Spectral
By onezero on July 10, 2016 7:59 pm
Sometimes one just doesn't have an idea, or the ideas one has don't sustain interest. Late in the week, I had some percussive patterns in mind, and put them down in Live, but by the time we got to the weekend, they weren't compelling. I slowed them way down, with the thought of playing Moog guitar drones against them, which I did...and I ended up with a bunch of snippets (Moog through RF-01 Fuzz and Vox Wah, manipulating the wah at the same time as manipulating the harmonic sustain point; there's also clean Moog guitar). All these clips had a chance of going together, but they didn't inherently lead to a structure. Some were obvious guitar with pick attack; others I faded in with the volume knob--I'd had a thought of doing a lot of notes with defined attacks, though in practice that mostly didn't work for this one. (If I'd have tracked less, I might have finished up sooner, because I would have had less to decide between.
For a while, I added volume zero-phase auto-pan on them, with the thought of increasing tremolo as a structural element, but it didn't work in a satisfying way. Similarly, I tried vocoding one of the drum lines to keep it involved...but it didn't work, and came out. In the end, I had seven tracks of Moog guitar drones, mostly going at the same time. Everything got auto-pan for left-right variation.
Sends are where it gets a bit interesting: I used the modulation delay, with the delay times synced to the now-ghost tempo, but I added slight automation on the delay modulation. That send channel cascades into a convolution reverb (very large space), and there's another send (M4L Harmonic Filter) on the two harder, more distorted guitar. (That cascades into a different, smaller convolution reverb.) Everything got Full-Chain Master.
Title comes from the spectral-filtering sound of the final mix.
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