Percussion Track

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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.

Percussion Track

Musitronic

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Recently I stumbled across an archive of a late night Keston and Westdal jam session buried in a dark, moldy and neglected sub-folder. I looped two bars and put a fade at the end, but otherwise left it untouched. It consists of bass guitar (Nils Westdal), a breakbeat, and myself on Wurlitzer Electric Piano. More specifically a Wurlitzer Electric Piano packaged by Musitronic for use as a student model. I picked this one up in the mid-90’s for a couple hundred dollars. I don’t use it that much since I prefer the sound of the Rhodes, but I think this particular recording is a nice example of the Wurly sound.

Musitronic

MUTO by BLU

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A friend sent me this link to an animated piece done on public walls in Buenos Aires and it was just too good not to post here. Fortunately, the piece is fitting for this venue due to the quality of the audio involved.

The animation is amazing, but one of the things I like especially about this piece is the sound design and music. It’s starts deceptively with typical city ambiance, but when the animation begins it quickly changes into a combination of experimental music and clever sound design carefully synchronized to the visuals.

More information about the artist and examples of their work can be found at blublu.org. The animation is by BLU assisted by Sibe, and the music / sound design is by Andrea Martignoni.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Hummingbird Morse Code

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One of the things I do frequently, either for the sake of experimentation or for inspiration, is to apply multiple levels of processing with the intent of significantly manipulating an otherwise mundane sound. With a myriad of audio effects available to us this is also a good exercise in learning how certain kinds of processing impacts audio.

I started with a loop of hand drums going through Fragulator (Pluggo). Fragulator fragments the input signal into chunks, similar to grain-table synthesis. The chunks are looped at varying speeds to create a broad variety of effects. It was already drastically different from the original, so I chose to add only one more device. Harmonic Filter (Pluggo again) controls twenty-five filters with a cellular automata algorithm. I used its filter sweep mechanism to spread the stereo spectrum and provide tonal variety over the 1:25 minute recording.

Humming Bird Morse Code

Blitzen Machine

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Here’s a snippet from a track I started working on today. I began by using the same techniques I described in Robot Music and in Robot Conspiracy, only I was more deliberate about the patch changes so that they lock in with the tempo a little bit more nicely.

Another technique I used was to cut up individual slices of my recordings and load the samples into Ableton’s virtual drum machine, Impulse, so I could program patterns of the samples into a variety of MIDI clips. I also used a couple of very short sections of AM Radio Static diffused with a healthy amount of reverb.

Blitzen Machine