Just wanted to follow back up now that I finished my track, because I had some questions (and some great suggestions from others) about dealing with long form things that are very static from getting boring pitch-wise.
As I continued to work on the piece (which is about 34 minutes long), I decided to take sections of about five minutes each and try to focus on movement within those. I ended up sticking with the two long form recordings, and adding an additional two long form recordings, and using 9 return tracks and a lot of automation within ableton to basically segue and move them through space.
One really useful trick I found for making the pitch less static was using ableton’s corpus device (which is basically a resonator), modulated by two slow lfos and ran through ableton’s echo. It creates a pitch warble about halfway through the piece that I think keeps it a bit more engaging.
Working the stereo field as @Simeon and @alanza mentioned was also a big thing. 3 of the return tracks were dedicated to this, one very mono, and the other hard left and right. Being able to individually automate things about these tracks (and send them independently to other returns) allowed me to keep things moving. I also used several notch filters, some to cut, and also at one part, I modulate the freqeuncy of a few of them and have them resonate and sweep (similar to your suggestion @_mark).
@lettersonsounds I used your technique of focusing on the tones and harmonic/intervalic relationships in reverse. One of my tracks is pseudo-random long form pitches, and I would use notch filters to cut out tonics if I didn’t want things to resolve in a certain place. While not related to the bass note issue, I did start to lower other things as I bring in this high metallic cloud sound towards the end of the piece to keep it moving.
This was a really fun project and I think having so many suggestions and feedback helped me to push through and be a bit more critical on the details than I typically am, so thank y’all!
