Great gates
I believe that gating is the future.
The simple binary effect of opening and closing a signal is one at the start of production for me.
In my remixing of playgrounds it was a way to isolate tones, then manipulate them.
Those
lingering metal notes from old slides, in particular, became so much
more usable with this approach before pitching them into key and adding
delay or reverb.
When I moved to recording
drums the gates became a way to remove the room sound, before adding a
studio reverb modelled on a more famous room.
One
of the most creative ways I've used gates was to run a sequencer through a crossover, then have the kick open a pitched-down treatment
while the hats opened a pitched up one.
I would
strum a chord and suddenly a bassline would pulse while a rhythmic
urgency pulsed, giving my simple playing a feeling like making live
techno.
Then I got
interested in how Rainger FX had used a gate in a range of pedals to
make the effect part of expression in my playing.
It
prompted me to look at the pedals I had that weren't being used with
new eyes and the B pedal board suddenly became the one I was using the
most.
Now I looking at the range of stutter
effects and wondering how even more variety can be incorporated,
especially now I'm thinking about a pedal board for a double-neck
instrument.
I can't believe there aren't more
guitar pedals with a crossover effect, but then again, I'm also
surprised there aren't more using gates.
Guitarspiration
I think it's the most audacious instrument that I've seen in years, with the resonant strings crossing over all those extra pickups.
It gives me hope that something as much as a mainstay as the Stratocaster design can still develop, because so much of contemporary culture seems stuck looking backwards.
And it reminds me there are a pile of pickguards and guitar bodies that are waiting for me to do something different.
My second double-neck
Disquiet Junto 0757 Screen Time
The assignment this week is to "Interpret [a] gauzy window treatment as an audio effect."
My first impulse was to record the guitar set-up I recently plugged together that uses a Chase Bliss Audio Lossy pedal, but my kids are home and I haven't much opportunity to jam to arrive at something worth recording.
So I wasn't sure I'd respond to the Junto, until I watched Hamnet with my daughter last night.
There's a moment after the death of the titular character where he's shown beyond veil of death and it's literally filmed through a dark piece of cloth.
(Hopefully that's not a spoiler for anyone but, frankly, if you didn't already know that the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet has been thought to have contributed to his play Hamlet then it's probably not a film you'll be watching anyway!)
This led me to ponder whether the window gauze might be something more than a filter or a gate?
Also, this morning my Facebook Memories included the Junto track Beatin' Leeton from six years ago that I thought would be good material to manipulate.
From there my idea was that going beyond the veil in this case is to use Ableton Live's convert to MIDI functions as a way to go beyond the audio tracks, with bass and drum parts generated with those transcriptions being fed into arpeggiators as well as the aforementioned effects.
Look at the size of that thing!
The face of my delivery guy, Eric, came to mind and I really couldn't.
One wonders if it has inside it a speaker and one end and a mic at the other, or maybe a really big spring?
A wit elsewhere remarked that it is a room reverb, but I don't think I could fit my drums inside.
Does music create boundaries?
Susan Rogers, a recording engineer turned academic, once said to me that the future of music lies in timbre, which is where the abstract notion of notes becomes so much more engaging through the inflections of instruments and the memories they create and prompt.
Disquiet Junto 0755 Give Way
A couple of weeks ago, after Marc posted Junto 753 interpreting the
traffic sign, I was walking to the shops and pondered the "two tracks"
message on the Give Way sign outside the Leeton Rice Mill.
It's not the first time this sign has given me reason to pause and ponder, see https://showcasejase.
So
I sent it to Marc as a suggestion for a Junto and we considered
options, with me promoting a broad interpretation that ranged from
literally having two tracks giving way to each other through to arguing a
Wayne's World-esque "Way!" could also be valid.
In that discussion I also noted that
in the USA a "give way" sign is phrased as "yield" and knew it would
appeal to Marc, because I think one of the fun aspects of the Junto
community are those little insights one gains into other's lives and our locations in this small world we share.
The
various meanings of the word "yield" have become more significant in my
interpretation, which should become apparent by the end of this
reflection.
At the time I resisted pointing out
how the "two tracks" message is erroneous, as a railway track uses two
rails and this particular site has two railway tracks that the road
crosses, which became part of the interpretation that ended up informing
my track for this prompt by using four tracks.
So it's two tracks combined, giving way to another two tracks combined.
Since my exchange with Marc I noticed this Junto project would be my 500th video responding to a weekly prompt from Disquiet.
It's a surprising number, but the biglyness reflects how much enjoyment I've gained from these activities over the years.
Yesterday
I thought I'd look over my playlist and see what suggested itself for
the activity this week, finding a few things that seemed relevant to the
location.
The first is a recording made from
close to the site of the Give Way sign that responded to a
project proposed by my compatriot and sometime fellow Cyclic Defrost contributor, Kate Carr.
That
was Junto number 218, and my video shows the Rice Cooperative site that
adds a distinctive hum through most of the year in my town of Leeton,
New South Wales.
