Day 489: Ten Days Left

I'm pretty tired right now, so I don't have much time for commentary.

I will say that this was done mostly using sounds from New Atlantis Audio.

Day 487: Romance

Per one of my previous posts I wanted to take a stab at something that sounded "Romantic".  I don't know if this is that exactly, but it's a start.  Especially considering I've never tried something of this style before.

Enjoy.

Day 485: Piano Haiku

Today's work is part of the Naviar Haiku project.

Here's the haiku:

A piano is a conversation

best answered

by a violin

Here's the music:

Day 444: Cinematically

Something orchestral to add to the portfolio today.

Day 402: Dark Corners

The sounds of horror lurking around every corner.

Something suspenseful, something a  little scary, something to build fear, something to confound expectation.

Day 401: For Adventure

Today we travel to the future.  Getting lost and swallowed by the city is a real fear.  Danger lurks around every corner.

Day 395: Changing Gears

After a year of weird electronic sounds, experimenting with machines, and generally making lots of music that may not see the light of day past Soundcloud, I've decided maybe I should focus on making things that could possibly make me some money eventually.  It helps that I happen to enjoy this kind og thing also.

Today's piece is perfect for a film.  It could probably fit into a few different genres.

Day 359: Put on your Moon Boots

So, this piece has really climbed into a rocketship and launched into space.  I think I can safely say that I hit the "space" button and started to turn these "primitive" pieces into alien future music.  Well, I might just keep it moving anyway.  Just for fun...

Day 358: Space Cavemen

Starting to sound less primitive and more like music influenced by aliens.  At least the instrumentation is mostly normal instruments.  Sitar, Bass koto, hand drums, some kind of bell sound.  Not really a lot of processing going on.

Day 357: Lucky Number 7

Another "Primitive" experiment today.  It occurred to me that the title could be construed as offensive to someone if they put too much thought into it, so just to make it clear, primitive is a reference to the composition and some of the instrument choices - NOT everything you hear.  In other words, I don't think that the music of other cultures, regardless of their being 1st, 2nd, or 3rd world is primitive.  That is all.

Am going to spend some of the day trying to put together a "Glitchworks" collection on the suggestion of FGL.

Day 351: Noises in Your House

Today's work is a project for the Disquiet Junto.  It's a little obtuse, but kind of interesting.

My first step was to find three things that have a distinctive "on/off" sound.  Those ended up being the dryer, microwave, and toaster.  The toaster was the most musical of the three, providing both melodic and rhythmic elements.  The microwave was the most melodic, having one long tone, and the dryer kind of just makes a low rumble.

Initially, I didn't alter the sounds at all and just tried to overlap them to create a natural rhythm.  Sadly, the natural rhythm wasn't very natural, so I started playing with making them sync more.  I didn't want to make it very plain, so the rhythm is still quite disjointed, something like if you had several of the actual devices and were trying to "play" them as a band.

Finally, to finish it out I created a short section that would be the most musical of all. Squashing samples, playing with pitches, and making it all "fit".  Hope you enjoy.

Day 305: Kitty Junto

My beginning idea behind this piece was to take the three voices and make something quasi-musical without deconstructing them too much.  The bird has an obvious melodic component, so I wanted to make it into a rhythm instrument.  The pig is almost percussive in nature so I attempted to make it into a pad, lastly the kitten is just annoying, so I wanted to make it entertaining.

The bird song was cut into a smaller loop, then a delay was applied, along with panning.  Lastly, I automated the dry/wet knob so that it would create a kind of tremolo effect.  A piece of the song was used as an intro while the full bird song was used at the end to round it out, crushing the bits while the song plays, symbolic of the destruction that just took place.

The pig's snort was so aggressive that I felt it needed to be washed out and some of the edge taken off.  I decided to use the sample sparingly as it was almost painful to listen to.  To enhance the intensity I applied a pitch shifter 12 steps and 13 steps above the principal to "harmonize".  Heavy reverb was then applied to make it last and last and last.

The kitten is almost like a crying child and that can wear down anyone's patience fast.  I took out most of the silence between "meow's" then applied a glitch/stutter effect interspersed with a grain/pitch shifter to make it sing.  The resulting effect is almost listenable.  

Now if someone can just kill that kitten.

More on this 94th Disquiet Junto project, in which the sound of three animals is combined into an unlikely vocal trio, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/10/17/disquiet0094-naturalisttrio/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Day 299: 300

Here we are at day 300.  I happen to have a little more free time today than most days, so I can at least talk about it a little, as opposed to just post and run (my usual lately).

