Disquiet Junto Project 0520: On the Clock

Disquiet Junto
#22


That thing I’ve been putting off? Creating a longer form piece with a sci-fi space vibe. I’ve created short spacey and sci-fi loops in the past but nothing of any length or with structure. This track features a chaotic middle section with some chill at the beginning and end.

Made with a mix of modular synth (voices: Hexinverter Mindphaser* and E352 Cloud Terrarium) Korg opsix hardware synth, and Ableton Live instruments. Effects: Valhalla Supermassive, Desmodus Versio, and various Ableton audio effects.

*Just before this Junto was announced, I had put the Mindphaser in my focus case to get to know it better. What a perfect opportunity to see what kind of sci-fi vibe it could make. It’s responsible for much of the middle section.

6 Likes
#23

This may be an example of “just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should”…anyways, I had this idea percolating for awhile, so I made a guitar bit using frippertronics, then cut it up and mixed it with other things in FL Studio, then slowed the whole thing down slightly in Audacity.

7 Likes
#24

Ever since my one time outside of N America in 2004, I’ve longed to just listen to a fridge running on 50Hz power. Since was 3 or so, I’ve formed music around the ubiquitous sound of 60Hz power, but a minor third lower seems so much nicer. Two things at the top of my procrastinated list were to check out freesound.org, and to do something with an old practice tape reel of my dad’s from the early 70s (metronome and piano).

Thanks to the 0520 impetus, I uploaded a couple sounds to freesound.org, and downloaded a fridge and a neon light running at 50Hz; and I took a snippet of my dad practicing Bach, and roughed in corresponding midi by hand. What’s here resulted from noodling around with just the two 50Hz samples.

7 Likes
#25

My procrastination knows no bounds.
Here is the remix of my very first Soundcloud track on my channel.
I meant to get it in last week for the remix Junto but you all know the story.

Merry Christmas everyone. Been a real pleasure enjoying all your tracks for the past year.

9 Likes
#26

Thank you for this project! When reading the email I was reminded of the Disquiet Junto Project 0488 Reverse Delay (think of something music-related you’ve been putting off: finishing a track). Back then I wanted to do my first song (including vocals), but ended up only with the instrumental version Ride the Curvature.

Now I decided to put aside all the voices in my head arguing against and set to work. Having thrown away the paper with the lyrics I wrote new words, remembering they were just playing around with buzz words of time-travel - curvature meaning the space-time curvature.

Still without microphone I used the one integrated in my laptop and recorded directly into Cubase. I had to use Var-Audio extensivly since I missed nearly all the notes :slight_smile: . I had to invest quite a lot of time to create something not too unbearable from the audio, trying to somehow cover the bad singing with effects. If you wonder about the incomprehensible lyrics - I wrote them down on SoundCloud.
Then I also worked on the music, adding new transitions, a new sound, doing some EQing…

So thank’s to @disquiet, I have finally published a song! This is an appropriate climax of my first year in the Junto. Thank’s to all of you, I have learned so much. Merry Christmas!

9 Likes
#27

At the end of 2019 I composed a few songs for a friend of mine who was making a romhack of Zelda II. The game was released at the start of 2020 and many people in the Zelda II community were really excited about the new music I added. I have since composed full soundtracks for two other Zelda II hacks but neither had the reception or gave me the pride of that first one.

Since sometime in 2020, I have been meaning to make an “arranged” version of the songs from that first hack and this project was the final kick in the pants I needed to sit down and do it. Because the game it was made for was called “Winter Solstice”, I won’t be releasing the new album until tomorrow morning, but I promise it’s all finished in time for this deadline.

If you want to check it out it will be available tomorrow morning at 07:58 PST (the time of the solstice) at https://eatabrick.bandcamp.com/album/winter-solstice-arranged

3 Likes
#28

On May 31st of this year, one of my friends announced the track list for her then upcoming EP, with one of the titles being “Guitar Solos”. After she revealed that the track did indeed have a guitar solo, I began brainstorming instruments that are seldom used as a solo instrument. The wind chime was the first suitable instrument that came to mind, so I ended up running with it, even promising her that I would eventually record a song titled “Wind Chime Solos”.

