Here’s a free track I wrote in the last week, for the 34th week in a row.
Aims this week
Things I tried to do differently this week were:
- No sequenced notes
- One source sound.
Reckons
Pretty short and sweet, both in the time it took and the resulting track. I like it enough. Another one that feels almost like a palette cleanser for me.
Process
I found a field recording I liked and chucked FX on it that made it ring out at various pitches. That’s basically it.
More detailed version, though…
I found a field recording of, well, guess what? Of fireworks, that I recorded in Florence, Italy, on the last day of 2017. I loaded that in my DAW. I didn’t edit it at all, except for chopping the ends off to cut it down to just a section I liked.
I added a resonator plugin, a free thing called Polarity-RES. You add a series of “nodes” that form like partials of a single sound. You can constrain nodes to a musical scale, so I set it fairly arbitrarily to D minor, and drew a bunch of nodes in at various pitches and volumes. I tweaked this so the mix of dry fireworks and ringing sounds was nice.
I added a delay after the resonator, and put a pitch shifter in the feedback slot, so each subsequent delay is pitched down an octave. The pitch shifter I used is a free plugin called Spectral Shift, which I’ve found has a pretty clean sound.
I added a granular delay after the pitching-down delay, which slurs everything around and makes for something like classic timestretch artefacts before it runs into a reverb. I made the reverb really big (long tail, no dampening) but dark (lowpass filter cutting off almost all of the higher frequencies). The granular delay is the first commercial plugin on the track, Unfiltered Audio’s SILO.
I automated the mix amounts on the plugins, so the track starts with just the fireworks and the resonator, then the pitching-down delay fades in, and then the granular delay.
I decided I wanted more harmonic activity, so I cloned and retuned the resonator plugin twice. All of them are still tuned to D minor, but basically one is centred around D, another more around C, and another around E… I put all 3 into what my DAW, Bitwig, calls an FX Selector, which perhaps unsurprisingly means you can take the incoming signal (firework) and switch it between each of the resonators. The beauty of this is it is changing the input, so the long resonant tails get to ring out. I added a little step sequencer that switches between the 3 different resonators depending on each step’s value. I listened through and checked that even though it is rhythmically stepping this never felt too rigidly like a beat. I needn’t have feared. 😅 The fireworks are in no sense synced to the tempo of the project in my DAW anyway, so I couldn’t hear anything remotely predictable or chugging about the switches.
That’s it!