The Junto this week to make a track from a clock was a great prompt to try an idea I'd had. Last week I recorded a drum part that I thought sounded good but my family thought sounded like all my other drum parts.
Undeterred I thought it'd be interesting to make the track into a round. So I duplicated the drum part and staggered their starts by a bar each. Then I got stumped by the idea of composing a melody to also be a round with it.
Instead I thought of my alarm clock which makes a horrible bleating sound. I've heard a bit of it since starting my new job. It was recorded using my Rode VideoMic. The drums had been recorded using a Rode NT4 stereo mic.
Once I started manipulating the bleating alarm in Ableton Live, I found it sounded keyboard-like when dropped an octave. For a while I played around with different pitches and speeds, then I went back to an early attempt and gated it with the Beat Repeat effect.
A bassline was made using a VST, then Valhalla Shimmer reverb was employed for that octave above and below effect. Then I went to bed.
When I returned to the draft this morning I began thinking of a guitar part. I experimented with a few chords and then, when time allowed in the afternoon, recorded a part and layered it four times to create another round.
Then I added a bassline, which seemed way too murky multiplied by four, and raised the VST bass part an octave to sit behind the alarm clock. The reverb on the drums smoothed out some of the parts which drift out of time, which is something the delay on the guitar does too. I panned the guitar parts from left to right.
If you listen you can hear the round go 'round your head, which is kinda cool given the circular representation of time on an analogue clock face.
This is my 40th Disquiet Junto video.