I have been rather busy over the past several days, and was thus unable to complete this assignment by Monday, but I still wanted to participate.
Earlier in 2022, I created a synth oriented song that resembled the work of Vangelis. Portions of the arrangement were promising, but I was dissatisfied with some of the programmed percussion, so I largely tabled it. This prompt encouraged me to dust off the song and try a different approach to the percussion. I opted to emulate the work of Tom Waits, particularly his Swordfishtrombones era, by incorporating metallic percussion and mallet work. I originally attempted to program some marimbas, but the lower frequencies were muddied in the mix, so I instead played a mini balafon and transposed it up an octave so that it would easily cut through the mix.
The metallic instruments came from both found sounds (like a plate weight), conventional instruments (cowbells), and unusual contraptions (satellite drums and a reco-reco and created by Pete Engelhart).
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