This is my 43rd week in a row of creating and sharing a free track.
Aims
My only aim for doing something different this week was to use no synth sounds. It’ll be obvious that I processed sounds to basically turn them into synths, but all the tuned stuff is processed versions of the field recording that opens the track.
Reckons
This was a fun time to make and I’m pretty happy with the results. I feel like I could tweak this into something I would normally release.
Taking semi-random field recordings and applying the pitch detection feature that my DAW, Bitwig, has introduced in its sampler recently actually seems pretty fruitful and like something I’ll do more of.
Letting delays properly feed back and playing with that is good fun too, I think I want to do that more. Doing it by drawing automation on a screen is pretty bloody laborious, but I’m travelling and don’t have a controller I could use to ride the settings live.
Process
I started by sifting through my folder of field recordings, and choosing a recent recording of a safety video playing on a ferry in Greece, with added commentary from some tour guide and his group. This is the source for most of the sounds. In the final track this ended up as the opening thing you hear.
I chucked the safety video recording into the sampler in Bitwig and applied a setting where it tries to detect the pitch of the original sample and then repitch the whole thing to that pitch. The idea is if, say, you played C3 on your keyboard the sample would be tuned to that note, with any ups and downs in the original smoothed out. Given the source material this mostly failed in an excellent way, with lots of burbling and artefacts. I set the sampler into a granular mode, so it increased the amount of stuttering and stumbling through the sample on playback. I picked a key and a tempo based on playing this back and mucking around with what sounded good. I came up with an 8-bar chord progression using the repitched safety video, based around an inversion of an Am7 switching to Em7.
I found a chunk of the above that was interesting when played quite low and slow, and bounced this to audio to use as an additional layer. This drops in at the start of every 4 bars. On every second time it plays I send it into a convolution reverb with a copy of itself at half-speed as its own impulse response. If that makes sense. This added a really lush depth to the sound.
I decided I wanted to create a more traditional pad sound that would mirror the chords being played on the more free-wheeling, weird-pitch sample. I duplicated the first chords and trimmed the sample start and end points to just play a short loop focused on an evenly-tuned moment. I tweaked the settings to make it distinct from the first sound, including a slow attack and long release.
I dragged a copy of the second sound into another sampler to create a bass tone. Again I trimmed the start and end points of the sample to find something that I thought worked and then wrote a short bassline.
I cloned all of the above loops and wrote a variation on the chords and bassline, this time focusing on Dm.
For whatever reason at this point I added in a field recording of a small boat’s motor idling, another recording I made in recent travels. I did nothing to this beyond EQ. The recording is almost exactly 24 bars in the project’s tempo, so I decided that was how I would start structuring things.
I laid out an arrangement of the track, alternating 24 bars of the tuned stuff based around Am, then 24 bars of the Dm B section. I made a bunch of changes here to have different things come and go, including having the bass parts fade in slowly. I decided to have everything end when there’s a mic handling pop at the end of the boat motor recording. To me it sounds like the whole track clicks off at the same time.
I decided I wanted percussion to come in at the end and played around with a few different recordings before deciding to loop sections of a contact mic recording of me tapping a big, thin stone. I layered up two lots of recordings and used stretching / warping to drag the events into time with the track tempo.
I spent way too long configuring multi-tap delays on the percussion sounds, automating changes to the feedback path and feeding each of 4 delays back on each other in different amounts. I put a comb filter in the feedback path of one of the delays and let that start to really feed back just as the track was coming to an end.
I decided to put the raw safety video recording at the start and I tweaked the arrangement in response to how that sounded. I also added some effects and parameter automation to the end section to create some more movement – bandpass filters on both chord sounds, reverb, and EQ changes. Done.