Charlie Creates Sounds

So here’s my final project. It is intended to be an ambient remix of Björk’s ‘Show Me Forgiveness’.

The original song is extremely simple. There’s Björk’s voice, a little reverb, and that’s it. The vocal is full-throated, with a melody that never repeats itself. Given this source material, building an ambient song that stayed true to the original was not going to happen.

Nonetheless, there are elements of the chill-out genre in the piece. The tempo stays at a leisurely 80 beats per minute. A harp gives a simple, and oft repeated, bassline. The few vocals which acted as a lead were reversed in wave editor, then reverbed in metasynth, then put forward again. Finally, I used quite a bit of found sound.

However, the way I used those sounds gave this piece a harsher feel than the ambient I’ve heard. The squishy beats which enter near the beginning were made from a recording of my friend walking through the leaves. I took that file, and shuffled it in metasynth, while also playing with the attack and decay of each piece. Near the end, a metallic rhythm enters the mix. This was built from a recording of a spoon rubbing against a glass that was chopped up in ReCycle, then arranged using ReDrum in Reason.

I also used the source material in some strange ways. I chopped the whole song into tiny pieces in ReCycle. I then used those in the NN-XT sampler in Reason. I used various samples of Björk breathing in an attempt to create ashtmatic refrain. I also used the final slices of her singing in ReDrum to close out the piece.

One final note: this song, like almost all of Björk’s music, is definitely meant for headphones. While speakers work fine, a lot of the details will be missed.

Here’s my fourth assignment. The requirements: use five loops from recycle to create a 1 minute composition in Reason in either the trip-hop or jungle genres. I chose trip-hop.

I started by finding a record to set the mood. Snoman’s Dance Music Manual claims that many trip-hop songs sample old jazz records, so I decided to grab a recording of Billy Holiday singing ‘Stormy Weather’. The opening of the song became my first loop. I used her vocals in redrum.

I then needed to fill out my drum machine. I found a great drum opening in Al Green’s ‘I’m Glad You’re Mine’, spliced it in recycle, and used it in redrum to get my beat. I altered the pitch of one of the patches to give it a harsher snare sound.

I added the bass from Miles Davis’s ‘Blue in Green’, to dirty the sound; make it more menancing. I also took multiple trumpet pieces from my davis loop, and played them on a sampler to introduce the piece.

To go with ‘Stormy Weather’, I got rain and thunder noises from The Cure’s ‘Same Deep Water As You’.  These were added to the intro, then thunder and rain returns for the end. A sampler and redrum were used.

Finally, I got a loop of ‘Gymnopedie No. 1’ in Recycle. I put that in Dr. Rex, and used pitch bend (another favorite of trip-hopists) for the first cycle of the loop. Halfway through the second loop, I drop the bending as the thunder strikes.

My third assignment. A 1 minute piece built in Reason software. I went for a tribal sort of feel with this one. It opens with the log drum from the nn19 sampler going randomly over multiple octaves on the RPG8. A delay is added rather quickly. The drums drop in with a kick on every quarter note. A second drum lands on the off eighth note except for the final  quarter of each measure, when the two drums are in sync. A syncopated tom tom is added on top. Finally, the bass, played by a xylophone comes in. A phaser effect is added to the xylophone, which is also going through an RPG8.

Syncing the auxillary to my keyboard helped me adjust the effects just to my liking. Now that I’ve gotten more comfortable with reason, I hope to have a more dynamic song on the next go round.

My Second Assignment. Three loops made out of a sample of a clicking sound repeated four times. In the audio above, you’ll hear the four clicks, silence, the first loop, silence, the second loop, silence, and finally the third loop.

The click was created by speeding up dancing queen until there was nothing but a single noise left for the entire song. The song was played through four times.

Using that basic building block, I made three loops, each about 20 seconds long, in the software program, Radial.

The first loop was set to 60 bpm. The click was put through a high pass filter for the basic beat. A second, lower click is added to hit every other beat. Then the regular click is slowed down, so it hits twice on every fourth beat. Finally, a click sent through the chamber reverb begins to hit at random.

The second loop is built around 137 bpm, disco heaven. A deep, full click created using a low pass filter sets the basic beat. A second lower click is added, but it goes at nearly triple the speed. A slightly filtered click is set off rhythm, adding some much need syncopation to the mix. Finally a high pass filtered click, moving extremely fast and modulated by the chamber reverb effect, gives the loop an extra shimmer. Finally, the off-kilter channel’s filter is adjusted to give the track some movement.

The final loop enters with all of the effects added. It, too, is at the ‘disco heaven’ bpm. The slowed down double click from the first loop now has chamber reverb added to it. Also, the shimmering high clicks from the second loop return. The low steady beat goes slightly faster than the norm now, while a second beat, going at the same rate, has it’s filter altered as the track moves forward. Near the end, feedback is added to the reverb effect, and the system heads toward overload, before the feedback is cut-off, and the loop returns to normal.

I do a radio show on WYBC (stream it at wybc.com) called Big Wilma. Every Wednesday at 6, my co-host Kelsey and I play songs that fit a particular theme. This week, the theme is songs about politics. Lil Wayne’s ‘Georgia… Bush’ is, in my opinion, one of the two most important political songs of this century (the other is Toby Keith’s ‘Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue’).  Unfortunately, Lil Wayne uses a lot of words that aren’t radio friendly while describing the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and so I was worried I wouldn’t be able to play it. But, thanks to the Yale Music Lab, I was able to bleep all of the bad words using Wave Editor. In fact, the reduce gain process makes for a rather elegant edit that keeps the momentum of the song intact.

Coincidently, ‘Georgia… Bush’ has a terrific loop in its background. The song samples ‘Georgia On My Mind’ by Ray Charles, taking the opening refrain and clipping it with the iconic strings from the same track. The sample drops into the background, while a simple drum kit with heavy bass and cymbals takes over, as Lil Wayne’s anger builds. Ray Charles’s voice returns whenever the lyrics deem it necessary, and the full sample comes back for the chorus, but this time the sample is seeped in irony and cynicism. Like Steve Reich’s ‘Come Out’, ‘Georgia… Bush’ transforms a simple loop into a dramatic statement about race in America.

My Second Ringtone