Rice is the crop that secured a
future for the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, where Leeton was planned
as an administrative centre, and it was proposed by the manager of the
fruit cannery who the road Brady Way is named for.
Around
the site of the Give Way sign the road Brady Way becomes Railway Avenue, and
then later becomes Oak Street around where a bridge crosses the tracks,
but none of this is very clear and that's another surprising thing
about the location.
I often think this area in
front of the Rice Cooperative is one of the wildest roads I've driven,
because when you turn the corner you can be travelling at 60km/h and be
confronted by a long freight train in your path or sometimes a B-triple truck on the wrong side
of the road as it turns out from the weighbridge.
You will also find trucks parked
wherever they please, including in the area between the two train tracks opposite to the old cindercrete railway station.
It
really surprises me that the road traffic authority haven't taken more
interest in this area, but I suspect the local council realise that it
would impact on the travel of residents as well as the traffic
servicing the Coop.
By the way, you might sometimes eat
some of the products from this site, as it's marketed as Sunrice and is a
significant Australian brand with a corporate headquarters in town too.
Anyway, the
second of my two tracks is 'Riverside' from Junto 284 and I think I
remember that involved manipulating samples made from an artist working
with river-based clay.
At that time I'd been
reflecting in a soundtrack for an exhibition how the local Murrumbidgee River is part of exports with the industrial agriculture in our region, and thought to
illustrate my track with water escaping from the Coop on a cool night.
The next two tracks used this week are also from Junto projects and there are few ways that the first two give way as I
used a variety of filtering techniques, including EQ and sidechain
compression, as well as effects from Goodhertz and Unfiltered Audio.
These are automated to increase throughout the transition.
The
drums were taken from an early of iteration of the Junto trio projects, number 429, and a personal favourite as they prompted a wonderful spoken response from the poet Sam
Knot.
The footage of the train travelling
through the next railway crossing heading east from the one outside the
Coop came from a self-initiated project I started in 2011 to celebrate
the centenary of Leeton, see https://www.youtube.com/
That video from Ramponi Park was used in Junto project 635, which I think might have
been a direction to use a field recording to give shape to a musical
composition.
In
hindsight, those tracks I made manipulating contact mic recordings of
playgrounds were one of my formative experiences as a musician, and also
reflected in my first Junto video for project 29. (Although, surprising in retrospect,
at the time I wasn't sure it was appropriate and didn't publish it until years later).
See https://www.youtube.com/
The
decision to work with video developed into the "For 100 Years" album
and a series of screenings that I held, with some of that material
contributing to exhibitions at the Griffith Regional Art Gallery in 2019
and Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in 2020.
Recently I
asked ChatGPT what it knew about the artist Jason Richardson from Leeton and the discussion became skewed toward my electroacoustic work, which was innovative enough to gain the most interest online I guess.
Sorry, I seem to have rambled on, but it's been interesting for me to connect a few observations to coincide with this project.
The
Junto is a significant part of my creative practices and I really
appreciate the inspiration it has provided, especially now that I look
back and see it constitutes around half of the material I've published
on Youtube in the last two decades and that's likely a similar ratio in my releases on Bandcamp too.
Wish I knew which Charles Sturt University student created it, but it's been adopted for my senryu-style blog: Zen Roo.
naviarhaiku649 – Leaning on my crutches
The haiku shared by Naviar Records this week brought to mind the expression from backstage in a theatre, "break a leg."
I took the bass recorded for the Junto and experimented with faster drums, before reevaluating the piece at a slower tempo.
Disquiet Junto 0754 The Blip
The Junto project is to "Interrupt an ongoing process."
I think gating is a versatile effect and almost everything benefits from it, aside from some recordings where it draws attention to itself.
To demonstrate I recorded a simple bassline and ramped up the threshold on the gate until it mutes near the end, before rolling back down again.
A moat for the GOAT guitar design
Okay, so I was reading about AI and realised the audacity of Fender's strategy in claiming the S-shape (for Stratocaster) as entirely their own.
After seven decades and innumerable versions of the famous ergonomic double-horn shape, the recent moves to prevent others from using the design have put an ugly shade to the company.
Previously I thought that their decision was in response to the quality of Chinese counterfeits and my experience has been that Chenders offer a value that overshadows the original, especially since Fender guitars often lack the features they expect consumers to buy afterwards like better quality pickups and other parts.
The thing that occurs to me is that claiming the design, along with the legacy of Leo Fender in previous months, is it provides a moat for their business:
A moat is what protects a business from competition. The term comes from Warren Buffett’s image of a castle surrounded by water. The castle is the business; the moat is whatever prevents rivals from storming the walls. A moat might be a famous brand, a patent, a network effect, control over scarce resources, high switching costs for consumers, or a regulatory barrier that makes it difficult for competitors to enter the market. The deeper the moat, the easier it is for a firm to charge high prices, preserve margins, and survive imitation.
naviarhaiku648 – In the sky, the sound
So I wanted to revisit my track for the Junto this week and tighten it up, like a cherry blossom.
Using an alternate take of the drums, I gated the guitars and added some effects.
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