Freq Out
By onezero on December 7, 2014 8:48 pm
Apparently my sense of "what's right" in a track is still in this abstract space--I'd tried working with drum machines and obvious keyboard lines, but they didn't sound right, and as this week's came together, I gravitated toward a lot of Ableton's Analog for percussion, as well as for nearly everything else. Two exceptions: there's a bit-tortured track of the Tension instrument in the low bass (with a lot of inharmonic partials), and there's a track of live guitar through the RF-01 fuzz, and Ableton ring mod, which I played abstractly so as not to sound guitar-like. (It mostly sounds like bells/chimes/clicks.)
The whole thing really started coming together when I added two Grain Delay return channels, set to three and five beat delays, with + 7 and -7 pitch shift...feeding partly into each other. The guitar goes out to that a lot.
Add a couple reverbs, another delay, and two-bus compression, and there we are. Title from the fact that I had to stop mixing on speakers because one of my kids was getting freaked out by it.
Bonus in-production effect: one reverb and the two grain delays are pre-fader, and earlier versions had some of the percussion voices sent to the return without having any direct presence in the mix. Some voices--like the Tension instrument--stayed that way, but I got rid of it on percussion because it lacked impact. While I had percussion set that way, though, I kept finding myself thinking that someone was bumping around elsewhere in the house--kind of an alarming effect for late at night.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike (BY-NC-SA)
