First, I dragged each sample on to a track in Ableton’s arrangement view. Seeing the waveforms and comparing the lengths of each sample helped me better understand what I was working with.
I started with “walking” and it seemed to me like it would sound cool if I reversed it, so I did and I liked what I heard. The resulting recording neatly created what I considered to be three different parts, which I then built an A, B and C part off of for my track.
I then used “worn path” as my bass track and kept it pretty simple with a single bass note for each part.
Then I messed around with “PSU Stairs” to create random percussion sounds. I dragged the sample into an Ableton Simpler device and just assigned random MIDI notes until I liked what I heard.
“Street poet” just served as a background, percussive pad type of sound. I did not do much to it except take a different part of the sample for each of the parts of my song. I did a similar thing for “no input” except I used EQ to take out the entire high end because of that high-pitched noise.
Finally, I played around with “nacre voit” and “hands held” as my pads, just trying to layer parts that I liked from those samples in the parts of the song I had developed so far.
I wasn’t satisfied with what I had for a song at this point, so I decided to create some drums from the PSU Stairs sample. I considered playing live drums or using new samples, but decided to try my hand at some sound design. I pitched one of the percussive elements down to create a kick and then captured what sounds like keys jingling to create a tambourine sound. I did similar things for the crash, adding a wash effect, a “snare” and a “shaker” sound.
For mixing, I recently logged into a Focusrite webinar where attendees were given a code to download the FAST plugin bundle. So, I skipped a few steps in mixing this track and left the EQ and reverb to the algorithms.
This was a super fun project and I really am glad to have had the opportunity to participate. I am looking forward to listening to the other submissions and hearing how we all used similar elements.
Edit to add a Bandcamp link: Fireworks Disquiet0600 | John Wright
I have only posted my submissions to SoundCloud so far, but I was thinking of posting them to Bandcamp as well. I like the idea of using BNDCMPR mentioned above.
