Radiolarian
By onezero on September 25, 2016 11:56 pm
Mid-week I tracked some drum lines (kit, percussion, handclaps, tabla--because I was listening to Miles's On the Corner a fair amount this week) and two basslines that were pretty satisfying, particularly when one was offset from the other by a quarter note--there was a kind of King Crimson "Discipline" thing going on there. (You can hear them at 55 seconds and 3:19) It would have been very easy to put some not-really-odd-meter "Discipline"-like melody lines over that...though I didn't want it to tip into not-very-good-copy territory. So I sat with that for a few days, and then tracked a lot of guitar (Epiphone Moderne)--way more than I could have needed, some of it ok, some not. In the end, I spread it out over five channels, though not all of it was sounding at the same time. There's clean guitar, some with wah, some with Reuss RF-01 and wah, mostly rhythmic patterns with a few chordal sections.
To give it some bottom, I added K3M deep kick in places, and for some atmosphere, sparse Rhodes and vibraphone. To give it even more atmosphere, I decided to add a return channel with convolution reverb going into a delay, and then feeding it back into itself--you can hear that on the cleaner guitar. (This was inspired by reading about Hungry Robot's pedal The Wash.)
Other sends: convolution reverb, filter delay, and beat repeat on the drums for some variation. This really needs M4L Humanizer on the MIDI instruments, but I ran out of time on that. Sorting through it all was time-consuming, but I managed to give this a kind of shape just before the deadline. There are some ideas here, but...it could probably use some humanizer and another editing pass. Anyway, here we are.
The title comes from association off the fact that it's week 38, and 38 is the atomic number of strontium. Apparently Acantharea, a group of marine radiolarian protozoa, have (or leave?) skeletons composed of strontium sulfate. (Here I thought every skeleton was pretty much calcium, but apparently bodies want to treat strontium a lot like calcium.)
On listening to the mp3 the next day...what happened to the drum kit? Aha: I'd mis-clicked on trying to add full-chain master to the master channel, and instead dropped an unconfigured External Audio plugin on the drum channel. So the drum kit is not actually in this version of the piece. That explains a lot. Here's the piece with drums and humanizer, as intended.
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