It’s a tale of seduction and the perils of addiction. A tragic journey from freedom to imprisonment then ultimately liberation and a new chance at life. Sometime last year, I found a fly stuck inside an empty beer bottle that I had left on the window sill. This poor creature would have died had I not courageously opened the window and set it free. After, of course, I shook it around a bit and got some good recordings.
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Now, a year later, as I remember these dramatic events, I am inspired to compose an ode to this brave little fly. And what better way to pay homage than to use nothing but the recording made on that fateful day.
On the download page are the 6 Kontact instruments I used to make this song which you can download for free. My favorite instrument, was made of three simple elements. For the first element, I EQ’d the above sample slightly to bring out the tone of the bottle, then I loaded it into Kontakt and, using the volume envelope and a compressor, I gave it a very sharp attack and gentle decay. This is what it sounds like at root pitch then an octave lower and and an octave lower than that.
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For the next step I simply ran this through Kontakt’s convolution reverb with a custom IR of mine called “dark space”.
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Then I added another layer of the same sample this time run through a resonator plugin and EQ’d more aggressively to give it a distinct tone. The resulting instrument, with all the layers together, has a nice full glassy sound with the added textural grit of the fly’s wings flapping.
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And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for…..”Journey of the Fly”.
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Hi. I’m really impressed by all of your work. It’s hard (but fun) work creating new sounds – the fact that you do it for free is amazing.
My uni project has followed a similar format to what you have been doing, building instruments and documenting my work. I was wondering if you could have a listen to some of my tracks that I’ve uploaded to sound cloud. They are each created with a bike, with the exception of a filing cabinet or gas bottle here and there. It’s due in on friday, so just trying to get some last minute feedback.
I’m sure i’ll keep up your blog when i’m finished.
Hope you like it.
http://edwardszakaluni.blogspot.com/ – Blog
http://soundcloud.com/edwardszakal/sets/spokeworks/ – Tracks
Hi Edward,
Cool blog. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. Looks like we have a lot of the same inspirations. You’re instruments sound great. I especially like the sounds in the first section of the “SpokeWorks Demos” and the percussion stuff in the 4th. If I were to give some feedback I would say some of the instruments have that overtly ‘sampled’ sound to them. This can be an aesthetic choice. Some of my instruments have that sound too and in certain contexts I like it. If you wanted a more “organic” sound than the key word is variability. Real instruments vary in many many subtle ways at different dynamic levels, across registers and with each repetition. I read you used the round-robin feature for some of your instruments. This is certainly a great way and the most straightforward way of creating variability but there are others as well. Maybe I’ll do a blog post on this subject sometime but for now I bet you can come up with a bunch of creative solutions if you meditate on that concept for a bit. Try mapping different controls to modulators like velocity, key input, and of course random bipolar and uni-polar. Less is more for natural sounding results. Hope that helps. Feel free to write me directly if you have more questions.
Awesome stuff. How did your IR manage to bring out so much clean, subharmonic sound on the sample you pitched down 2x? What specs did you record the initial sounds at? The pitched down versions manage to sound very clean and full and still have quite a bit of life in them.
Thanks for sharing this.
Hi Luca,
Thanks for reading and thanks for the comment. People ask me about the low end of my stuff a lot. I don’t do anything exceptionally extraordinary to get it. I record at 96k, in this case with the built in condensers on my Zoom H4n. I convert to 48k to edit and master my samples with a little EQ and multi-band compression. That’s it really. In this case I used a resonance plugin to add a little extra tone and my IR had a lot of bass content which helps.