Sound of the Economy Flushed Down a Million Electric Toilets

Posted on September 29, 2008 by John CS Keston

To create this sound I took the bubbles sound from yesterday and programmed it into a simple sampling VST. I built a pattern of chords in a MIDI clip that covered a wide range of frequencies for the sample simultaneously. This created a sort of spectrum of pitches. The next step was to spread that spectrum of pitches by resampling the output in a processor called Fragulator that effectively chops up the sample into fragments that can then be automatically looped at different frequencies.

I automated the speed and size of the samples so that I could go from a high-frequency-electronic-stock-market-crash effect to a fragmented-toilet-gurgle-of-lost-revenue sound in a fraction of a second with a controller. I hope you will enjoy listening to this sound more that watching your savings evaporate.

Pitch Spectrum

Tracker Stop Effect

Posted on September 25, 2008 by John CS Keston

I have been busy today working on four or five separate mixes and managed to finalize two of them, maybe. We’ll see how my ears respond after some rest. Anyway, during the last bit of work I was doing I noticed that one of the processor chains was causing insteresting random sounds whenever I pressed stop in Ableton Live. I decided to capture some of these sounds and see if they might be useful in the track.

Live has a great “resample” feature, but it was no use it this case because the only way to create the sound was by pressing stop and when you do that it stops recording. So I opened up Audacity and attempted to route the output from Live into it. After about five minutes I realized this wasn’t working and turned to the web for an answer. I quickly came across Soundflower (Cycling ’74), a “Free Inter-application Audio Routing Utility for Mac OS X”. This allowed me to route the audio to Audacity as I performed starting and stopping in Live. Here’s an edited version of the results. Warning: I normalized the render and it starts out extremely loud.

Tracker Stop Effect

Micro Sample with Massive Reverb

Posted on September 22, 2008 by John CS Keston

Here’s a technique that I stumbled across while experimenting. Sometimes I like to put a micro sample (a sample that is a fraction of a second in length) through a massive reverb. This particular sample is perhaps a tenth of a second of music from an old television commerical. When I do this it’s usually on its own track with lots of other stuff going on around it.

This example is the micro sample through the reverb alone so you can hear the texture that it creates. Most of the time I will run it through a high pass filter before it gets to the reverb, and in this case I’m also running it through a slowly modulating auto filter so that it has a slightly different timbre each time it occurs. Hearing this alone makes evident a high frequency overtone that starts to ring throughout the recording. You can hear the same sample in context in the track Electric Sheep that I linked in this post.

Micro Sample With Massive Reverb

Cuba, Illinois

Posted on September 16, 2008 by John CS Keston

Once again, today I set out to experiment for a few minutes and make a new sound using some processing I had yet to use. But like it is prone to happen, as I tweaked and played around a musical piece started to emerge. I sequenced a series of vocal samples then applied a real-time randomizer to the sequence. Second in the chain was a vocoder plugin programmed to produce a Csus chord, followed by a stereo delay. Underneath it I layered a low melody and automated the waveform setting for one of the oscillators to get a digitized static effect. I titled it Cuba, Illinois after a town of about fifteen hundred people in Illinois called Cuba. I’ve never been there, but I like the juxtaposition of the town and state names.

Cuba, Illinois (Rough)

Percussion Track

Posted on September 9, 2008 by John CS Keston

This segment of percussion is from a new piece I started on today. To get this sound I used a similar filtering technique that I described in Hummingbird Morse Code on a percussion loop that I had pitched up about two octaves. When pitching up that far on a warped clip in Ableton Live the audio takes on a ratchet like tone. Adding the filtering after that created some low resonant sweeps that add some bass frequencies to the track. I haven’t named the piece yet, so this segment is simply titled Percussion Track, although unlike any percussion I have heard.