In the Ocean of Night - 2

mmi

Sometime yesterday, sandbags posted “In the Ocean of Night”.
Fuelled by a lovely walk and some pints, I was inspired to make some additions.

Technical/process details:

Guitar was my Michael Kelly going into GT-10 which had compressor, delay and reverb going. It also has a hardware effects loop which brings in my uPOG which was on (dry at 12 o’clock, suboctave at 1 o’clock, and octave up at 9 o’clock).

I recorded three separate improvised (mono) tracks. The first two panned hard left and right and the third left in the middle.

On the third, I created a quickie rack (Ableton Live rack, that is) with two chains. Both with an EQ3. One allowed only the low frequencies through and the other allowed only the mids and his through. I put the mids+his through an autopanner set to slowly sweep at .26Hz. Using the rack mixer, I balanced the two chains until I was happy.

All three guitar tracks had a single post-fader send going to a return track holding a chain of effects. Eos -> Kombinat -> Gate -> Phaser.

Eos makes a big beautiful (reverb) sound but sometimes it’s too big, so I’ve taken to messing with it. Kombinat is a distortion / bit crusher that can make some really nasty sounds. Can dirty up the reverb wash nicely. Of course, it just sits there and makes noise, so I add a gate to shut the whole thing up unless I’m putting something through it. Lastly, the phaser is there to colour the sound and give some movement.

Finally, on the master channel, I added a high pass filter to tone down the bass frequencies across the whole mix as things were getting a little out of hand.

Gave sandbags a listen and he said post but with a longer reverb tail. Frankly, I rather like the way the reverb gets snuffed (like a candle) so I’m leaving that alone.

Was a lot of fun. Someday, we should play live together.