Signals

Mr Sandbags

I’m trying to experiment with intentionally combining two different sounds. Since I seem to find this difficult I am starting with using a drone as one of the sounds taking my inspiration from the opening tracks of the Brian Eno & Jah Wobble collaboration “Spinner”.

In this case I used a Reaktor based drone generator to generate one track. I use a lot of automation to “tune” the drone at the start of the track so that it homes in on the sound I want to continue through the rest of the track.

The second sound comes from my Novaphone 340G Reaktor instrument. It’s playing a sample which has a kind of “underwater chime” sound. Each loop played by Novaphone is quite short and played at half speed with a 4 pole LP filter sweeping across it.

It’s playing MIDI that I hand generated using the prime numbers under 200 converted into beat positions. E.g.

  2 | 1.2
  3 | 1.3
  5 | 2.1
  7 | 2.3
11 | 3.3
13 | 4.1
17 | 5.1
19 | 5.3

and so on. The result is that. barring the first note, all loops are triggered by notes played on either the 1st or 3rd beat of the bar they land on. 1st beats alternate between playing notes C and B#, while 3rd beats alternate between E and G.

I use AD PanStation to add some shimmer to the Novaphone part and automate a send to Valhalla Shimmer to add some “Eno” to the track.

The whole lot is piped through the AD Eos reverb and Vintage Warmer for some light compression & limiting.

The end result is, I think, a gentle flowing piece of ambience that points in a direction I want to go, even if it is only a first step toward it.