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This weekend a buddy of mine and I recorded and released an album of horrible noisy speedcore which you can hear at http://piiiisssss.bandcamp.com/album/pingo. Be warned, it's extremely noisy and probably only appealing to people who are already in to that kind of thing. The reason I'm posting about it here (aside from the obvious one of promotion) is to tell you about how we made it. The original idea we had a few weeks back was to create something using a limited sound palette so we would be forced to be creative and hopefully pull ourselves out of a rut of stamping out the same thing over and over again. I'd been experimenting with creating noise-making circuits and after dismissing a few ideas as just being too dumb ("only use whatever synthesizer impressions we can do into a microphone") we decided to use the following: 3 breadboarded noise making circuits - These were what I had on my workbench at the time: 1 dual-squarewave-oscillator drone synth, 1 8-step sequenced squarewave synth and 1 strange parallel-to-serial bit-mangling synth. 1 mic - we weren't sure if we wanted vocals or not so decided to allow a mic just in case. 1 battered distortion pedal - to make the synths and mic sound horrible. Ableton Live with a handful of drum samples - to record the whole thing with minimal processing. We used a bit of compression and distortion and abused the time stretch/pitch shift algorithms to generate some of the glitches. We combined the synths in new ways for each new track and started altering the circuits as we went along to make new sounds. It was really useful having the synths on breadboards as it meant we could treat the whole thing as a strange modular system and mash it together as we saw fit without limitation. We also experimented with control methods such as using photoresistors in the place of potentiometers which led inevitably to the realization that the fridge has a light in it and should be used in the recording. Here's a video of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R-lJmDCiV8 The guiding principle was "we've got 6 hours to do this so let's do it fast". We didn't plan ahead at all, just started making noise and moved on when we decided a track was done. We didn't have time to worry about the mix so we just left it as it fell. It was a really fun and liberating experience and a real contrast to the kind of production we've each done in the past where tracks are carefully crafted over days of painstaking work. Even if you hate the album I hope you'll take away my recommendation to get out of your comfort zone and write/record something in a totally new way. It really helps to stimulate creativity and it's loads of fun!
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Feb 1, 2017 15:18
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Very cool idea man. I think it's a good thing to make yourself pound out some tunes quickly sometimes. I'm getting the same feeling of liberation for the http://rpmchallenge.com where you write and record an entire album in the month of February. I like this idea of having to go ahead and get it done quickly.
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Feb 2, 2017 02:40
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neat
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Feb 24, 2017 05:44
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