Tag Archives: Music

Precambrian Resonance

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Remember those Precambrian rock noises from North Shore Rocks? Well for this piece I loaded the unprocessed recording of those rocks into a simple sampling plugin, then arpeggiated the sampler randomly within a scale. This created a cloud of stumbling chaotic rhythms that changes every time it is played back in the software.

I listened to this for a long while, fascinated by it, then decided to run it all through the Resonator in Ableton Live. This processor produces a chord of resonant pitches that react to the signal sent to the device; in this case, my falling rock sample. Since the rocks had no discernible pitches, this instantly created a musical bed of sound. I tuned the resonance to a C minor 9 chord and then automated the tuning of a fifth pitch to create a melody. A little bit more fussing about, and this is what I got.

Precambrian Resonance

Unity Status

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Technically this post and the last have been more than one sound, so perhaps I should rename the category “one sound or more every day”. Anyway, I just made a rough mix of this musical sketch (not quite a complete piece yet) and thought it could serve as today’s sound.

The image is a partial screen grab of one of the virtual instruments I used. The chordal and melodic tones and the bass are all played and programmed by me, but the rest of it is sampled from an unnamed jazz recording, so although the samples are heavily manipulated this composition is unlikely to go much further than this.

Unity Status

Piano and Kalimba

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Every so often I think it might be a good idea to record using acoustic instruments I have lying around my studio. This time I started with a little loop of syncopated piano. On top of that I added a very simple melody with a kalimba, or thumb piano. There’s no processing other than normalization to -3db to give the levels a little boost.

I have dozens of these tiny pieces, and once in a great while they actually get finished as tracks, but the vast majority of them, like this example, sit in dusty folders on backup hard drives. Most of the time that is exactly where they belong, but I do review them occasionally to get ideas or see if there’s anything worth producing.

Piano meets Kalimba

Distorted Percussion

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In this category I am planning to post a new sound everyday. I may not have created the sound the very same day of the post, but it will be something recent at the very least and more than likely created on the day I submit it. The idea is something like my colleague Tim Armato’s p{365} blog where he is posting a Processing sketch every day for a year.

My goal is to learn more about some of the audio processing that is available to me. It’s not always convenient when working on a project to explore new plugins or new ways to use old ones, especially in the studio or while collaborating. With this exercise I can do that and archive the results here. I’ll briefly describe the process of creating each sound and something about the software and hardware involved.

Today’s sound is a loop of audio that has been heavily processed in Ableton Live with filter taps (Pluggo), distortion, eq, dub delay (MDA), reverb, and more. The loop is an excerpt from a remix of “Some Kind of Adhesive” (One Day to Save All Life) that I produced with Nils Westdal. Believe it or not it started out as a simple shaker pattern. To me it sounds similar to the over driven thumb pianos of Konono N°1, although this was an accident since I was basically tuning the pitches to work in the remix. After I added distortion and a little virtual knob turning on the dub delay, this is what I got.

Distorted Percussion

Internet Radio

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Nova PlanetNovaplanet.com is a broadcast radio station out of Paris that also streams their programming over the internet. This radio station was made for me. Their broad programming is eclectic, funky, never repetitive and even on occasion delves into the avant-garde. One minute they’ll be playing Boards of Canada, and then the next their onto some Pharoah Sanders.

One reason why Novaplanet.com is so good is because of the time difference between Minneapolis and Paris. I’m rarely listening during peak hours. On the few occasions that this has happened I have noticed more advertising, news, interviews and French top 40. If that’s not your thing just check the time in Paris. The good shit starts happening after midnight.