Synth Manufacturers

6 years of Naviar Haiku

Disquiet Junto 0420 Luna Tick

The Junto this week asks for "music that proceeds according to the phases of the moon, in celebration of Lunar New Year."

I spent a day exploring chord progressions, before deciding I wanted something that seemed obviously like an orbit.

Michael Schenker on avoiding writer’s block

I play and discover. You have to imagine a kid in a sandbox. You’re just having fun. You’re not expecting anything; you’re not looking for anything. You’re not following a trend; you don’t do something that needs to be similar to something else. It is actually from within yourself, which is endless. It’s like a kaleidoscope—you shake it and you have a bunch of new ways of doing things. So I think this block only happens to people who expect something, or who want something or are chasing something or who are trying to write something that sells or whatever. If you don’t look at all of these aspects, if you’re just having fun with notes, it doesn’t happen. 

[…] 

I call it “play and discover” rather than “practicing.” It’s like treasure hunting—you try and find a piece of gold but you enjoy the journey of looking for things along the way. You find something and then you capture that in a special place. And we use it later for making an album. And so that’s what I kept doing.I was always looking within myself for the next discovery. 

naviarhaiku314 – Buoyantly we go

This week Naviar Records are celebrating six years of sharing haikus and inspiring music.

They shared this beaut haiku.

I've taken the opportunity to record a chord progression that's been haunting me on the ukulele: Em and B7.

This is my 102nd video in response to the Naviar Records prompts.

P.S. Just noticed the video of the bass is out of sync. Not sure I can be bothered fixing it.

Disquiet Junto 0419 Dischoir

The Junto this week involves making music from vocal samples of held syllables by members.

I began by singing a few notes, with a view to figuring out their pitch and substituting my voice with samples.

Then, after a few takes, I thought I'd layer up my singing and hear how it sounded.

Of course, by then it already sounded how I thought it should sound.

So I gave myself the day to clear my head, then returned and found samples to accompany my singing.

It was an interesting process working through the voices and I learned a few things.

The first was that I like the sound of my own voice.

The second was that composing with vocal samples requires allowing space for breathing.

The third was that I found pitch-correction did weird things and I didn't like it.

An onion is the bass player of food

Disquiet Junto 0418 Ice-Nine

Directions for the first Junto of the year are to “Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it.”

It’s one of the more challenging Disquiet projects.

The high-pitched transients are difficult to manipulate and it’s usually the hottest day of the year here in the Antipodes.

I’ve made a few percussive rhythms over the years and increasingly I look for ways to make the ice cubes more harmonically interesting.

A few years ago I recorded around a dozen and half of my out-laws’ glasses, which have served me well for this project.

This year I offered those for Junto participants to use in their productions.

For a little while I wasn’t sure how to approach this assignment in 2020.

I had the drums that I’d recorded last year, when it was cooler — which is why I’m wearing a vest in the video.

On Saturday, when the temperature climbed to a new January record of 46C in Leeton, I got the idea to use the glasses to outline a progression.

So I found snippets that seemed to suggest a key, then added a transient shaping effect and de-essers to try and soften them, as well as tape-style delay and Eos reverb.

On Sunday I jammed with the bass until I found the notes that seemed to give the right shape.

Since it was a bit cooler, I put the shirt on that I’d been wearing when I recorded the drums.

I picked a fretless bass because the glasses weren’t really in tune, then afterwards I ended up adding pitch-correction to the samples to be sure they would mix.

Finally, I switched between drum recordings to give more variety to the song.

You can hear the kick drum comes in after a couple of bars, which was recorded using a bass speaker in front of the kit and then pitched down an octave for a fat thump.

Later on you can hear the drums shift, losing treble as I switched to the audio recorded through the Rode VideoMic on the camera.

Elsewhere the drums were recorded through a Rode NT-4 stereo mic, which I also used to record the ice in the glasses back in 2017.

Listening back to the track now, I wonder if I should've added another loop.

Anyway, there's always next year.

It's good to have had the project to occupy some of the weekend, rather than being absorbed with the news of the bushfires.