Aviary
By CrazyBob on May 8, 2016 5:53 pm
Kind of a culmination of various things...
Back to mining favorite tracks for structure/composition... this one came dangerously close to straight-up plagiarism, but I think I managed to steer out of that. 2562's "Morvern," in case you were wondering. The main sound reminded me of a delay-treated seagull, so I decided to try basing a piece around bird samples.
Credit where due: all bird sounds from freesound.com
Seagull samples: "Lakeside Birds 2.wav" by jus
Robin chirping: "Bird Whistling, A.wav" by InspectorJ
Lakeside Birds was chopped up, some put through reverb and ping-pong delay, the rest put through chorus and grain delay. Bird Whistling was looped and run through a resonator, flanger, ping pong dealy and auto pan. The resonator allowed the robin's song to take the place of the pads I was planning to add. Tweaking the phaser settings as the piece went created some pretty wild sounds.
I recorded a live bass. Three tracks, actually. One relatively clean, one through a harmonic percolator clone, and one put through a heavily gated big muff clone. Gradually changed the volumes on the three tracks to give different bass textures. Also created a synth bass on Operator, with a low pass filter (sometimes modulated with an LFO)
The vibraslap was a late addition, because I felt the piece needed something more. It kind of echoed one of the bird samples, and added a nice punctuation to the different sections.
It sounded a little too mellow/loungey, so I kicked the BPM up from 140 to 143.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike (BY-NC-SA)
