The Junto prompt this week is "Record a piece of music that sounds like a once healthy garden going to waste, growing wild, collapsing under its own weight, or some other form of decay."
It follows from the gardening analogy last week and brought to mind that I recorded three takes at that time.
I went back to the recordings and found the final take was somewhat unruly.
There was clipping, which led me to re-amp the guitar with the Woodrow emulation.
The haiku shared by Naviar this week prompted me to swap back to an older pedal board.
I put these Chase Bliss effects together a few months ago, then set up the board with two Habit pedals.
This one gets unlikely sounds from my ukulele, because the loop is tuned down two octaves and made into a synth sound while the other output puts Lossy into Mood.
The Junto prompt this week celebrates Steve Reich’s 90th birthday, which is cool because I enjoyed his 80th.
This recording developed as a collaboration with my partner Jo, who contributes to my Junto recordings and only occasionally appears in them but often shares a perspective along the way.
When the Disquiet prompt arrived I gave Jo a quick background on Reich and realised how much of his work I've enjoyed.
I wasn't interested in singing Happy Birthday, but Jo thought there was a section in it worth looping and I decided it'd be more enjoyable to work with her voice.
I realised that it made sense to try it because, where audio software works in milliseconds, it would adjust loops by frames and that could be 24-60th second easily.
Somehow the idea of changing in those increments seemed easier to manage!
So I made a quick recording with Jo using my Nikon and Rode mic, then opened FCP for the first time in ages.
I picked a six-second section and multiplied it, then shortened sections by 2-3 frames.
This edit was placed against a section with only six-second loops and it sounded close to something resembling my memory of Reich's Rain piece -- dunno, I should go back and listen to him again.
Anyway, I put the video into Ableton Live and ended up phase-cancelling out some of the vocal so that I could add another track!
Then I added reverb and compression and some percussion loops.
The assignment is to: "Use some reverb. Then use some more."
I grabbed the guitars that I've been jamming with recently through Chase Bliss pedals driven with an Omnichord.
There's a ukulele (with a Klon clone) and a bass that each have a Habit pedal, as well as a 626 drum machine going through Generation Loss and the ride has Onward.
With a plan to add reverb, I recorded four mono tracks with these pedals and edited them a little (like dropping out drums in places).
There was some reverb added, like Lossy on the bass, then two reverbs added with busses.
These were Capitol and Motown emulations on guitars and drums, with some cross-pollination.
Normally I probably wouldn't add so much reverb to bass, but I think it sits okay.
