While working in the studio recently I plugged in a cable from an auxiliary send to record some bass and got some horrible feedback. So horrible that I was determined to record it. The reason I was getting the feedback was because the same send that I was using to record the bass happened to be turned up on the channel that I was using to monitor the signal. I realized this immediately, but the sound was quite interesting due to the subtle latency on the signal path caused by the digital hardware involved. Here’s a couple of layers of the feedback running through reverb. I also made adjustments to the pitch a time stretched the recording in a few places.
Accidental Cable Noise
I recently recorded a few passages of clavinet on a piece I’ve been working on for a while. My Hohner E7 is still in disrepair, so I had to rely on a sampled version of the instrument. I processed the sampled version in a similar way to how I would have processed the real thing.
While sorting through dusty clips from live performances I came across an angular Rhodes line that sounded quite odd removed from the context of the original set.
I came across this sample from a performance on July 13, 2006. It is a delayed synthesizer line that I played and captured as a clip in Ableton Live during the show. What’s interesting to me about this clip is the obvious modulation in pitch on the delay trails. This is not something that I programmed into the patch and I suspect is actually caused by a bug in the Korg MS2000. It’s possible to recreate this bug by enabling tempo delay then sending external sync to the instrument. I rarely experience this glitch anymore because rather than using the delay on the Korg, I usually run it through tempo delay in the software. However, I kind of like the ghostly quality it creates in this short passage.
I found this short loop of loose keyboard playing in an Ableton Live set. I had played it and live looped the phrase during a performance. Most of these little clips are never heard again, but every so often I save the set with the clips intact. Even more rarely I go back and listen to these archives. Here’s one that had been sitting in a folder of collected files for a while, so I decided to loop it and add some reverb for a finishing touch.