My stab at the January acid pattern recorded live last night.
Rust Creep’s original pattern is a cool smooth 4 bar thing but I got tired after inputting the first 13 notes and then absent-mindedly left the door open for some weird mutants to creep in, confuse me massively with their monkeying around, and introduce stacks of hard-to-control layered distortion.
Eh, it happens.
I had trouble sleeping last night so I pulled the laptop and headphones into bed and constructed this little experiment.
The gimmick here is that all the sounds are sourced from a single Roland TR-808 cowbell sample. Well, 2 samples if you consider the reversed version separately. Obviously and predictably, massive amounts of processing was involved.
Due to the context, I didn’t employ any outboard synths, mixers, controllers, or effects. Nor, for once, did I employ any third party plug-ins or other special sauce - just (a lot of) what’s natively built into Ableton Live 8.
Thus the project is easy to share (and not very big) so give me a shout if you’d like to have a play with it.
Slightly late, here’s my riff on August’s monthly acid pattern.
Recorded live at Low Brow Eye Labs, 7th August 2011. It’s the first and only take, hence the sloppiness in places and imbalanced arrangement. (Shhh — don’t tell anyone, but apart from the cables and headphones it’s all digital. I didn’t dare risk exploding any more of the real analogues.)
Kudos to:
⚫ d-Rektional for the cool acid pattern
⚫ Yamaha RM1x: drums, synths, effects, sequencing, live pattern switching and muting
⚫ Kenton Control Freak: control of the RM1x’s filter cutoffs, channel volumes and clap pitch
⚫ STEIM’s junXion software: mapping of the Control Freak’s sliders to the RM1x’s parameters (far easier than reprogramming the Control Freak)
⚫ Ableton Live 8: recording the jam, constructing the intro, adding a big glitch at 5:18
⚫ ExperimentalHomeLab for providing the intro samples
⚫ Grado SR80i headphones: vital aural feedback
⚫ White Sambuca: composition and performance fuel.
I shockingly spent some time this weekend in the studio happily drowning in heavy waves of sound. Here’s one of the bits that got captured.
The arrangement needs a lot of work, consideration and practice: this load-out is confidently over the limit of what my hands and feet can pilot live. Predictably, it could do with being at least 3 minutes shorter.
I’ve only just realised that all the sound sources are analogue. Huh, how about that. That’s more than balanced out by the shed-load of digital signal processing applied, though.
Gear list!
I bought this tiny but horrifying instrument at a flea market in Hamburg in 2001 for 5 Deutsche Mark. It accompanied me on many a summer field trip, much to the horror of my fellow travelers. It simply sounds weird, as the pitch slides from a very short correct tuning time into something…
Digging these, particularly the “welcome” and “thank you” samples.
