Mary left this morning for an extended business trip, so I’m a single-parent for the next week. And Olive, our 9-month1As of yesterday old puppy is a harsh and jealous mistress. She’s matured a lot in the last few weeks, but she still needs a ton of attention and exercise. Now this may come as a surprise, but the writing music process doesn’t do so well with interruptions every 5-15 minutes.
- The Sentinel Ray Toler 6:13
With this in mind, I figured I’d write something that could tolerate the interruptions and worked on another drone. I’ve been experimenting with various textures, and a lot of my newer sample libraries use orchestral samples as a base. Some are processed and mangled to the point that their orchestral origins are barely recognizable. Others, like the anchor sound in this piece are closer to a somewhat structured form of an orchestra warming up. The strings are quite present in the opening cluster.
The only “surprise” in this one is that I decided mid-way through to add the pulse sound. I’ve been trying to do more “deep drone” types of things as an exercise in finding structure and variety through things other than rhythm and melody, but this sound provided a dimension and lots of potential for interpretation that had been missing. Not that the pure drone was bad, it’s just a bit more interesting this way.
Colophon
Instruments & Samples
Slate+Ash Colours & Cycles, Albion Solstice, Dawesome Myth, Olafur Arnalds Cells
Effects, Mixing & Mastering
FabFilter, Gullfoss, Valhalla VintageVerb, MOTU Masterworks EQ
Image Credit: Eve University Wiki (CC-BY-SA 4.0)
Notes
- 1As of yesterday