Octave Pedal Rhodes

A variation of this clip is probably going to end up in a new track that Nils Westdal and I are working on. After a recent session Nils left his Boss OC-1 pedal in the studio for me to mess around with. The first thing I did was plug the Rhodes into it. The cool thing about the OC-1 is that if you play intervals into it it gets confused and randomly switches between notes. The results are unpredictable, but it’s also possible to get consistently unpredictable results. I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but duplicating certain intervals at specific dynamics allows you to mold the output into something usable. This is what I was going for in this example. I edited the recording to a suitable length, added some delay, and then automated a filter to manipulate the texture.

Octave Pedal Rhodes

Time Stretched Dog Bark on the PCM-D50

I time stretched this recording of my dog Tia barking on the PCM-D50 using the built in DPC or Digital Pitch Control. I don’t know why they call it pitch control when it doesn’t change the pitch, but rather time compresses or expands the audio by percentages, from -75% to +100%. The intent is for musicians to practice difficult passages, but I think it has a nice eerie, metallic effect on voice and other sounds. For comparison I’ve posted her barking with out the time expansion as well.

Original Dog Bark

Time Expanded Dog Bark

Rhodes Feedback

In order to get this example of feedback I ran my suitcase model Rhodes, which I confine to my studio, through an outboard processor with some nice amp modeling and cranked up the gain. For the processing I used an eleven year old Yamaha A3000 sampler. The A3000 allows you to edit and apply processing to an incoming signal and it has some pretty nice sounding effects. Once I had adjusted the processing I held down the sustain pedal on the Rhodes and let the amplification do the rest. Tapping or gently knocking the instrument also produced some nice sounds. Here’s a snippet of the results.

Rhodes Feedback

Mangled, Reversed, Distant and Filtered Piano

Over processing usually leaves you with audio that lacks it original luster, or perhaps it starts to sound like the processor itself. However, sometimes you might end up with something interesting as a result of pushing the processing beyond the normal boundaries. While listening to the garbled piano in the last entry I could hear something haunting about the passage, so I decided that I would try to bring out those haunting characteristics by adding some unrestrained processing to the recording. I started by reversing it and pitching it down a couple of semitones. This brought out a brief harmonic minor melody. Later, after applying some extreme filtering and massive reverb I ended up with this thin, distant, and haunting sequence.

Mangled, Reversed, Distant, and Filtered Piano

Dub Delayed Atmospheric Bubbles

This atmospheric effect is a continuation of the experiment from yesterday involving the Flying Waves VST. This time I loaded up a sample of air bubbles being blown into a glass of water. The original sound can be heard here. I also ran the output through an analog modeling delay and then recorded the results as I manipulated the pitch and volume. The result is a wet, atmospheric, psychedelic texture of ambiance. The next step I might would be to sweep the panning or apply some processing to spread the stereo spectrum since the output at this stage is still in mono.

Dub Delayed Atmospheric Bubbles