In this segment from the Ostracon release show I have a watery portamento lead going while Graham is making some nice atemporal sounds with what he calls a “cow necklace” and other parts of his kit. The cow necklace is made made from cow hooves strung in a loop. I searched the web for a similar instrument but found nothing but disturbing images of animal parts. In any case it sounds great.
Watery Lead with Cow Necklace
I rendered this odd percussion sequence from a GMS practice session in Ableton Live.
Odd Percussion Sequence
Today I decided to record my electric drill. It was on a list of “things i need to record”. Power tools make some great sounds with all sorts of textures and frequencies. I captured the sound of the drill in stereo at a variety of speeds. I also got the sound of switching the drill from forward to reverse. Afterward I chopped it up into a percussive loop and ran it through beat repeat to get a nice mechanical loop going.
Beat repeat has pitch decay setting that incrementally lowers the pitch of repeated slices, which you can hear in the piece. I also maximized the chance settings to increase the likelihood of repeats happening and the variation setting to vary the length of the slices used in the repetition.
Power Tool Percussion
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