Boomerang
By onezero on October 9, 2016 11:46 pm
Here's one that changed in character from the beginning to the end, and I wasn't sure where it'd end up. I started with some beats, and they didn't sound quite right, so I kept fiddling, adding instruments and taking them away, swapping out drum racks, putting in placeholders, liking patterns, but not instrumentation...and after a lot of fiddling, pulled out the Corpus plugin for several parts.
Instruments: Drum Rack of K3M samples through the Corpus plugin (pipe modeling) with an LFO adjusting the frequency.
Drum rack of Analog for custom synth drums, through Utility for some slight level reduction.
Impulse of handclaps through Corpus (pipe), again with LFO on frequency.
Two tracks of Electric piano, one Wurlitzer (through auto-filter for wah), and one Rhodes (for bass).
Operator on some weird custom pad I built up.
Four tracks of Moog guitar through wah, three through Auto-pan for hard tremolo (one of which got the Amp plugin for variety), and one with Corpus (beam). In playing them, I'd been thinking of John Luther Adams's Wind in High Places, which doesn't have fretted notes--just fundamentals and harmonics on open strings, so I did passes through the standard-tuned guitar strings for those. (That said, I had to cheat and fret a few notes as well.) I grouped these so I could filter out some nasty 3K that was going on--I previewed the piece in the car, and it prompted me to remix, pulling back on these guitar parts, as well as going through the notch filter.
Sends: Two convolution reverbs, one of which was a weird dub-like echo. Also simple delay into filtered delay. Everything got L-R auto-pan as well, and the whole thing got full-chain master.
The title is free association from NGC 40--while that's the Bow-Tie Nebula, there's also another one in Centaurus, which is also called the Boomerang Nebula. That seemed like a cooler title, and bits of this piece keep coming around again.
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