At this point I had an interesting line of work work the instruments that I mentioned in the last post. This loop sounded quite good for me and I thought that I could stretch these sounds to a whole track so I had to start thinking on a good way to sequence everything altogether with the DAW and being able to record each instrument separately. Here is a little jam with the elements I had at the beginning without any sequencing:

In order to sequence every instrument with the DAW I created a new project on Ableton where I loaded 16 midi tracks, and each one was routed to the Digitakt, because this one features 8 own sample tracks and the following 9 to 16 tracks can sequence any other midi devices so this channel were controlled by Ableton via USB and the Digitakt then was connected via midi to Nerdseq, a modular sequencer which can sequence up to 6 CV tracks on the modular synthesiser, plus a midi device too, where I will connected the Microfreak.

As we can see in the image, this was the main sequencing interface for this project, having routed 16 midi tracks from Ableton to Digitakt, and then from this one controlling other devices in the studio. Nerdeseq then was configured to receive external midi on each of its CV channels, however I only needed one for the baseline but I’ll keep this configuration anyway for future projects.

Everything was ready now to start sequencing the whole track, this is very useful as we can start to see different structure and timing for the different tracks and also create melodies and automations more accurately; this was specially useful when I sequenced the strings on the OP-1, this one just needed to be connected via USB to the computer to be arranged on Ableton, and I was able to create a much more precise sequence for this sound.

These were the most important steps that I followed during the sequencing process, the arrangement of a track is always much more intuitive when is done from a computer with a DAW and it also give us the possibility to make changes on the structure in real time, controlling different instruments from the same device. After some time developing the arrangement and careful consideration to achieve what I was looking for, I just needed now to record every instrument individually and we’ll se this on the next post.

For the creation of this track I will be using a wide range of electronic instruments, devices and software and now I’ll enlist the instruments that I used to create the musical pieces from this track and their role within the composition. These devices have been connected via midi to the computer and audio interface in order to be recorded and sequenced; the software that I used this time has been Ableton Live 11, because it’s intuitive in order to compose and also is quite straightforward in terms of midi configuration.

4ms Ensemble Oscillator – Baseline

This is a polyphonic 16 oscillators synth voice in Eurorack format, and I’ll be music it together with a simple filter to create the bass sound melody that will support the whole composition from beginning to end.

Arturia Microfreak – Arpeggio

This is a versatile paraphonic hybrid synthesiser which features 12 oscillators and 5 bespoke engines; in fact this instruments has been engineered combining the mother boards from the acclaimed Eurorack modules “Mutable Instruments”, its sounds are so clean, eerie and consistent, and I love it to be featured on the front line of my tracks.

Hologram Microcosm – FX

Together with Microfreak I’ll be running this effects processor and it will have a very important role within the composition, it will manipulate the main synthesiser sounds to create some arcane atmospheres. This FX unit in guitar pedal format uses granular techniques to create delay and reverb processing.

Teenage Engineering OP1 – Strings

The OP-1 is a little beast in terms of electronic sound, it features up to 12 different synthesis engines, built-in effects and different sequencers. I will be using it on this composition for melodic string pads.

Elektron Digitakt – Samples

This is an 8-track sampler which I’ll be using for any other sounds and samples that could be introduced on the song especially the percussion, it will be also used as a bridge to sequence other gear, and at the same time is being sequenced from the DAW, I will explain this more in depth in the next posts.

During the conceptualisation of this project I worked on several tracks as sketches trying to find the best sound which would fit with what we’ve been working on as a group on the Creative Sound Projects unit during this second term of the first year. My focus was to make an Ambient or Drone song because those are the genres on which I’m more focused at the moment.

As Brian Eno commented on his Ambient Music manifesto “Ambient music must be as ignorable as interesting” and that was the main objective in the beginning, to create a subtle piece which would focus on the nuances of the tones rather than create a sonically impacting composition. However, as I progressed on its composition, once again, I thought that this university exercise would demand something that would shine a little bit more and would combine different techniques, instead of a mere relaxing ambience, therefore the track featured some minimal percussion and the frequencies were stressed slightly, a bit more than we could expect on an Ambient piece.

After some trials of cause and effect, finally I found the sound I was looking for on a looped composition, this loop featured a dark baseline, a synth arpeggio and some other elements, that’s why I’d catalogue this into Dark Ambient or Synthwave genres, I will show you in the following posts how this was created.

Write a blog post reflecting on the feedback you have received and how you will implement or experiment in response to it:

This week we have shared our work in progress to the rest of the class, the sound piece that I showed featured the first 1min of my current work in progress therefore this work will potentially change a lot, however I received some feedback on the excerpt referring to its genre, possible likely to fit within dark sci-fi cinema and good references about the kit of percussion.

Another idea that I had in mind and I also was referred by the lecturer and piers was the possibility of adding field recordings or magnetic field recordings on top of the composition to recreate this soundscape on a better way. This possibility is being considered strongly to be added but as I mentioned before the track still in a very rough phase of development and there could be many changes on it.

This was the little excerpt that I showed in class and as this was the last lesson in the CSP part one, from now on my blog posts will reflect the further development of my composition whose will form my collection of blog posts relating to this assesment.

Find an artist working with psychoacoustics and identify a skill or technique to try out. Work on practical experiments using this technique and record this work in progress for your blog:

In 1996 the iconic Nintendo’s sound designer Koji Kondo used a version of the Shepard tone to accompany a stage in Mario 64 where the character found a set of endless stairs. In this video we can hear the actual effect which used a similar technique as the always-increasing pitch famous tone.

I became a bit curious about this psychoacoustic effect and after investigating a bit I tried to make my own Shepard tone. Here is the result, is not perfect and I think that creating a perfect one need a bit of dedication but for sure has been fun and interesting to research about it.

Shepard tone Experiment:

Follow up: Through practical experimentation and digital manipulation explore the use of the voice in your audio track.

Here I’ve composed track where I’ve added some vocal samples, they’re quite abstract and are not lyric based but I think that they give an interesting approach of voice to this song.

Subaquatik