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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / ioflow's music / electric waterworks

electric waterworks

By ioflow on June 11, 2016 2:28 am

a textured noise experiment in no-input mixing. an afternoon in the laboratory, high-voltage lines sizzling, mysterious pipes and beakers bubbling. subsonic rumbles. no audio signals were used.

[soundcloud]268551301[/soundcloud]

this is my first-ever venture into no-input recording, per this week's disquiet junto project theme, and since i didn't have enough 1/4" cables to try this with my mackie mixer, i figured i could try it with a mixer eurorack module: mutable instruments shades.

i normally mostly use shades to control the amount of modulation sent to clouds. but on its own, once self-patched, shades puts out a surprising amount of extremely low-frequency noise when adjusting knobs, as i saw with a spectrum/eq utility in ableton live. i had an idea: why not excite that activity with a modulator such as tides? i already had the parasite alternative firmware running on tides, so it was just a matter of sending one output of random control voltage into shades, and from there into my audio interface.

the result was seven minutes of hilarious, delightful knob-wiggling, which i then edited down to under three minutes. this track is a sample of the wildly varying textures, drones, static pops, pitched buzz, and burbling gloops obtained with this tiny self-patched rig. just two modules, but so much fun!

recorded for disquiet junto 0232, "no input," and weekly beats 2016 #23.

Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike (BY-NC-SA)

no input!  great experiment idea!  great track title as well.  I can definitely see the mad scientist and the beakers bubbling with mysterious fluids.

orangedrink wrote:

no input!  great experiment idea!  great track title as well.  I can definitely see the mad scientist and the beakers bubbling with mysterious fluids.


it was super-fun to work this way, and even the bits i didn't use in the final track provide lots of sampling material for other purposes. this experiment might be a good introduction point to modular drums.

Nice experiment!

m2K7 wrote:

Nice experiment!


thank you! really enjoyed it; will have to revisit this process in the future.

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