The first sound with the periscope comes from the beginning and is one I love, while the stopwatch is neutral and the soundtrack I dislike.
You can hear that in how much I manipulate them, as the soundtrack is divided into two to be repitched and gated while the other parts largely stay recognisable.
The haiku shared by Naviar Records this week captures something of the weather here.
I have the fire burning but it's not cold enough for snow, so rain is falling.
There was a melody in my head that I quickly arranged and arrived at something that sound to me a bit like one of Aphex Twin's earlier (so-called) Ambient Works.
This led me to play around with the timing of the parts as the piece progresses.
The assignment is to "Make music intended to be listened to in the background while one is reading in the middle of the day."
I don't normally like music while reading, so I asked Google and it recommended lo-fi beats.
This prompted a little bit of pondering, since the crunchy beats seemed at odds with background listening.
Investigation of different kits in Live led me to one that was "darker" sounding but had too much reverb, which was addressed with a gate.
Then I noodled around on the computer keyboard to play a bassline and added effects to make it darker too.
It sounded good, but I knew it needed something more and time was short as my family wanted to watch another instalment of Dune -- because my son seems to insist in only sitting still long enough for half an hour at a time.
To speed things up I repurposed the bass as a keyboard part, starting it at a different point and pitching it up a few octaves.
The video was shot last weekend while visiting Dr Greg Pritchard in Natimuk, where I had the most delightful crap accompanied by the kaleidoscopes he has sitting in the bathroom.
(If you're looking for an artist residency, then I recommend his studio and the nearby Mount Arapiles is also inspiring for rock climbers.)
The Junto assignment this week is to "Make music for (anonymously) someone who’s angered or disappointed you."
A magpie-lark (Grallina cyanoleuca) is known locally as a pee-wee and it isn't a big bird, but it will act aggressively toward larger birds and even people.
So I was watching a pee-wee swooping at a hawk on the drive home from the shops and started singing about it to my partner.
She was amused and I typed up my lyrics when I got home, then the Junto instructions arrived that night and the bird theme made me think it'd be fun to record the song.
It's directed at some people in my neighbourhood who've been cutting down trees recently.
The line "birdy peep" imitates a call I've heard from pee-wees, but also is a rallying cry for those who would like to see the bird habitat protected.
My favourite audio effect is a gate and playing with the threshold brings out dynamics in parts.
However, a friend on Facebook named Hurricane Bestman recently prompted a discussion of signal treatment that I think is worth considering:
Communication is imperfect. What’s being offered and what’s received don’t always match.
Borrowing from my recent toe-dipping into the world of audio engineering, I’ve installed a few new signal-processing tools for navigating life:
Two knobs and a fader.
The first knob is labelled FEEDBACK.
Feedback can be useful. It can help us understand how we’re being perceived, including the moments when that perception doesn’t align with our own sense of self.
There is, of course, another kind of feedback.
When a microphone passes in front of a speaker and creates a loop of increasingly ugly NOISE.
When that happens, I’m learning to reach for the feedback knob and turn it down a little.
Beside it is another knob labelled SENSITIVITY. Sometimes that one can come down a touch too.
And while I was installing the new equipment, I added a fader labelled SELF-LOVE.
Somewhat magically, as the feedback and sensitivity come down, I’ve noticed the self-love fader creeping up.
Discerning what is your shit and what belongs to somebody else is a lifelong practice.
I’m feeling a little more ease navigating it with these new tools
The assignment is to "Use audio of a light bulb to express the pervasiveness of energy."
Musikfestival Bern shared an audio sample by musician and media artist Michael Vorfeld, which I manipulated and then added video from a Chocolate Factory fire in Marrickville.
The Junto assignment this week is to "Play into the distraction."
My Sunday morning routine includes watching ABC's Insiders program about Australian politics, which this week featured a distraction in the form of discussion of the Prime Minister's appearance on a podcast.
I should declare at this point that I have never subscribed to a podcast and don't understand why I would want to listen to such inanities, particularly when a transcription can be consumed much quicker.
As the venerable Fourth Estate disappears with the loss of journalism, and takes with it the important function of digesting policy and presenting a range of views rather than regurgitating press releases, we're left with mindless entertainment such as social media rushing into the vacuum.
An example of the inanity of this situation was provided in the distraction that followed Anthony Albanese's admission that he fancied Kylie Minogue, which is surprising because I think it would unAustralian to say one doesn't admire her contributions to popular culture that continue over decades.
So I found myself playing the blues as the esteemed journalists on the Insiders couch discussed the depths plumbed by the Prime Minister as a range of other significant policy discussions were disregarded without any acknowledgement of Ms Minogue's undeniable sex appeal.
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.
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.
