Ultraviolet Amphibian Live Segment

Posted on by
6

This segment of Ultraviolet Amphibian was recorded during a live performance at the Nomad in Minneapolis on June 10, 2008. I’m including it as today’s sound to give you an idea how Keston and Westdal’s live performances sound compared to our studio recordings. There’s more improvisation during our live shows as well as the addition of live drums. This performance features Graham O’Brien.

Unfortunately board mixes like this one are rarely balanced because the sound is being mixed for the room. Anything loud or amplified on stage like bass guitar or drums don’t come through very well. Since the laptops, Rhodes and synth are going direct they are much louder in the board mix. I ran the recording through some pretty complex equalization and compression to try and bring out the bass guitar, but it still lacks the luster of the mastered studio version.

Tonight we are playing at the Kitty Cat Klub in Minneapolis. Tuesday, September 2nd we are performing at Peavey Plaza in downtown Minneapolis for a pro-art and political progress rally put on by TheUnConvention.com, and held during the Republican National Convention. For more information please visit our shows page on unearthedmusic.com.

Ultra Violet Amphibian Live Segment

Studio Version of Ultraviolet Amphibian

Time Expanded Radio Static

Posted on by
8

If you had a chance to hear Johannes Kreidler’s piece, Product Placement, made up of 70,200 samples in 0:33 seconds, then you probably thought is sounded a lot like radio static. To me it sounds like parts of it were time compressed and probably up-pitched, but altogether quite an achievement. Although, you might find the style of Akufen’s piece, Deck the House, more musical.

Rather than time compress the radio static I posted yesterday, I had a go at time expanding it. Time expansion works by stretching waveforms without changing the pitch. This can have some odd results when time expanding by a significant amount. You will often hear a repetitive stuttering, or garbled effect, like what’s happening in this example. In the image you can see the garbled sections represented as rectangular patterns that occur throughout the waveform.

Time Expanded Radio Static

Radio Static Part 1

Posted on by
7

As I have mentioned in previous articles, I love knobs. This includes the tuning knob on AM/FM radios. For today’s sound I decided to record my old Panasonic tuner. I took a mono direct signal into my M-Audio Firewire 410 and started tuning. What I was after is that static sound between stations, and the tiny chunks of speech and music that pop through as one spins the dial. I started with FM, switched to AM, and then back to FM recording close to ten minutes worth of audio. This particular tuner wasn’t much good for producing the gliding theremin like tones you sometimes hear, but I got some good static and random micro-clips of music and speech. Here’s a snapshot of one of the sections I’m satisfied with.

Radio Static Part 1

Meditation Bell

Posted on by
2

Nils Westdal and I recorded these bells for a percussive element in one of those tracks that have yet to see the light day. These beautiful solid brass bells have more than twenty seconds of decay. We recorded nineteen of those seconds. We used an AKG c4000b large diaphragm condenser microphone to capture the sound. The c4000b is one of the most versatile and sensitive mics I’ve used. It’s perfect for capturing all that sustain and high frequency goodness. Take a deep breath, cross your legs, close your eyes and press play.

Meditation Bell

Illuminator Console

Posted on by
1

To create this sound I started by programming a beat. In this case I pitched each slice of the beat individually to create a variety of pitches in the loop. Once I was satisfied with it I rendered it to a clip and applied a plugin by Paul Kellett (MDA) called Tracker, distributed by smartelectronix. Tracker tracks the frequency of a sample with a waveform, such as a sine wave, and then allows you to transpose, slide between pitches, adjust the mix and so on.

Running drums through Tracker can create some interesting and unpredictable melodies. At the start of this clip I left the mix at 100%, only hearing the melody created by the pitches tracked, then adjusted it down to zero by the end so you can hear what the beat sounds like without the pitch tracking. In front of Tracker I added Beat Repeat and turned it on a couple of times to generate some fills. I touched it up with some tempo delay mixed in here and there for some dub flavor.

Illuminator Console