Friday 7 January 2011

Sound-A-Day 07.01.2011


















Something a little different today, something a little longer than usual. It's a short percussive track I began a little while back. It's more of an experiment with some percussive sounds than a serious composition, but never the less, I still like it a lot.

With the exception of the pad part, all the sounds in this track are samples taken from a home made percussion instrument, built by Henry Collins. The instrument consists of a small wooden resonant box, with contact microphones fitted inside. Mounted to the box are various items of scrap metal, nails, screws, guitar strings, springs and so forth. These can be plucked, struck, bowed etc to produce various different percussive effects. The pad sound is a fairly simple patch made on a Novation K Station polysynth. I'm particularly proud of how well the synth sound compliments the drones recorded from the percussion box when played with a bow. The reverb effect is from the Lexicon PCM Native bundle, amazing sounding reverbs, definitely my favourite for this type of music.

Perc-Jam by Noisy Neighbour Sound

Although written with the main intent of trying some new techniques, I do really like this track. I think the key to a good ambient track is to provide a subtle sense of atmosphere, while still retaining a certain level of ambiguity, as though giving the listener hints about the intended mood, but also leaving it open for interpretation.

Its certainly something I'm getting more and more interested in. I hope to try more things along this vein, and in working on this track I've got a load more ideas for things to try in the future.

Again, special thanks to Henry for letting me use his awesome instrument!

1 comment:

  1. feelin this nn.. on same tip as my fav ambient works tracks

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