I'd misread the poem and planned to film myself blowing bubbles at the pool, then my camera wouldn't record.
It wasn't until I decided to read the poem again that I realised it said "hand" and not "head" as I first thought.
naviarhaiku581 – plunging my hand
Disquiet Junto 0686 Catch Your Breath
The Disquiet Junto instructions this week:
Step 1: Sit for a moment and slow your breath.
Step 2: Continue with Step 1 for a bit longer.
Step 3: Pay attention to your breathing, in and out, in and out. Don’t record yourself. Just listen, and feel.
Step 4: Consider how the process of breathing in and out slowly can lend shape to a piece of music. Again, just do this through personal consideration of the act of breathing. This project isn’t an exercise in audio sampling.
This has been a glass-half-full-kinda month for me.
So as I sat and considered a bunch of nagging thoughts arose in me.
Since my favourite way to distract myself has been jamming on instruments, it wasn't much of a leap to lending the breathing activity to shape a piece of music.
naviarhaiku580 – quiescence!
I decided it suited my mood and recorded three instruments in one day, although my family were watching TV when I wanted to record the bass so it wasn't on camera.
Disquiet Junto 0685 Pick-Me-Up
The Disquiet Junto assignment this week is to "Treat a set of sounds like a game of pick up sticks."
I decided to use a collection of chords like the colours of the pick up sticks, then added a little intro for them being dropped into place, and repeated that for when they fall during the game and are packed up.
Rainger FX Minibar
It looks novel, but I think a blend of lemon juice and soy sauce might have given me the best distortion that I’ve heard in my bedroom.
Klon clone
I got curious after looking at Klons and their copies
Doesn’t reach the higher fuzz of the Boss DS1, but worked well before it to add that peaking feeling.
Kinda missing the bass though, so probably better suited to adding volume for solos.
If I played solos on the guitar!
Actually, maybe I should try it on my basses?
naviarhaiku579 – Mount Asama
After finishing an assignment, I started playing guitar and trying different effects.
Something about the decay of the distortion led me to think it was suitable for the haiku shared by Naviar this week:
One of the four great haiku masters, Yosa Buson studied both Japanese and Chinese poetry. He was also an accomplished painter, and most of his poems were accompanied by paintings, resulting in a more diverse and individual set of works than the one by his main historical influence, Basho.
The event Bosun refers to is the eruption of Mount Asama in 1783, which instantly killed over 1,000 people. The toxic ash traveled 100 miles to Edo, making farmland useless and causing many more people to starve.
Disquiet Junto 0684 Early Bird
The Disquiet Junto assignment this week is to "Record not so much an alarm as a guided wakening."
It prompted me to think back over previous Junto projects that involved waking, particularly "Morning Music" from 2016.
(Another favourite involved an alarm, which was my 40th Junto ten years ago now.)
Lately my days involve needing to get going and I thought I'd make a track that's got some drive.
I used a video from 2016 showing the Mirrool Creek in flood, which seemed appropriate for emerging from sleep.
Fender Player Plus Meteora HH
The humbuckers have led me to grab a few distortion pedals off the shelf and the neck one sounds huge.
I like the split pick-up option, although the volume levels jump around.
It's body good balance with the big green arse sitting comfortably on my knee.
This Meteora design is destined to be another classic from Fender, I think.
Plug-in to the potential
Like a great man once said, "I have a dream..."
Ever since I fell deeply in love with Chase Bliss Audio's collaboration with Goodhertz on the Lossy pedal, I have begun imagining other effects that might be taken out of the box and into a smaller box.
Here are some of those ideas based on taking the VSTs and AUs that I often use and whispering at a shooting star to put a wish into the universe and see if anything manifests.
While I've only got ten digits to keep track of these brainfarts, let's start a tally.
10.
They already have brought a range of effects and amp emulations to market, but what about something as simple as their Verve Machines adding saturation in stereo?
I would use the fattening potential of these colours on a variety of instruments, particularly synthesisers and drum machines.
9.
While UA have brought nice reverbs to their range, I am hoping that someone is throwing lots of money at Sean Costello.
