This week’s assignment was to make something as unlike yourself as you can.
After some rumination (“Is music I don’t like necessarily unlike me?”) I decided to make the kind of electronic music I generally turn off as fast as I can – the kind that has one good-sounding loop that is played OVER and OVER again accompanied by a generic boombap beat.
I play piano, but I wanted to play piano like someone who didn’t know how to play piano. So, I used the Random MIDI VST in Ableton to “play” some piano whose pitches were not related to the keys I was pressing. Then, I found some bits that sounded good and pieced them together in a melody.
Then I added a boomBAP. Ok, that was easy. Then I added some bass, but, still pretending to not know how to play an instrument, I drew it into the piano roll and tried to keep it simple.
At this point I felt like I was making a Ninja Tune track (or, specifically, a spiritual heir to Four Tet’s “No More Mosquitos”), so I engaged in some contemporary crate-digging, aka freesound.org. I found a nice processed sample of some Central European(?) violin playing, some kids chattering that I turned into a chant, and some wackadoodle scratching vinyl that you’ll hear on the bridge. I’ve never used freesound this much before, so it was really fun to find cool sounds and layer them into my track!
Other techie stuff – all the bass sounds and the first electronic freak-out sound are u-he’s Tyrell N6, which I’m beginning to think is pretty nifty.
Violin sample from wjoojoo – freesound.org/people/wjoojoo/sounds/417667/
People talking – freesound.org/people/ZyryTSounds/sounds/222993/
Vinyl scratching – freesound.org/people/Ryding/sounds/412536/
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More on this 375th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Despite Yourself / The Assignment: Make a piece of music that sounds as unlike you as you can accomplish — at:
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