This week, since lockdown restrictions have been eased, me and Matthew had a chance to get together in my garage and work on a track. I wanted to do something that incorporated the music technology elements we tested back in college like the looping and midi controllers so I told Matthew to bring his EWI.
When he arrived, we started working on the track. We decided we wanted it to be fully live looped with no pre-recorded parts. I came up with the idea of looping a synth part and having them heavily side chained to the drums so that they would dip in volume every time they played. This became the basis for the track. Here is a clip of us trying it for the first time -
After this, I remembered a technique I used in the past to practically turn an acoustic practice mad into a midi trigger. To do this I set up the pad with an SM57 pointing directly at it. In Ableton, I then sent the audio through a vocoder to extract any pitch information from the percussive hit. Finally, I added a grain delay to the chain and adjusted the settings. It made it so the signal would “echo” but at an octave higher each time. I turned the feedback value up high so that the noise would keep building until there was a wall of noise. I wrote in automation to turn the volume down at the end of each bar. This made the practice pad into a riser that I could hit harder to generate a louder sound overtime. Here is a video of me trying this while adjusting the settings.
Once all the parts were worked out a did a practice performance to ensure we knew how we were going to swap instruments and sounds as the performance went on and subsequently recorded a take. We listened back to see if we were happy and then saved our result.
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