Here’s my 39th free track made within a week. It was written around an underwater field recording made by Flo Wilson, which she’s made available for free.
Aims
Usually I aim to do something different from what I would usually do, but really this week I was just trying to get something done very quickly. Maybe that’s something different: my aim was to finish a track within an hour.
Reckons
39 = 2/3 of the way through the year. I’m glad I’ve managed to maintain my streak this far, although I have remaining niggling questions for myself re: why I’m spending what free time I’ve got on this rather than just writing music freely.
As for the track, given the time constraint, I’m happy with the results. When I focus on details I tend to make tracks shorter, so it was kind of nice to let this do a few simple moves over a slightly longer duration. Most of the complexity in the finished track comes from the variation in Flo’s original recording.
Process
I skimmed through the pack of sounds that I had downloaded and chose one as the basis.
I sent the untouched recording into a series of resonant bandpass filters that turned it into a chord. The filters are all tuned to a minor scale. I used the free Polarity-RES plugin.
I sent the resonator output into a granular delay, that takes small slices and plays them back every 2 beats of my DAW’s tempo, pitched down an octave, into a big reverb. I used Unfiltered Audio’s Silo for this.
I added filters after the resonator and the granular delay, and structured the track by filtering the different sounds. I configured the audio routing so I could fade any of the three layers in and out without it affecting the output of the next thing. So, for example, I could have the granular delay in the mix without the dry resonators. The resonator has a low pass filter, so fades up from the lowest frequencies to the full range. The granular delay has a high pass filter, so it does the opposite. Near the end of the track I fade out the volume of the raw field recording.
That’s it!