I’ve spent much of the last year sketching and going nowhere. Some of it has been lack of time, and some of it has been one of those long dry spells that afflict me every once in a while.
After a series of difficult trips to see family in Arizona this summer, I spent a fair amount of my time with my bandmate Whale Dream working over some sounds I’d designed for us centered around the granulations of soundtrack segments from old science fiction films. While we have not used the material, I found that it in conjunction with a patch I had on the Teenage Engineering OP-1F worked rather well together.
This was originally the pump on our Nespresso machine, looped and mangled on an SP-404 before further mangling by a Kaoss Replay and then into an Eventide H-90 for some serious reverb.
This grew out of some work from Disquiet Junto’s “Consumer Drone” project that just wrapped up last week, but isn’t what I posted for that. I found this didn’t quite fit what I was looking for for the project, but something I thought might appeal to others.
This one was done with the OP-1F, some Rephazer patches I purchased (thanks, Rephazer, wherever you are!) and fiddling with the OP-1F’s compressor on the master bus. Done in several passes, recorded to a Tascam DP-008EX.
Another collection of drone sketches.
This one was fun. I did it entirely on the Teenage Engineering OP-1 Field. I did the sound design, laid down one four-track digital tape with the sounds, and then for the three tracks I used different tape speeds and effects on the master bus. The only thing done off of the OP-1 was the loudness normalization at the end.
I’ve been plugging away at learning about music theory, electronic music production, tape music techniques and the like for about the last six years. I’ve created a number of things — noise and field recordings — I’ve posted here and on my Soundcloud page, but never felt that any of it was “real” enough to actually list on a site like Bandcamp and actually set a price for it.
I set myself a goal this year of producing at least one “good” track a month in a genre I was trying to get better at. It was a surprise to me that the first two months have gone rather well; to the point where one of the tracks I finished (“Milky Tea”) was something I thought was good enough to offer to others, and then had my wife exclaim after she heard it that “you could charge people for this.”
So I’ve released my first EP on Soundcloud: Bad Caffeine | KF6GPE (bandcamp.com). I’ve self-published this; I’m not associated to a label or anything.
I don’t expect to win a Grammy, and in fact would be surprised if it makes enough to pay the sales tax on the gear I used to produce it, but I learned a lot in the making and publishing, and it feels really good to have started something musically, set some goals, and exceed those goals.
Now on to seeing what the March track sounds like.
I just finished Kadenze’s “Experimental Foundations of Sound Design” course, and it was great! Starting with looking at sample libraries and tape music techniques, you build up a set of individual sound recordings, process them using tape music techniques (in the box, of course, using Audacity), and learn to design and create an imaginative soundscape. Along the way you learn about auditory perception and how it affects sound design, and some techniques in Audacity in Ableton for manipulating sounds to improve tonality and place objects on the stereo field.
I had a lot of fun with it. Even though I’ve read a lot about tape music techniques and sound perception, it was great to have the lectures and some practical experience to back it up.
This year I plan on spending most of my effort in sharpening my acoustic playing — lots of piano practice, and I’ll dig out the long-neglected flute.
Some days, though, I may record drones for later use in compositions. Here’s one with some noise from the Lyra.
Modulated Noise @ -12dB