Auxiliary Input
By onezero on January 10, 2016 7:57 pm
Nice to be back. This week started with the goal of synthesizing each percussion voice with Ableton's Analog instrument (eight of them), and the idea of something abstract. The bassline came together as a sparse thing in the Collision instrument.
I messed a lot with FM synthesis in Operator, and kept two of those voices, but the piece needed more--the idea of a complex changing pad didn't really work. I reverted to an old trick I'd done this past year: reverse-patching the wah pedal, and manipulating it along with the guitar pickup selector switch and volume and tone controls to give a trumpet-like tonality. That's right: no trumpet on this at all, just the Gilmour reverse-wah trick. (I repitched some of these an octave up, and a few an octave or two down as well.)
To try the changing-pad idea, did a number of passes with Moog guitar, changing the harmonic inflection point, and arranged those in two tracks, and then did another pass with Moog through Reuss Repeater Fuzz and Vox Wah for a more buzzy tonality.
The arrangement pass was fiddly: parts worked, others didn't, and I ended up editing half of it out. There was a little space in the middle that needed something, so I did a quick improvisation with my pitch-shifter patch in Pure Data, and slowed that down a couple octaves--that's the Shepard tone in the middle.
Return channels include two reverbs (tweaked "empty club" and "large factory" presets), one Beat Repeat (tweaked "fill in the blanks" preset), and Max for Live Buffer Shuffler 1.0. Every channel got some degree of auto-pan, and the whole 2-bus went through the Full Chain Master effects rack.
Title comes from a suggestion from one of the kids, since I was using the aux input in the car yesterday, and he thought that'd make a good title. (It does!)
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