Tag Archives: Music

Piano Mallet Bass

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The sample I included in the Piano Mallet Loop has been used in three pieces that I know of so far and are all linked somewhere on AudioCookbook.org. So tonight I am presenting another example of using a mallet to produce sound with a piano instead of using the traditional keyboard that we are familiar with. The mallet I used to get this sound was the steel handle of a socket wrench with some thick rubber bands wrapped around one end. I bounced the rubber bands of a few of the strings in the lower register and got this simple bass melody.

Piano Mallet Bass

Here are the pieces that used Piano Mallet Loop. All of them are very nice. A big thanks to tacitdynamite, Fourstones, and small.cat for sharing their compositions.

Little Ditty #1 (tacitdynamite)

Mississippi (Founders Mix)

Red (small.cat)

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

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

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