Recently got a studio space in a former M&S building downtown - so I made a beat, then shut the door and recorded it on my phone. I added in some synths in FL Studio, as well as a guitar bit, where I used one of my favourite effects, the Squeeze which makes it sound broken and metallic.
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Sounds like a scene from a film!
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Thanks! I really enjoyed doing this one, especially as it gave me an excuse to use my studio space. Normally, I make stuff in the kitchen, same itās a novelty to have somewhere specific for making things.
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Through the wall from where I normally make music is my bathroom. So I just made a beat, turned up the monitors really loud, and made two separate recordings in the bathroom. The first one you hear is using little omni mics, which picked up plenty of traffic noise from outside. Later I mix in a second, much brighter recording which I made with contact mics stuck on the bathroom wall. Apart from normalising and chopping the start and end off the recordings, I didnāt process them in any way. It felt in the spirit of the assignment.
On top of that I made a kind of chord progression by stacking multiple arpeggiators in different time signatures and sending the note data to one synth. Chorus, very short delay for stereo width.
A couple of synth bass notes and a sampled guitar mutes through a delay.
A bit of automation and thatās about all I had time for this weekend, but it feels like something I might revisit and explore more! Fun!
Bitwig
Zoom H2 with LOM Usi mics and JrF contact mics
Klevgrand Slammer drum VST
Sandman Pro on the guitar mutes
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hello.
this was an interesting one to work on. because of my living situation (iām in an apartment building with neighbours all around) it wasnāt really practical to do the assignment exactly according to the instructions, but i was able to find a workaround.
i started by putting together the rhythm track in bitwig, which was some black metal drums played by ezdrummer3. i decided to have this louder and more compressed than i ordinarily would, and put it through guitar rig 6, as well as unfiltered audioās bass-mint and zip plugins.
the next task was to make it sound like it was heard through a wall. audiothingās speakers did most of the heavy lifting here, but i also used audio damage filterstation2 and melda production mbandpass to low-pass filter the sound (as that was what mostly came up when I searched how to make the effect) plus softubeās wasted space reverb.
i was fairly happy with how this sounded so exported it as an audio file (in essence making a recording of how it sounded through the wall) and brought that into a new project. for the rest of the track, i once again got japanese robots to make a midi file for me. this proved to be too short so i ended up stretching it to nearly 600% of its original length.
i heavily processed the drum recording and by chance got it to have this kind of whispering effect, which i decided would be a good foundation for the track. the midi from the japanese generator was instrumented with various arturia plugins: analog lab v, synclavier v, prophet v3 and pigments. i found a really nice reversed guitar which became the lead. i used delay (including minimal audioās excellent new cluster delay) and granular effects to add to the overall feel of the track, and applied my standard chain to the master.
after some fiddling around and tweaking here and there, i came up with what you hear below. the title was based off the project name and the whispering effect iād achieved on the drum recording, and the artwork (as usual) was produced by nightcafe studio, by feeding it the track title, various related terms, and some randomly-selected modifiers. (i think it came up with a rather good piece of art, this week.)
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I wanted to use an impulse response I made by pounding on a 2x4 against a wall with a hammer while recording in the room on the other side of the wall. I put this into Altiverb and composed my piece while listening through the wall filter/reverb.
For compositional material, I used sounds Iād recorded over several days with websdr channel at http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901 which is endless fun to listen to. Itās worth it to explore the wonderful resources buried in that arcane interface.
I built up a āconversationā between selected material arrayed over three main channels and recorded the output through the wall IR.
There needed to be some sort of rhythm, so I added a heartbeat recorded through a stethoscope, with time manipulations.
Inspired by the prompt but loosely implemented.
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Hey all,
I made a track using my first jam in Supercollider. My descent into programming music continues. Tour of UGens was the basis for most of the track.
Edited in Logic. With a tidal jam sprinkled in.
I then soloed just the bass drum and recorded it from outside.
That was when it all turned to custard. The cicadas turned out to be louder than
my bass drum and it was windy.
On my second attempt I forgot to push record.
So cicadas it is.
Looking forward to hearing everyoneās track.
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Tracks:
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Drone: StickFish by vcvphotography (VCVRack)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB1GkxqqDiU -
Ian Curtis Radio Blackburn interview.
Recorded 28th February 1980 at Preston Warehouse.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=DauN0oHgh4A&t=47s
(Tv next room, door closed, right channel)
Reaktor Ensenbles. Granular Entities.
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For this great prompt I recycled parts of last weekās track twiceā¦
For the rhythmic music played next door I opted for rhythmic piano-music. I chose two instruments from last weekās project. Olafur Arnalds Stratus is again playing some high pitched pattern, this time without the TranceGate and without tape-effects. And on the Steinberg Verve I played the rhythmic chords. The effects of these two instruments were adapted, but the reverb is still automated and several delays are at work.
I uploaded this track on SoundCloud since I like it as it isā¦
I exported the audio and played it with bluetooth speakers in one room, recording with the smartphone in the next room through the wall. The resulting audio had a very high level of noise louder then the music. I had to employ much noise-reduction (done in Audacity) and use a low-pass filter. This modified the sound and results in sound-artifacts - but I rarher like it.
I then added the same two instruments from the first part with their effect-chains. Stratus now plays another pattern, and on Verve I improvised a simple mono melody. The reverb-mix was reduced on both sounds to give it more presence, other effects were also adapted.
I like the resulting track and how the version modified by the wall (and played with the same instruments) adds this special background to the track.
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This moody jam was inspired by the installation of a return vent in my basement last year, which was house-shakingly loud, so of course I recorded it from the other side of the wall. It involved two power tools, and I used them here as sampled instruments. The only non-sampled non-rhythm instrument is a verb-y sine to build off of. I made a simple rhythm track to go with it, set up two old speakers facing a wall, and placed microphones on the opposite side to make a recording.
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Thereās something behind the porch wall. Something else is happening on the porch. The neighborhood cats are inspecting.
Process: Recorded drums. Played them at high volume. Went to the other side of the wall to the front porch. Recorded the very low-passed filtered sound with the zoom hand held recorder. Picked up some birds and melting snow drips and cars. Added more mysterious sounds experimenting with the Organelle and vocal sounds through the Microcosm pedal.
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The laundry room happens to be adjacent to my bedroom, so I used those walls as the filter to record the sounds of a drying machine cycle. Some fragments of a washing machine cycle were also included, although these sounds were captured inside the laundry room. I then applied the Kaleidoscope plugin and overdrive on both tracks and deemed the song complete.
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