkness / brightness of the modes, so I created this track which goes from Major to Locrian, changing modes every 6 bars, staying in C.

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Tip: If you cannot remove it, use it.

Here I had a recording of Norns with Awake. Yes, I know I can record internally noise-free, but here I did externally and I had a lot of noise (and hum). I removed it, but I was not able to remove it to my satisfaction. So I recorded some extra noise and added it in different layers, even as a rhythmic base.

00:00: Starting with the recording, with “removed noise”.
00:30: Removing the noise removal, so you hear the plain recording and the f*ing noise (USB power via USB hub, I suppose…)
01:00: adding more noise
01:30: adding rhythmic noise (step filtering Norns’ noise)
2:50: some tonal noise

Okay, it’s still too noisy :wink: But better than the “removal version” would have been…

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