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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / onezero's music / Nordkapp (for Jeff Kowal)

Nordkapp (for Jeff Kowal)

By onezero on June 24, 2016 5:16 pm

Once again a very busy week, but I wanted to knock this track out before an even busier weekend.  I started with a synth drone (filtered sawtooth) through the new modulation delay network I've been working on, and cascaded that delay network into a convolution reverb (BM7 Large and Deep impulse)...and it sounded quite a bit like an airplane passing overhead, which was cool.

During the week I added some drums, Rhodes, percussion, Airy Tube preset on the Collision instrument...and it just seemed a bit wrong.  Late in the week, I tracked a lot of Moog guitar drone clips--some straight into the board (notably, rolling off the tone a bit reduced the noise from the circuitry, and then going with the out-of-phase pickup position cut the mids enough for the treble to come through), and some through Reuss RF-01 and Vox Wah.  Even though I tracked against the drums, it sounded better with them out.  (I might do a version with drums, but I'd have to take the time to make them right, and it'd end up being a different thing anyway.)

So what we have here is several clips of Moog guitar, some pitch shifted an octave or two down, spread across several channels (mostly four, but late in the piece I introduce another, and still another at the very end).  Underpinning it is that one note drone in Analog. Everything got slow auto-pan, and everything went into the modulation delay, with slightly higher frequencies of modulation than I've used before.  (It still gets wobbly if I go too far.)  Full-chain master on the master channel.

The title comes from Nordkapp, a place I'd like to visit someday--it just seems interesting, to be able to stand there and look North to the Arctic Ocean.  (Hell, let's aim high--it'd be cool to play in that Nordkapphallen that they have up there.)  During the mixdown process, I thought that this is a piece Jeff Kowal (Terra Ambient--or Terraamb here on WB) would have liked. RIP, friend.

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Sorry for your loss. sad

But this is a very deep piece, definitely adding it to my meditation playlist. Many thanks for this! Keep up the good work. Fav'd and downloaded.

Sorry man...

This is a beautiful piece, I'll be listening to it alot.

Very lush and beautiful.  Haunting, even.  Well done.

It's kid of eerie sounding, but also oddly pretty.  Excellent mimimalistic track. 

Brilliant, so much depth to this, very enjoyable, haunting and beautiful

This is gorgeous.  When it comes to ambient tracks like this, I love reading how the sounds were produced; to me the contrast between the source and the result really deepens my enjoyment.

What a lovely tribute to your friend! Just beautiful!  It reminds me a bit of a record of whale sounds I had when I was kid from a National Geographic magazine. 

So sorry for your loss.

This is a beautiful ambient track. (Being from Norway it's slightly embarrassing that I've never been to Nordkapp, I should go there myself one day.)

Very nice drone and exciting sound texture!

Alphaglitch wrote:

Sorry for your loss. sad

But this is a very deep piece, definitely adding it to my meditation playlist. Many thanks for this! Keep up the good work. Fav'd and downloaded.

Thank you!  That you're listening to it while meditating, that's quite a compliment!

Sodabelly wrote:

Sorry man...

This is a beautiful piece, I'll be listening to it alot.

Thank you!  High praise!

orangedrink wrote:

Very lush and beautiful.  Haunting, even.  Well done.

Thank you for listening!

CosmicCairns wrote:

It's kid of eerie sounding, but also oddly pretty.  Excellent mimimalistic track.

Jason Nijjer wrote:

Brilliant, so much depth to this, very enjoyable, haunting and beautiful

mysterioso wrote:

This is gorgeous.  When it comes to ambient tracks like this, I love reading how the sounds were produced; to me the contrast between the source and the result really deepens my enjoyment.

Thank you all!  One thing I didn't mention in the description is that based on one comment (in person) on one of my other Moog guitar tracks, I made a conscious effort to keep in audible string bends and glisses, so that it still signified "guitar."

is nothing sacred? wrote:

What a lovely tribute to your friend! Just beautiful!  It reminds me a bit of a record of whale sounds I had when I was kid from a National Geographic magazine.

Thank you!  I've always found whale songs to be fascinating.  At a certain depth, water transmits their sounds incredibly long distances.  (There's a similar layer in the atmosphere, fairly high up, which was the impetus for "weather balloons" that were really listening devices.)


Plantrain wrote:

So sorry for your loss.

This is a beautiful ambient track. (Being from Norway it's slightly embarrassing that I've never been to Nordkapp, I should go there myself one day.)

Thank you!  Oh, wow--that'd be quite a trip to do.  (Someday...)

m2K7 wrote:

Very nice drone and exciting sound texture!

Podling wrote:

Thank you all!  (Going to make an effort to do more listening/commenting over the coming weeks.)

It's a piece of music which reminds me how ineffective the word 'drone' when describing music. This is a much more nuanced texture. Having spent a bit of time in the North Nordics (although not that far north) it captures that feeling of beautiful desolation.

This song just came up again on random play as I was on the bus to work this morning. It's gorgeous.

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