Another track cobbled together with crowd-sourced audio clips provided through the Reddit Play-It-Forward experiment. I wanted something slow, sludgy, and dark. I’ll probably put together a short abstract film to go with this in a week or so.

One of the contributors to the Play-It-Forward had posted quite a few samples created with a bathtub. They were presented as sounds to be used in a drum rack. From listening to the sounds, I assume he or she had used an old style cast iron tub. The sounds all had this wonderful depth and reverberation falloff. I love to use these real world sounds for percussive beats. I noticed that they all were in mono. I rather liked the richness of stereo recording I had done with similar “drum” sounds, because of their added complexity. Now, somewhere along the way, I’m pretty sure I encountered a tutorial from someone much smarter than I who recommended that drum samples be recorded in mono. Nonetheless, I wanted each element to have a wider spread. Luckily I had recently agreed to beta-test a Max for Live plugin which emulates stereo. It’s a subtle addition, but I like it.

It can be quite liberating to work with limited parameters. In this case the limitation is the sound sources. But what you do to them is completely open. As are other elements such as the length of the finished piece, tempo, time signature, what portions of the clips you decide to use, whether you might want to reverse the samples, or perhaps throw them through an audio effect, and so on.

It serves me because there is an imposed deadline, and, also, it’s helping me to better learn some of these audio tools (hardware and software) cluttering up my desk.