By Your Own Light
By onezero on April 17, 2016 6:08 pm
Another "organically" developing track. This one started with a suggestion from Laguna to check out using Live's vocoder on drums, so I did. Single-hit samples on a real kit aren't in an audible channel, but instead are feeding another channel of Analog going into the vocoder, with a few different note-length variations and patterns for the synth. The vocoder went into an effects rack, one chain straight through, and the other through Corpus for some extra-membrane action. (This was inefficient; I should have stuck with the wet/dry, but was considering other processing options which I didn't end up doing.) I also used four LFOs on this channel: one on synth filter cutoff, one on synth filter resonance, one on the send to filter delay, and one on send to Beat Repeat. (Actually, just looked, and the beat repeat LFO got deleted at some point. Whoops. Not going to re-render, though.)
Against that background, handclaps on 2 and 4 anchored things, but the claps were too clean, so I put them through a bit crusher and into another Corpus plugin with pipe modeling.
I recorded bass straight into the board, but added some impulse delay send (BM7 Studio B Far impulse), and added a bit of Electric for a Rhodes line, putting that through the Dynamic Tube plugin (on Hot Driven Tape).
I'd experimented with another vocoder on bass, but it didn't really fit. So I kept that channel for after tracking guitar. I did do a bunch of snippets with the Moderne into the board, giving it some air with the Cabinet plugin and some room reverb, as well as the Berlin Power Station impulse. Both main guitar channels got some overdrive and filtering with Auto-Filter, as well. (While tracking, I wasn't sure whether to go torchy or bluesy; ultimately, I threw out the bluesier bits.)
I also wasn't sure about the guitar, and toyed with making it unrecognizable; after experimenting with several approaches, I went with time-stretching using the Complex algorithm. Stretching the guitar to the extremes ended up giving it a trumpet or (alternately on some clips) violin-like timbre. That seemed to work with the rest of the piece.
The processor was working really hard on this one, and I had to be careful not to open any windows during rendering. Kind of weird. I might have to look at machine-upgrading options.
The title comes from 15 being the atomic number of phosphorus, which makes me think of the Wallace Stevens poem "Phosphor Reading by His Own Light." Enjoy.
(Now off to do a live drone soundtrack to a several-hour reiki session.)
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