With the fields recordings back in the studio I had something that made everything come together; I added them to the project and I equalised them and compressed accordingly, as well as the rest of the clips. I also recorded a bass sound and a synth lead using MIDI automation and Moog Mavis, this additions resulted on a better progression overall and made the track more interesting. Finally I mixed and balanced all channels and increase a bit the gain on the master channel to get more volume, now I’ll just need to render the whole track and it’s ready to upload!

This project has been very regarding and I have enjoyed every step of the process; this is the last assignment this year, looking forward to complete more units on Year 2.

I also needed some ambience for my composition so I did a little sound walk on the park with field recordings involved. I was mainly looking for nature sounds like birds and other animals to add give a relaxing mood according with the soothing sounds I have so far. The day was a bit windy and that made a bit difficult the recording but I captured some wind and leaves which I ended up liking in the final mix. I also stayed near a kids playground and recorded voices, shouts and a very organic ambience.

An idea that came along during the first steps was to record the main pad chord progression from the modular to cassette tape and from the cassette then back to Ableton, that would give some texture to the sound to achieve a more lo-fi feel that could remind to early ambient and music scores from the 80s. These techniques are being used more commonly in recent years, due to the movements of “nostalgia” trying to recreate obsolete recording methods in order to achieve a retro sound. However, the sound quality can be obviously affected but in terms of experimentation and process I think it could be interesting, I’ve got a Technics cassette deck from 1982 and a new Komplete Audio 6 interface so hopefully the recording will be done properly.

Now that the main instrument was set up on the studio, the next step was to start experimenting and jamming to see what I could come up with. I created a new project on Ableton and I routed the MIDI channels through the modular sequencer to be able to carefully create some harmonic sequences. I also used the modular synth with the Ensemble Oscillator to compose a warm pad which will be the main base for the composition.

I knew that I wanted to create something simple, quite minimalistic, where later I would add some field recordings. I was trying different chord on the VCO as well as different arpeggios and combinations for a while. After a couple of tries I found something that I enjoyed and that would be the starting point of my composition. You will be able to listen and see the setup on the following video.

For the creation of this project I decided to add a new synthesiser to my studio, the Moog Mavis, we’ve been looking at similar synths at class on this Creative Sound Projects element 2 and I think it will be very interesting to create the composition with a new synth in order to add some new information to the writing bit and also get inspired.

The Moog Mavis is DIY synth, that means that you receive a kit with all the different parts and has to be assembled by yourself, but this kit doesn’t include soldering. This is interesting in order to see which are the separated components of a synthesiser of these characteristics. Mavis is a monophonic analog semi-modular synthesiser, featuring a saw and pulse wave VCO, a classic Moog low pass filter, ADSR envelope, LFO and a wide patchbay to explore different modulations.

Today after class I went to the library and I borrowed this book “Audio Culture – Readings in Modern Music”. It is like a true bible of the Sound Arts, it features iconic essays and writings from great artists and academics like John Cage, Brian Eno, Pauline Oliveros, David Toop and Karlheinz Stockhausen among others and goes through different topics as interesting as electronic and experimental music, minimalism and even DJ culture. Very inspiring, I highly recommend it.

In this week’s class we’ve been learning the last automation techniques over Ableton and with the use of them I created another piece, this time the composition for practical purposes was a bit more commercial, with some breakbeat and synths and similarities with different classic genres of dance music.

At the end of the lesson, we also performed an exercise about film scoring, and we scored two scenes of two different films. The first one was a very old film, and the exercise consisted on 3 different takes, with a setup of plugins quickly arranged and then we performed some sounds “on the go”, on top of the silent scenes. The second one was “You Were Never Really Here” with Joaquin Phoenix, for which I’m going to add here the last take, and although it’s very different from the real sound I was quite happy with the result.

As suggested, this week I borrowed from the kit room a Korg Volca synth to experiment with and practice different techniques. My choice this time was the Volca Kick, which also comes with a Korg NTS-1 mini synth.

I tried different configurations with them, but in the end I sequenced the NTS-1 via USB MIDI with Ableton, and sent clock sync to the Volca Kick. These two devices work really well together and it was very fun to jam with them both, here I added a short clip with a little beat I created during the experimentation.

In this lesson we’ve learnt different techniques in terms of automation and modulation with Ableton. With these procedures we are able to automate different parameter from each section and these modulations will be repeated continuously on each loop.

This is the little composition that I made using various envelope modulations on volume, frequency, pan and other parameters. I also recorded some MIDI sequences with the Complete 25 keyboard and arranged a percussion kit, this is a very experimental track and was composed only for practical purposes.

This week we had an introductory lesson to spatial sound looking at binaural, stereo, reverb, delay and granular techniques using different apps and software. Then we moved to the performance lab where we’ve been listening to different pieces on quadraphonic sound whose were really interesting.

Here I have created a piece which combines a tape recording with different plugins provided to experiment with the use of spatial sound: dearVR Micro, Circular Doppler and ML Distance. Due to uploading conditions the video is still in mono but I have also uploaded the Ableton audio version which is is stereo and the spatial effects can be better appreciated.