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Disquiet Junto 0722 Spook Street

The Junto assignment is to "Make music for a haunted spy film."

My first step was playing with the "Black sabbath" sounds in the M-Tron, but it didn't go anywhere.

Next evening I decided to explore a spy theme and thought I'd start with a 5/4 time signature like Mission Impossible.

I don't think the result has that timing, but the idea was moving.

Added a few more parts and found the horror trailer, then thought I should finish before Halloween faded.

Anybody would like to say something?

 

naviarhaiku616 – whenever we meet

I thought to respond to the haiku shared by Naviar Records because it's raining.

This is my favourite pedal board at present, although the mix in the video has a lot of post effects too.

There were a few takes but the above version was concise and features a cameo from my youngest.

Dunno, the version below is longer and seems to work better?

So I said to him

Disquiet Junto 0721 Well Weathered

The Disquiet Junto prompt this week is to "Record a track in which you play along with the storm."

I found a wonderful storm on Archive.org by Brother Elias and played my bass along while it screened.

There were a number of takes, but I edited this part since it captured some of my favourite ideas.

I also thought I'd record a piece explaining my Junto process, since I haven't been giving it much reflection in recent years.

Era

 

Sonicake Portal with Noise Wipers

Portal is a useful mixer-style pedal by Sonicake with options to invert, stack or parallel the inputs. 

My initial idea to use it like a buss didn't go as planned, but I thought to try adding a gate in the form of the Noise Wiper pedal.

The result has been a lot more use of the Alexander pedals, Reverse delay and Space Race reverb.

With the Portal blending in those Alexander effects when my guitar play gets louder, it makes the experience so much more dynamic.

I'd been pondering dynamics and gated effects in recent months, and another moment was hearing the EarthQuaker Devices Data Corrupter through the gate on the Coppersound Triplegraph (not shown) -- which made an overbearing effect a lot more musical.

Anyway, as someone who is sick of seeing the word "freeze" on pedals, I've been wondering why more effects don't have a gate?

And, yes, I have started using an oven rack as a pedal board.

naviarhaiku615 – reminding me not to forget

The haiku this week was a reminder not to forget to record this pedal board. 

Things that make you

 

Omnichord chasing bliss

Suzuki Omnichords are like little time capsules. 

I've thrown a few things at this one over the years, particularly my Roland Boutique synths.

Similarly, the 505 drum machine is like hearing a beige version of a more famous Roland.

Somehow they pair nicely here, which was obvious when I substituted Roland for a punchier Alessis drum machine.

The arrangement of pedals has been changing and I like the quirks that get added.

Another quirk here is the tenor guitar, which has been tuned like a ukulele but from a low A.

That idea arose from learning about Keith Richards!

Bleep

 

Disquiet Junto 0720 One from Two

The Junto prompt this week is to combine works in progress.

I found a couple of sketches in 135 bpm that merged nicely with this NASA video.

It’s funny, there were already “combo” titles when I opened my folder of unfinished Live’s als files. 

One of those tracks I recognised from last year, so I looked instead for similar bpms and found a few possibilities around 135 from this year. 

Then I found this NASA video waiting in another folder, which effortlessly fit the audio. 

While, it looks like the Junto came together easily, I had a whole other process up until I re-read the prompt. 

Although I knew I had plenty of material, I really wanted to try recording away from the screen and thanfully it was really quick. 

Along the way I considered whether a pedalboard would be a work-in-progress, which has been a fun detour.

Phil Collins singing and drumming

 

naviarhaiku614 – The coming of autumn

The haiku shared by Naviar Records reminded me of the red butterflies that I've observed at the start of autumn, such as this scarlet percher. 

 

Classic effects

 

Disquiet Junto 0719 Riding on the Metronome

The Disquiet Junto assignment is: Play with and against a steady beat. 

Step 1: Locate a metronome and set it to play at a speed of your choice. Recommended: 70 bpm. 

Step 2: Practice playing with, and against, and entirely apart from the beat. 

Step 3: Record a piece of music in which you start off playing with the beat, and then veer away from it, and then are drawn back to it, and then veer away, around and again. End the piece while playing apart from the beat, not in sync with it.

My metronome was Ableton Live and the 70bpm recommendation stirred a couple of tracks as I let the Junto directions simmer since reading them on Thursday evening.

After a day or so an idea arose for a beat that veered away, so I started scaffolding a structure of a track.

Sunday morning arrives and I start recording a drum track, using the second take, then first takes of bass and ukulele.

Along the way I thought of veering on the bass too, more than the ukulele anyway. 

Brian Eno on presets

I think what bothers me, which is exactly part of what you’re saying, is the possibility of not making a mistake at all, of making things that always come with this professional finished gloss of what a real pop song looks like or what a real picture looks like. And I think that’s lethal.

I have an architect friend called Rem Koolhaas. He’s a Dutch architect, and he uses this phrase, “the premature sheen.” In his architectural practice, when they first got computers and computers were first good enough to do proper renderings of things, he said everything looked amazing at first.

You could construct a building in half an hour on the computer, and you’d have this amazing-looking thing, but, he said, “It didn’t help us make good buildings. It helped us make things that looked like they might be good buildings.”

I went to visit him one day when they were working on a big new complex for some place in Texas, and they were using matchboxes and pens and packets of tissues. It was completely analog, and there was no sense at all that this had any relationship to what the final product would be, in terms of how it looked.

It meant that what you were thinking about was: How does it work? What do we want it to be like to be in that place? You started asking the important questions again, not: What kind of facing should we have on the building or what color should the stone be?

When I see people fiddling around with synthesizers — this has always been a problem with synthesizers — they always come with a bank of sounds ready-made for people who don’t want to learn how to program them, which, it turns out, is most people.

I remember talking to Yamaha once, which had just produced the most successful synthesizer of all time, which was the DX7. And I said, “You should really make these a little bit easier to program.”

And they said, “Well, we don’t bother because nobody tries to change them anyway. We often get them back for repair, and we can tell if somebody has tried to change the programming, and nobody’s ever done it. They’ve just used the presets.”

That seems, to me, a kind of mental laziness that I really don’t think fits well with making new things.

This tape

 

Disquiet Junto 0718 Planet Jam It

 

The Disquiet Junto project this week is to "Record the sound of an advanced alien civilization." 

The year is 2126, and your spaceship is on a routine science expedition of the outer reaches of previously unexplored parts of the universe. Your crew has encountered, for the first known time in human history, a planet that is home to sentient life that has developed an advanced civilization not unlike our own. After settling into geosynchronous orbit, you send down a stealth drone to explore. The drone captures audio and video. Please share the audio of your drone’s reconnaissance mission.