How I Did It
Infusionby Quarkstar
Samples are used in:
Tools I Used
Drone bass: Xfer Records, Serum (Quarkstar patch)
Drums: Ableton, Simpler+Corpus (Quarkstar design)
Grand Piano: NI, The Maverick
Guitar x 4: Synapse, Dune2 (Gitano EX)
Rhodes Piano: NI, Rounds (Ice Rhodes)
Humming Tops: NI, Kinetic Metal (Humming Tops)
Flutes: Rop Papen Blue II, (Quarkstar patch)
Organs: Zebra 2, (Little Nemo)
Strings: Ableton, Tension (Noisy Strings)
Notable Effects:
Reverb: Air Windows: Space
Console emulation: Air Windows
Distance: Tokyo Dawn Records, Proximity
Compresor: Vladislav Goncharov, Nova-67P
Equalisation: Tokyo Dawn Labs, VOS Slick EQ
Original Samples
Binaural Drone
Rhodes Piano
Grand Piano
Noisy String
Organs
Plucked Strings
Process
These musical phrases are extracted from a piece which is 24 minutes long and written to help a friend sleep at night. Each instrument part is not that interesting by itself, but when you layer them up you will get an ever shifting piece of music with chords split across several instruments. It was intended to be background music while drifting off to sleep. I also wrote the piece thinking about ccmixter “Music for Healing”.
Terry Riley wrote a piece called “In C” which is made up of 53 short phrases lasting from half a beat to 32 bars. A large group of musicians play the phrases in order or omit phrases depending each musicians personal decisions. The phrases can be repeated as many times as they want, but the completed piece depends on the musicians choices and skills. To me the piece becomes less about the music and more about how it is played. I had this in mind when writing Healing. Its down to the performance, instruments and the musicians, not so much the composer. Perfect for ccmixter where the remixer creates their own music. Here is a Youtube version of “In C” by African Express https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FXQ68ZkWVw
The music is constructed from short repeated phrases of music, each of different lengths. As they play, the repeats will start at different bars compared to other phrases. This will make the music both repeating and ever changing.
Phrases are 4, 5, 6 ,7 or 12 bars long. These phrases begin at the start of a bar and finish at the end of a bar.
Other phrases are odd beat lengths, like 4 bars and 1/16 beat, or 4 bars and 1/4 beat. As they play they will shift along by 1/16 or 1/4 note approximately every 4 bars. These are inspired by Steve Reich, especially his “Clapping Music”. I use 3 or 4 of these phrases playing on the same instrument, so that the melody is ever changing. Its easy to write these phrases to play a planned melody for the first 8 or so bars but the more you focus on writing for the first bars, the more disjointed the latter parts will sound as they go out of phase. I found that you have to write simple parts and then listen to what is generated and only fix what is absolutely wrong. I wrote these as recognisable little phrases that would keep their character as the changes progressed. Each phrase uses 2 or 3 notes [(G3 and C4), (D#4 and F4), (D#4, G4, C5) and (C3, D#3, F3)] .
In another section I took the auto generated music, described above, and “played" it on piano so that it has a performance element.
There are two sets of samples, loops and sections. To use the loops, import them and put them on “loop” or duplicate them but keep the sample lengths. I have included MIDI files too so you can use your own sounds. The sections are longer pieces of loops that you may want to chop up or use whole.
All the samples have been centred and set to a maximum volume of about -12dB. You will need to pan them left and right and mix them down in volume.
The Drone is binaural and the left and right channels are to be kept apart. Don’t mix them to mono, add reverb, chorus or other stereo effects, or the important binaural sound will be lost. Volume changes and filtering are good though. I recorded the drone without effects, otherwise I would have run out of space, therefore the drone should have Tremolo, high pass and low pass added. These should be changed throughout the track to create variation and different moods.
The organ parts are inspired by Indian Raga music, with a formal rule on the melody; the melody can only go up or down by one note. By following this I hoped to get a restful melody and section of music.
Other instruments are there to enhance the melodies, create interest, introduce new melodies and to create a connection between the various segments.
With this type of music, the energy of the sections is extremely important. Energy is changed with volume, note lengths, chorus, delays, swing, low and high pass filters, tremolo, timbre and other effects that don’t change the melody, but change the timing and sound. The aim is to keep the tune interesting and change the emotional impact. This piece uses filters to change the tonality of the instruments.
I used a lot of delay effects and ping-pong-delays in the music. Somehow I find the delays relaxing.
Reading the Forums http://ccmixter.org/thread/3256 I saw that rapid changes in the music are confusing to some people. A repeating sound becomes boring. My idea is to have loops that repeat, but they don’t repeat at the same times so the music is ever changing and becomes both familiar and different over time.
The lead instruments are Gitano and Grand Piano. Secondary instruments are Noisy String and the Rhodes Pianos. Backing instruments are Organ, Humming Tops Flute and Drone.
Other Notes
Wrote this in about 3 days and spent 4 days making samples from it.
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