hello.
i was interested in this project when the brief came through on thursday, but i kept putting it off in favour of other things. i finally got around to doing it on sunday night, but felt too tired to listen to the final thing, upload to soundcloud, and write about it. so here i am, only a couple of hours before the deadline, trying to squeeze in.
anyway, i possibly misinterpreted the prompt; the way i read it was to use the provided samples and only those samples, but seeing as others have added further elements, i suppose i must have got it wrong. this was, however, the way i approached my piece.
with the requirement to have at least 2 seconds of the samples unadulterated at the beginning and end of the piece, i decided to start (in bitwig studio, which i recently upgraded to version 5) with a track that would be completely free of any processing. i initiated the piece with the “hands held” sample, though i did add a fade-in to make the start less abrupt. (similarly, it ends with “walking”, which is faded out to avoid a sudden stop.) i actually tried to take the instruction extremely literally and have the uneffected track even bypass the master channel, but that just made it go silent, and i felt like i didn’t have the time to look into if there was a way to fix that.
i then proceeded to add the different samples on their own tracks at regular intervals until all the samples were playing. because some of them were quite short, a couple play twice.
next was adding effects to the samples. this was done with a variety of plugins; i favoured using granular effects, reverbs, and delays, as it felt like the piece should generally be quite ambient. i also made use of devious machines’ infiltrator2, which is fast becoming something i use on almost every track. i didn’t use huge chains of plugins for each track as i felt the original material was already good; most have only two or three plugins in operation, and one track only has a single plugin affecting it.
i had only listened to each effected sample in isolation, but whether through good luck or design, when i listened to them all together, they formed a rather pleasing piece. the final step was to add a fairly standard mastering chain (including my newly-acquired ozone 10) and render it out.
i’m pretty pleased with the end result, especially as i had to work more quickly than i would have liked (entirely through my own procrastination). the title is part of a quote i’ve always liked from hamlet - “i could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams”.
the artwork is produced with nightcafe studio, as usual, which i feel came up with a rather pleasing result.
congratulations on this thing running for 600 weeks. personally i’ve been around from the start (though my participation has been very sporadic - there was a period of two or three years where, due to a bad living situation, i didn’t work on any music at all) and look forward to sticking with it for as long as it may go on.
