The Long Haul

Last week I have been working on a piece which is now 12 minutes long and requires a time out. Let me tell you  about the route so far.

I started out with the following. After I had constructed two pieces that are quite rhythmic of nature, I decided to make a detour and go for something slow, without a constant beat, with pitched harmonics. I set up a soft synth (Crystal, a very nifty little thing) and my keyboard. After some trial and error I had the right sound and played a midi file of 2.5 minutes with only 3 notes that kept on ringing with overtones that kept coming and going and interfering with each other, etc. (told you, that Crystal is nice). Then I recorded my own voice singing the same notes a few times. Did two takes and layered those over the synth parts. In order to fill up the frequency space I included two takes of short wave radio. Now I had sound storm blowing for 2.5 minutes.

Listen to 30 seconds [ here ]

I decided that by the end of the first part ("the long haul") I would introduce percussive sounds (not necessarily rhythmic!).I had a sequence from another trial part (recorded in June) of some 1.5 minutes consisting of a gong and some bell sounds. I included this into the Reaper project and placed it behind the first part. That's the easy part, but to  connect these two parts is much more difficult. Fortunately the first part could be 'shut off' with the sound of the radio being 'shut off'. The percussive part then immediately takes over. It kind of works but at the moment needs some more attention.

Listen to 30 seconds [ here ]

What next? I decided upon a second part of 'the long haul'. This time mutated of course. The voice, which in the first part plays a role in the background, now is more prominent after a severe treatment in Audiomulch using the Granulator.

Listen to 30 seconds [ here ]

This is an image of the project. I have indicated what regions are used in the samples.

As a side step I did a session whereby I constructed a drumloop (with house samples from a freebee dvd) and worked from there. I extended the drumloop with two different procedures. First I extended the bars by simply placing the samples further apart. Secondly I time stretched the original loop. Both now run at 20 bpm. The idea was to extend to a degree where the grooviness is completely gone. Because I was thinking of including this as a new part to the composition above (although I still haven't a clue where and how, that's why I decided to start a separate project for this) I underlined this drumloop with the mulched voice recordings. With a ducking compressor set up with a very slow release this yielded an interesting result.

Listen to 30 seconds [ here ]

The next step is to integrate this drumloop project into the original composition. This yields two important dilemma's:
1. the structure of the original 'long haul' piece is okay (although it still needs a lot of work), so how do I include the rigidness of the new drumloop part?
2. the 'long haul' piece is already 12 minutes long as it is; including the new drumloop part will extend it with at least another 5 minutes. The number of ingredients is rather limited so won't it get too long?

We'll see....