The idea would not be pursued any further until this week’s prompt was announced. After weighing my options, I decided that “Wind Chime Solos” would be the song that finally sees the light of day.

Despite my excitement for this song, I succumbed to procrastination and only started recording Monday evening. Rather than shred on the instrument, I instead opted to record a wind chime soundscape. I used a total of nine tracks, with the main track being doubled and panned to the left and right to achieve a fuller sound. Some additional tracks were even fed through a rotor cabinet plugin, creating a fascinating draining effect. These come in at the second half of the song along with five additional wind chime tracks that have been pitch shifted, filtered, delayed, compressed, and even de-essed in some cases.

4 Likes
#29

Recorded this in 1992 as kinda one off screw around making up genres in the studio with a friend. Outer Space Psychedelic from San Francisco 1965. I forgot about it until about a year ago while cataloging some old tapes. I started a mix then, but shelved it. So a perfect candidate for this Junto. Played live to 16 track while drinking a lot of beer.
Happy New Year all. Thanks for all the fun tracks.

6 Likes
#30

Clocking in at the 11th hour - have wanted to rework this one for some time. Some elements have moved forward, and tightened composition, but ultimately should not use live drums on the street, recorded from a distance, as a backbone. Leveraging more EQ on the other tracks. Thank you for listening.

The female voice is the somewhat disappeared Michele Bachmann, sourced from public TV vids at archive dot org. The angry gentleman was a street preacher who worked my job walk once or twice a week, waving a stick, and getting more and more agitated no one was seeing the angry light that enlightened him. He also disappeared, from that route at least.

The crunchy percussion is an ancient DD-14 yamaha electronic drum kit, shoved through compression and distortion, as is the dubby bass guitar.

4 Likes
#31

I think the playlist is all set. If I missed your track, lemme know:

3 Likes
#32

I procrastinated searching for new VSTs and developing new ambient composition methods this year. For this challenge I tried some new VSTs (Odin2 and LowBitMonoSyn) and layered some soundscapes.

Odin2 is quite impressive, I will keep this synth. LowBitMonoSyn seemed ok but somehow it made my FL Studio crash after some hours of work. Disappointed, I had to remove it.

Regardless, I am happy how the textures turned out. :slight_smile:

4 Likes
#33

It’s a week late, but, for what it’s worth (and I love it!), here it is:

https://soundcloud.com/michael-ash-sharbaugh/bittermouth-disquiet0520-on-the-clock-sm7?si=c8e2042232c14d96875c0c0c7640a0b4&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

"I was working on the recording of another work – “The Shadow of Your Smile” [ Michael-ash-sharbaugh – The-shadow-of-your-smile ] – when I had ‘mistakenly’ recorded the two main sequences that make up this tune. I had, at the time, hoped to add them to the “Shadow” song, but, alas, they did not fit, but – BOY[!!!] – did they sound great nestled side by side one another as discrete tracks!

Therefore, I continued working on “Shadow,” and put them on the desktop backburner in a folder called “put these audio files together.” After remembering Marc’s prompt a week ago – “stop procrastinating and do … some musical idea you’ve been putting off doing all year … a riff, a new approach to an instrument you use, reworking an existing track … whatever’s been on your mind,” I busted them out, and just did it!

This ‘junto’ piece is almost a week late, but, as I have done with many other works based on Marc’s prompts for the Disquiet Junto, I opened that aforementioned folder, and edited the hell out of the two tracks (snipping them into sections and juxtaposing them over a 3-minute duration), and added more sound (coyote calls, synth flute, and ambience-giving plug-ins – delay, reverb, chorus, and phaser), and release it now.

Happy Holidaze, Everybody!"

~ Michael

3 Likes