Category Archives: One Sound Every Day

From July 28, 2008 – July 28, 2009 John Keston posted a sound every day in this category.

Radio Static Part 1

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As I have mentioned in previous articles, I love knobs. This includes the tuning knob on AM/FM radios. For today’s sound I decided to record my old Panasonic tuner. I took a mono direct signal into my M-Audio Firewire 410 and started tuning. What I was after is that static sound between stations, and the tiny chunks of speech and music that pop through as one spins the dial. I started with FM, switched to AM, and then back to FM recording close to ten minutes worth of audio. This particular tuner wasn’t much good for producing the gliding theremin like tones you sometimes hear, but I got some good static and random micro-clips of music and speech. Here’s a snapshot of one of the sections I’m satisfied with.

Radio Static Part 1

Meditation Bell

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Nils Westdal and I recorded these bells for a percussive element in one of those tracks that have yet to see the light day. These beautiful solid brass bells have more than twenty seconds of decay. We recorded nineteen of those seconds. We used an AKG c4000b large diaphragm condenser microphone to capture the sound. The c4000b is one of the most versatile and sensitive mics I’ve used. It’s perfect for capturing all that sustain and high frequency goodness. Take a deep breath, cross your legs, close your eyes and press play.

Meditation Bell

Illuminator Console

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To create this sound I started by programming a beat. In this case I pitched each slice of the beat individually to create a variety of pitches in the loop. Once I was satisfied with it I rendered it to a clip and applied a plugin by Paul Kellett (MDA) called Tracker, distributed by smartelectronix. Tracker tracks the frequency of a sample with a waveform, such as a sine wave, and then allows you to transpose, slide between pitches, adjust the mix and so on.

Running drums through Tracker can create some interesting and unpredictable melodies. At the start of this clip I left the mix at 100%, only hearing the melody created by the pitches tracked, then adjusted it down to zero by the end so you can hear what the beat sounds like without the pitch tracking. In front of Tracker I added Beat Repeat and turned it on a couple of times to generate some fills. I touched it up with some tempo delay mixed in here and there for some dub flavor.

Illuminator Console

Guitar Chord

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A rarely tapped resource for me are clips found in the sound file folders of Ableton Live sets I use for performances. My group Keston and Westdal use two laptops running Live synchronized using a MIDI network. We usually play instruments during our performances and use the laptops for live looping and triggering loops and “scenes” as we construct the arrangements during the show. Our drummer gets a click so we can we can leave out or bring in sound from the laptops as we like. This way we can have purely live instrumentation intermingled with sequenced and live looped audio. It’s a bit of a learning curve to perform this way, but very liberating once you get it down.

This short sample of a guitar chord was played by my good friend Jason Cameron based in Seattle. While jamming together last June, 2008 I captured a few of his phrases in one of my Live sets, and came across it today while browsing through the sound file folders, looking for something to post. I dumped it back in Live, resisted the urge to reverse it, and added distortion, delay and reverb for a little texture.

Guitar Chord

Logical Psychosis

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Once again I have opted to feature a mini-mix of an unfinished idea, rather than an individual sound or example of processing. I am finding that creating these 1 to 2 minute snapshots of the idea is giving me a new perspective on unfinished compositions that I might have otherwise left by the wayside. Perhaps rendering simplified versions of these pieces will serve as an interim step to producing completed versions. I’m also appreciative of the feedback I’m getting on these rough mixes from friends, family and even a handful of very nice reader comments. Thanks!

I wouldn’t exactly call this piece a remix, but it does use bit of my Rhodes playing and other samples from prior Keston and Westdal tracks and performances. The arrangement, bass line, chord progression and processing are all new, so it only obscurely resembles any other tracks. I’m quite fond of how the bass line sounds. It reminds me a little of an analogue, male vocal simulation that Tomita produced on his interpretation of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”, which otherwise has no similarities to this piece.

Logical Psychosis