Intergalactic planetary

 

Dozer

Bit cute and a really good fuzz pedal.

The tone was thick and the lift switch brought in the higher frequencies, but my fretless sounded better without those.
 

I can say

 

naviarhaiku537 – Deep in the mountains

The haiku shared by Naviar Records this week was written in the 15th Century, which is kinda mind-blowing.

I've been on holiday at the beach and had recorded the chords using a Jamstik guitar, sending the MIDI to Ableton Live's electric keyboard instrument.

It's been a rainy day today, so I arranged those parts and then recorded my upright bass.

This is about the sixth take and I think I was getting a bit carried away as the bass part is probably too busy.

Anyway, it's been fun to make music and it helps justify all the equipment I packed!

Drum and bass

 

Disquiet Junto 0642 Kick from Champagne

The Disquiet Junto project this week invites participants to make a techno track using kick drums made from the sound of something carbonated.

It stumped me for a few hours, as I'm on holiday at the coast and wasn't sure I could record a good pop even if I had a bottle of sparkling wine.

Then I remembered Archive.org and downloaded:

• https://archive.org/details/bigclive_20201107
• https://archive.org/details/VirtualWine-vwtip_060810_03_how_to_open_champagne936
• https://archive.org/details/twitter-1304429831409537024

These were edited in Ableton Live and used only the effects within that software.

I found the sparkling pops worked for the snare sound and also the bass part, but there was a sample of Clive putting down some bit of equipment that gave an okay kick sound.

With that in mind it's interesting that two of the three videos compared the pop of the cork to a farting noise.

After shaping up the loops and getting a rhythm going, I gave the track structure in Live's Arrangement view and added the vocal part since I liked Clive's commentary.

Kids these days

 

Deep listening to nature

Recently I heard a talk from Andrew Skeoch about his field recordings.

It was a thoughtful presentation that opened with audio he’d captured of the dawn chorus of birds in Victorian bushland.

Andrew shared a spectrogram with the birdcalls that showed their frequencies and then identified specific bird species to discuss their evolution and how this shaped their communications.

A cuckoo, for example, had a deeper call to reach other cuckoos as they were more geographically isolated species.

Other species engaged in a call and response that saw their birdsongs adapt to new melodies, which reflected my own recent experiences whistling with Pied Butcherbirds.

He spoke on the way some sounds will evade detection, while others include transients that help identify the location of the bird.

As the presentation neared the conclusion, Andrew reflected on the subjective experience of time to consider how different species in the landscape operate in different speeds.

He speculated that dragonflies, for example, live at a pace over a hundred times faster than humans.

To illustrate his point he slowed down the birdcall (but maintained pitch) of a small bird to demonstrate how more emotive their sequence sounded when we could identify the micro-phrases that constituted it.

The broader argument of his presentation, Andrew explained, was to help people recognise their place within the environment and he said there were many more observations with audio files to hear in the book he was promoting.

As he ended Andrew played the recording again and this seemed magic the way it illustrated how much we'd learned since first hearing it.

I really enjoyed hearing his perspective and am grateful for the Murrumbidgee Field Naturalists for inviting Andrew to visit Leeton. 

So my humming

 

Disquiet Junto 0641 Re-re-re-re-revise

The Junto this week is to revise a recent track.

Lately I've been challenging myself to work in different time signatures, so this isn't the best example but maybe that's why it stood out. 

After I'd tried permutations that made lottery numbers look sequential, I found myself pondering whether I'd lost something pursuing needless complexity in my compositions. 

So I put together this track quickly and used the M-Tron VST for inspiration, particularly the disco bassline and a choir shaped the chord sequence. 

When the Junto instructions arrived I decided to run the four MIDI parts through my Roland Boutique rack. I've got a lot of the Boutique range but mostly use the TR-06, JU-06, JX-08 and SE-02. 

I found presets that sounded okay and then began experimenting with the arpeggiator and delay settings. Somewhere I found that fuzzy Juno button and then I realised the song needed more space for the delay, so I changed the sequence. 

And I've been pondering that news from Cechnya about legislating tempo and realised this song would fail their censorship, although it means no harm to the Checnyan peoples. 

This is the fourth take and it was the first where the feedback didn't totally get away from me.