Impossible Acoustic

At long last, the saga of the pen continues.  Several weeks ago, I took apart a ball point pen and recorded half an hours worth of fiddling with all the parts inside.  As I made instruments from the recordings, the goal was to stay true to the source material at first, then manipulate the samples in progressively more substantial ways.

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As you can hear from this excerpt, we’ve strayed pretty far from the original pen recordings.  At some point we’ve crossed over from sampling to synthesis.  It’s debatable exactly where the border between the two lies, but I think at this point, we’re well within synthesis territory.

For me there are three kinds of loops – long loops, short loops and really short loops.  Long loops alter but retain some qualities of the original recordings.  As an example, here’s a recording of the silver bit being spun on my kitchen table.

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And here it is again with a large portion of it looped as well as an envelope controlled filter and some panning.

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Definitely a departure from the original, but once it’s pointed out you can hear the resemblance.  But, can you hear the similarity between this sound…

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and this sound?

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Even though both sounds are played at the same pitch, the second sound sounds so drastically different because I only looped a small section of the waveform – about 10 cycles as you can see from this picture.

If you loop an even smaller section, then what’s left is just a completely unremarkable sounding simple waveform.

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Waveforms like this are the basis of most synthesizers and like most synthesizers, through layering, filtering, and envelopes these simple sounds can become much more complicated.  Since this process is the same as the process used in most synthesizers, the result sounds like most synthesizers as well.   The question is then – why not use synthesizers?  An argument could be made for the knowledge and control that comes from making these sounds “from scratch”  An argument could also be made that these sounds still retain some organic flavor due to their acoustic source material.  What do you think?

For some reason this weeks song took a lot of work to put together.  First of all, tuning all the instruments so that they played well together was a royal pain.  Second of all, the song itself didn’t come into being easily.  I have a little phrase I use frequently – “it’s not the ideas that work that are time consuming, it’s the ideas that don’t work.”  Experimentation is not an efficient process.  The track below is what I came up with after completely starting over three times and revising this final concept dozens of times.  I’m happy with the final result, but I think by delving so deeply into a purely electronic realm, I’ve gotten away from what has excited me about the other songs I’ve done, which is the tension between acoustic and digital.

There are fifteen, yes fifteen, original instruments available on the download page.  Both the instruments and the song are made entirely from one ball-point pen.

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P.S.

I spent more time on the programing of these instruments (layering, tuning, adjusting envelopes, effects etc.) than any other instruments I’ve made.   All together however, they total only one and a half megabytes.  It just goes to show, don’t judge a sample library by it’s size.