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

Mississippi (Founders Mix)

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AudioCookbook.org has been featured today on ccMixter, “ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want.” Along with the announcement, the ccMixter artist, Victor (aka fourstones) posted a remix called Mississippi (Founders Mix) using several recordings from AudioCookbook.org. Samples used include, Roof Racket, Piano Mallet Loop, Pro-One Dub, AM Radio Static, Time Expanded Radio Static, vocals by Kristin Hersh and several others. Checkout the mix on ccMixter for more information. Since the track uses several samples from AudioCookbook.org I am posting it here as today’s entry into the “One Sound Every Day” project. This marks the first time that I have not directly produced the daily sound, however, I feel this is an excellent example. If you like the track, head over to ccMixter and give some love to Victor for this tasty mashup.

Mississippi (Founders Mix)

Roof Racket

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This morning at approximately 7:14 am roofers started removing four layers of asphalt tiles, along with the original cedar shakes, from the roof of my 102 year old house. Not being one to squander such opportunities, I recorded some of their hammering from inside the house. There’s some really nice wooden resonance to it. I hope you like it as much as I still am enjoying it. The photo is a detail from some of the debris that is collecting around the perimeter of my house. At this stage it was about 18″ deep.

Roof Racket

Robot Conspiracy

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I can’t seem to get enough robot action these days. Robots have lots of personality. Much more than politicians who convene in St. Paul. I used a similar technique to get this sound as I did for Robot Music. This time, however, I did a bit of processing after the fact, including pitching the recording down thirteen steps. Why thirteen? Because thirteen is a cool number. It’s subversive and pagan and not a floor in lots of buildings. I also added some standard reverberation and automated up some delay at the end to please my sense of aural space.

Robot Conspiracy

Pro-One Dub

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Having been asked on more than one occasion, it is about time that I posted a sound from one of my favorite synthesizers, the Sequential Circuits Pro-One. This is actually two layered tracks of sounds I made with the Pro-One today in a session with Nils Westdal. The sounds are effects for a dub track at 73 beats per minute. I ran them through a couple of tempo delays and reverb to create some atmosphere. Even after using this instrument for more than ten years I still manage to get new sounds out of it. Perhaps it’s the unpredictability of the analogue oscillators and filters, or the fact that you cannot store presets, in any case it seems to breathe and even sometimes cough as if it needs to wake up a bit before behaving consistently. The short story is that this simple mono-synth from the early 1980’s has a lot of character.

Pro-One Dub