Impossible Acoustic

    In the book “The Way It Is” Ajahn Sumedho spoke about his first few years as a Buddhist monk.  At the monastery where he stayed, monks were required to follow hundreds of rules concerning every aspect of their life.  From eating to sleeping to sweeping the walkways, everything had to be done in a very specific way.  At first he was frustrated with how arbitrary the rules were, until one day, he realized that that was the point.  The rules were meant to be arbitrary because, while it didn’t ultimately matter how the walkways got swept, the rules forced a confrontation with his habits and brought into focus patterns he hadn’t realized were ever there.  

  While my goals are considerably less ambitious than Ajahn Sumedho’s, this whole business of using limited source material and limited effects has required that I deviate from my usual ways of sampling and composing and discover some new ones.  For example, while making the song this week, I came to a point where I really really wanted some sort of sustaining sound.  Normally I would have taken this sound (made by blowing across the top of the tube)….

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and looped the end portion to create a sound like this…

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  Luckily, I had decided not to use looping at all this week and save it for a post of it’s own.  I say luckily because, had I followed my usual methods, I probably would have overlooked the wonderfully strange sound created by simply pitching this same sample down several octaves.  

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Also, the same sample played in reverse sounds like this.

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  Of course, some habits are habits for a good reason and there’s often nothing wrong with the obvious solution.  The limited pitch choice of last weeks “spring buzz” and “tube tap” sounds can be easily remedied by mapping those samples across multiple keys in Kontakt.  I also reworked the Battery kit from last week by simply changing the pitches of each cell.  Extreme pitch shifting can have surprising results.  For example, when pitched up 36 steps, the sound of twisting the clip into place on the tube….

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…sounds like this

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  It’s also possible to create a pitch envelope so that the pitch changes over time.  When this effect is applied to the sound of the silver bit spinning on a table it sounds like this –  

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  Another method of transformation worth talking about is layering.  The mind has a curious way of combining sounds that happen at the same time.  The following sound seems like a single instrument right?

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Actually it’s three versions of the “Tube Tap” instrument transposed up 0 steps, 12 steps and 19 steps respectively and one instance of the “Tube Flick” instrument.  Listen.

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   Assigning the same midi input to a set of instruments is an easy way to experiment with different combinations of instruments.  Considering that each instrument can have its own individual pitch, volume, volume envelope, and effects etc the possibilities are many.  There are several multis on the download page as well as a few instruments built from layered samples.  

  As with last week, the song this week was made entirely from pen sounds manipulated and made into instruments using the techniques discussed.  I also used heaping portions of delay and reverb as well as one instance of a grain delay plugin cuz I just couldn’t help myself.

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