Hey everyone! I’m really happy to present you my latest music release “Harbour”:
I had the idea to make a continuous ambient album in March 2016, while sitting on a train and recording surrounding sounds with the built-in microphone, routed through various audio effect apps. During the past three years I would record like this every now and then while traveling, sometimes jamming with synthesizer and sampler apps live on top of the microphone input. Those sessions were collected in a folder on the iPad until I finally had the time and inspiration to put everything together in Cubasis a few weeks ago. The whole album was actually created on the iPad. I even drew the cover artwork on the tablet and uploaded the master WAV file to Bandcamp in Safari. It was a really great experience and I feel a lot more at home in the music app ecosystem now.
I hope you enjoy this music piece and I’d love to hear your thoughts and feelings about it.
Thanks! That was a fun project too. I’ve got another road trip coming up later this year and I’m already gathering ideas on how to make that into an audiovisual release as well
Thank you, everyone! The track consists of about 20 different recordings I made over the years for this project. Putting it all together into one single track took me a while and I went over several different compositions until I was happy with the final one. It was interesting to work like this, without a clock signal or BPM, just nudging and editing various audio clips in a long timeline. I really appreciated using the Apple Pencil in Cubasis for more precise controls, compared to using a fingers, especially when it came to trimming clips and drawing automation curves.
I decided to let this be the soundtrack to my bus ride to work this afternoon. No noise-cancelling headphones as suggested, but the use of earbuds allowed other sounds to mesh with the music, sometimes in quite complimentary ways. The rumbling of the bus on poorly maintained roads was a disservice that occasionally drowned the music out, but there were also some great moments where the conversation between a recovering addict (“81 days clean and sober”) and the person he was speaking with on the phone managed to fade in and out in time with the transitions in sounds.
Thank you very much for reporting back! Glad to hear the soundtrack worked for your commute. Ambience can indeed add to the music experience. I often feel that music reaches me more deeply when travelling compared to listening at home, so combining ambience recordings with travel music is something I enjoy a lot and I also went into a somewhat similar direction on Hawaiian Yurt Music.
The track consists of about 20 different recordings I made over the years for this project. Putting it all together into one single track took me a while and I went over several different compositions until I was happy with the final one. It was interesting to work like this, without a clock signal or BPM, just nudging and editing various audio clips in a long timeline. I really appreciated using the Apple Pencil in Cubasis for more precise controls, compared to using a fingers, especially when it came to trimming clips and drawing automation curves.