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Mr Sandbags

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When I uploaded this last night I thought it was a failure, this morning I am not so sure. I’ve just listened to it again and, while it fails to live up to my expectations when I started, there’s something about it that I like.

The initial premise was to take recordings of myself (using my Zoom H2 as a Mic & audio interface) reading passages from Chamfort’s”Reflections on Life, Love, & Society” (as well as my laughter at some of those passages) and mangle them.

I picked the best 8 or 9 and arranged them in Ableton Live along with a very basic arrangement of Alchemy choirs which I played on the SP3X (improvising on the chords and melody of ‘Did You Know Him’ from Michael Andrews Donnie Darko score).

I ran the vocal stuff through DubStation after which it joined the choirs and headed into Reaktor where I used MIDI loops to chop & dice it with The Finger before passing it to the Aetheriser grain effect.

I put that lot through another Reaktor instance running the GrainStates ensemble. Finally I used Eos to create space and CamelSpace to create movement.

I think the biggest problem is that - bare - the arrangement isn’t at all musical but, in compensating for that, I rather overcooked it: my voice is too incoherent, the choirs get totally lost, and the mix is too muddy. I made a number of attempts at fixing this but couldn’t come up with a better balance than this.

I think perhaps I should adopt Thoreau’s maxim “Simplify! Simplify!” and start taking things away, pare the process down to it’s essentials.

One thing I am finding very hard is to get the Absynth Aetherizer effect to sound anything like some of the better presets that use it. I suspect this is because I am struggling to figure out Absynth modulation. It seems very peculiar.

Still I enjoyed using my voice and there is a dark & sinister quality to some parts of this that I like very much so it’s not all bad.

There’s also a big chunk of sample material I didn’t use yet. So fodder for something else.

kavin.'s avatar
kavin. said

number 9..number 9..number 9

Guest said

Actually...I think the voices sound great! And the fact that the spoken voice (yours?) is incoherent doesn't matter at all. You could be spilling all the secrets of the universe and we wouldn't know, I like that - it's intriguing.

kirklynch's avatar
kirklynch said

Dark and sinister indeed! I like the use of your voice and the fact this it's incoherent makes it better. OOOOOH! That laughter at the end just caps it off!

dAb's avatar
dAb said

Very spooky! :)

Johnny Stone's avatar
Johnny Stone said

Wow you have some great sounds in this one mate sounds great with headphone

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