How I Did It
Dream Interruptedby NinKenDo
Uses samples from:
Tools I Used
Ableton Live 8
Samples I Used
'Swiss Miss' by
Original Samples
Just minor bits of percussion.
Process
When I first listened to the track ‘Swiss Miss’, I had in mind either an electro, stompy, high-octane mix, or something jazzy. However, upon listening more and more, I decided that the former was too close to the original piece’s later character. A jazzy piece seemed the way to go.
However, upon listening to the guitar stems, I found a piece already forming in my mind. Inspired by such pieces as ‘And the Forest Began to Sing’, I decided instead to pursue some lo-fi, melancholic pop. Not the easiest genre, but inspiration will take you where it will, and my mind couldn’t accommodate anything but.
The piece itself consists predominantly of the guitar stem, cut up and rearranged, with much of the content actually removed altogether. The piece was difficult to keep interesting due to the limited parts that were workable for the theme I had in mind. As I whittled down the samples further, I decided to take the “dreamy” quality of the piece literally, and pursue a concept work wherein the music represented the delirious, melancholic, joyful chaos of the dreamstate.
Motifs were chopped up, their timings changed to weave in and out of time with the main rhythm, and to represent the inconsistency with which a dream may become vivid and actualized, before falling into a confused state of disparate but related thoughts and emotions.
As the dream progresses, it simultaneously becomes more consistent, and more disrupted, as gradually increased wakefulness brings more concrete and consistent awareness of the outside, while awareness of the original dream slips to it’s barest concepts before slipping entirely to be supplanted with reality. This is why toward the end of the song, the main motif becomes so central, with the awareness of outside interference (the telephone tone) rising and becoming less filtered, and more recognisable. This transition was done with simple automated volume adjustments. A more complex method could certainly be used I’m sure, but scrapped for time, this seemed the simplest, most intuitive method to go with.
Percussion was admittedly something of an afterthought, and therefore kept to a minimum so as to compliment rather than disrupt the piece which had already taken on most of its shape. Were I to revisit the piece, percussion would be drastically altered or completely done away with.
Very few effects were used in the piece. Most, if not all the automation dealt with volume of individual tracks in relation to one another.
The two samples used were the ‘Swiss Miss’ guitar stems, a sdample of a ringing phone, found on the internet archive, and the sound of a phone being picked up, found on the same website.
As stated at the beginning, this piece is primarily constituted of cuttings from the original sample, rearranged. The biggest hurdle with this was the lack of clean motifs. Usually a motif would be intermingled with some other one, and so the linking of unconnected portions was difficult to do without slicing through the middle of a melody, rhythmic section or wavelength. Popping was obviously an issue, and this limitation had a profound effect on which portions were fit for use.
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