I recorded this freight train during a winter bike ride with a group of friends recently. We rode through deep snow, on frozen lakes, head first into snowbanks and all over the place.
My friends waited patiently while I carefully held the recorder and gestured to them to keep quiet while making the recording. Although, this train made enough noise to drown out any other audible sounds.
Winter Freight
Finding a new way to use my Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man delay led me to create this sound. By using the device as an external effect on a send track in Ableton Live I’m able to apply the processor to any track in my set.
Normally when I perform I’m juggling the use of multiple keyboards, pedals, software, VSTs and a mixer. Too much activity already to add an external processor into the fray. But for some shows in small venues, dance clubs, or galleries live instruments complicate matters, so my group Keston and Westdal have a laptop set that we do on rare occasions.
Two producers in front of laptops isn’t my idea of an exciting live show, so it’s not our typical modus operandi. Therefore, for a private gallery show that we are playing tomorrow night, I’ve decided to add my Memory Man as a distraction from the trackpad and computer keyboard. This way I can create more sounds like this in the set. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Memory Man Beat
One of my favorite external processors is my Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man delay. It’s mono, only has five hundred fifty milliseconds of decay, but it is one hundred percent analog gratification. My Sequential Circuits running through the Memory Man used to be a consistent part of my live keyboard setup.
I created this sound by setting up the delay as an external effect in Ableton Live then capturing the output in a separate track while adjusting the knobs. This short section was from the end of the recording after the guitar track I was running through it ran out. I had the feedback up pretty high as I manipulated the decay to get this result.
Memory Man Saturation
I’ve been working on some music composition and production for my upcoming album so I’ve not been doing as much experimenting with processing and sound design for the last few days. It’s mostly roughs at this stage, but here’s an excerpt from a new work.
This chunk of music happens to be the context for the arpeggio from the previous post and also contains a variation of the audio from Three Phase Oscillator.
Excerpt of Music from Title TBD
I have come close to finishing a track that I have been working on occasionally since September, tentatively titled Blitzen Machine after an ACB entry that contains a few bars of the original concept. What’s nice for me about exposing some of my techniques here is that afterward I have a resource to help me remember them. I have tons of archival recordings with sounds on them that I have little recollection of the process involved in making them. Perhaps another function of this blog can be to remind me what I did to make those sounds. Here’s an excerpt from Blitzen Machine that contains a little bit of the melody.
Blitzen Machine Excerpt