His Valhalla-branded reverbs are so beautiful and, aside from Walrus Audio's Sloer pedal, I can't think of too many that bring some of that Shimmer-style lusciousness outside of a Lexicon.
8.
Sure, Permut8 might be an even more engaging option with MIDI or even the Synplant synth, but I really want to crush my bits with a Speak&Spell-esque interface.
7.
Since Sinevibes are already making effects for Korg's platform, maybe it isn't such a leap for them to expand more into hardware and their Reactive effect is one that's been great at really pushing an instrument or sample to become something else.
6.
Aside from their decision to use Comic Sans font, it is really exciting to play with "concatenation synthesis techniques" to arrive at surprising results.
5.
There's a module for their Ohmicide distortion, which was always a lot nastier than I wanted and preferred Predatohm for delay, so the French developers are clearly already moving in the direction of packaging their tasty sounds.
4.
George Yohng's W1 Limiter is one of my favourites and gets slapped onto lots of my channels, so I feel it would be a very useful addition to the pedalboard.
Maybe it's too transparent for most people but I love being able to put it into a spot and never notice it again.
3.
Or a T-shirt, I feel like that little angry phallic-like banger is ready for more fame.
He could be the first plug-in to spawn an animated series!
Although, now that I think about it, a Delay Lama would also be a cool character to develop.
2.
Okay, seriously, I don't know where to begin with Airwindows.
There are just too many possibilities and, while I can't have them all, I think there's a gaping hole in the pedal market for more channel strip-style effects like the JHS Colour Box.
1.
I'm old enough to remember when this was the Coldcutter and it should be a no-brainer since the grandfathers of remixing have already kinda put their stealthy toes into the hardware market with the Zen Delay made by Erica Synths.
naviarhaiku578 – one by one
Big Spoon
One of the great things about coming of age in the 1990s was the music
A
friend of mine makes a strong argument that 1993 was the greatest year
for albums, which doesn’t capture all of my favourites but does stack up
a bunch of amazing releases.
Of course, these artists don’t
arrive fully-formed and, in the sage words of someone much earlier, they
stand on the shoulders of giants.
In particular for this post I
want to share a particular recording technique that has excited me, but
let’s meander a little more before we arrive at that destination.
The
music of the 1990s was exploding in all sorts of directions and some of
these were very surprising, although it seems obvious in hindsight.
Rock guitars were roaring back into fashion thanks to grunge bands.
Metal was finding new audiences and then there was the unlikely fusion with rap.
The juggernaut Judgment Night soundtrack brought together collaborations that stand up well today.
A massive leap came with the success of Rage Against The Machine, who remain one of the greatest live acts that I have seen.
The
earth literally moved for me when I saw them in the Flemington
Racecourse car park for the Big Day Out in 2008, which isn’t hyperbole —
it was the crowd stamping their feet and was more intense than any
earthquake that I've experienced.
Big Day Outs were another
benefit of being a young adult in the 1990s because you got introduced
to so many bands that mightn't have been noticed otherwise.
One of those bands at the 2008 BDO was Spoon, whose set I watched while waiting to see Battles.
Their music is beautifully crafted with arrangements that retain a spaciousness.
So
it was surprising that their sound seemed so in our faces, particularly
as I've mentioned the energy of RATM — both on and off the stage.
As
my friends and I were talking over the bands we'd seen that day, we had
pondered whether it was compression that gave this effect.
This memory came back to me recently as I was looking at guitar pedal videos.
The JHS Colour Box claims to pack something of the sound of a Neve-like console into a stompbox.
Neve is one of those names that audio geeks will recognise, because Rupert Neve is an engineer that gave airy qualities.
In
fact, there are interviews with Rupert where he speaks about how
frequencies above human hearing range are still being perceived and his
circuits flatter those sounds as they pass through the circuits of his
mixing consoles.
As I watched a video about the
Colour Box I learned it aims to provide a sound like plugging a guitar
directly into the console, as opposed to recording via a microphone in
front of a guitar amplifier.
At that moment I realised it was this sound I'd identified all those years ago.
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