When I began this project I had a few goals.  First was to see how far I could get, that is, how many days in a row I could post new music and/or sounds.  Well, here we are at 300 and almost all of it is new music.  Next was to create new sounds.  I think I've done that in spades.  In addition, I've had the opportunity to preview patches and rack extensions by new friends and have gotten over 8,000 plays total on my soundcloud account.  That may not sound like much to people who have 1,000 plays for one song, but I have over 300 songs and all of them have multiple plays, so I'll take the trade-off.

All in all, I'm very happy with what has come out in the last 100 days.  I'm glad I didn't stop at 200, though I considered it very seriously.

400 here I come.


Lyrics:
Under the canopy, 
under the trees, 
under the shadows, 
behind the breeze.

Beneath the river flowing up above, 
nothing left of our love.

Where did it go?   
Where did it go?  
Why did we let it go?

Day 269: Good bye, Voyager

I was listening to the radio and they did a story about Voyager entering interstellar space (that's the space between the stars) and played two audio samples during it.  As soon as I heard the samples I knew that it would be the Disquiet Junto project for that week.  Sure enough, Thursday night, there it was.

This was my third attempt at using the samples in a musical way.  The first was very canned and uninteresting (to me at least), the second was very experimental and weird.  Finally, I thought Why don't I make it musical and make it a good-bye song?  And this is the result.  I took the two samples and made them into a playable patch, then spun those two patches into a third one for bass (only had to drop it three octaves).  Finally, made the melodic content very sparse and a little sad, but still in a major key.  Kept the form simple (ABA) and did a small amount of mixing/mastering to balance things out.  And...

Voila!

Space Music.

-Enjoy.

Day 260: Disquiet 3D

In creating this piece I really wanted to create depth in every way possible, in addition to giving it a "human" sound.  The biggest challenge for me was depth.  Creating distance is quite a challenge and really requires skillful manipulation of volume and filters.  Since this piece was only 90 seconds long I didn't get to explore that portion as much as I would like, but there's a little of it there.  Past that, there's a ton of panning and playing with reverbs and a couple of effects that I don't use as much as I should.

More on this 88th Disquiet Junto project, which explores 3D sound, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/09/05/disquiet0088-3d/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Day 246: High Five Piano Alive!

A few days ago I was having a REALLY BAD DAY, so I went into my studio, shut the door, hit record, and started playing piano.  It's a little noodley, but it was one take.  To be completely transparent, I did clean up some notes in post.  After that I added a little accompaniment and voila!  Insta-filmmusic!

Day 241: Hit that Record button

I'm a member of HitRecord.org, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's site that is currently making a TV show exclusively from user submissions.  It's a really interesting project and this one was right up my alley.  Basically, it's making music from junk.  Composer Nathan Johnson (Brick, Looper) took a bunch of field recordings in a junk yard and people remix them into music.  This was my first effort.  More to follow.

More info here.

Day 226: On Being Under Surveillance

Today is another installment in the Disquiet Junto project on Soundcloud.  It's an exploration of a redacted document recently released from the NSA.

The document itself is pretty laughable, but the first thing I thought after looking at it was to turn it on its side and recreate the small mountain range of black lines to control pitch, frequency modulation, volume, and a few other things.

When looking at it this way, in my eyes, it immediately becomes a "musical" document.  After creating a few tracks and putting them thru several permutations based on the document I added a "B" section in which the "A" section gets totally scrambled, last I added a vocal at the end with the words "Are you listening?" For good measure, I ran the vocal thru a "glitch" patch so as to scramble it appropriately.  Wouldn't want anyone to understand it now, would we?

The piece itself is firmly in the "experimental electronic" genre, but I felt like some musicality emerged from it.

Day 222: In film

As we descend thru the surface of a dying world we come upon a dark door.  Inside is the lair of our evil villain, working on his machinations and machines.  Preparing his next evil dead.  He won't be happy until the word above is dead.... and it's almost there.

Day 213: Homage to FMJ

I was sent a new patch by Frank Georg Lucas yesterday that immediately spawned new ideas.  This piece is kind of an homage to Vivian Kubrick's work on Full Metal Jacket, but also to Stanley Kubrick.  He had lots of haunting music like this in his films and many of them inspired me over the years.  It may be a bit more "electronic" than he would've had, but I think the point is made.