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Quite a long piece today.
I wanted to include some sort of free improvised playing. However, I didn't want to rely solely on my piano chops, as they're a bit ropey (normally I fix my keyboard playing with the wonders of modern technology and the Quantise function). I got several minutes of playing that I liked. So I drenched it in reverb and put the whole lot through a string of effects and an amp simulator, I automated the settings of these while listening to the piano recording. Then I went out for a bit of a 'sound walk' (recording the environment as I made my journey). By the time I got back, I had some new ideas of where to take this piece and some interesting recordings of people talking.
I decided to vocode my recordings with some pitch shifted piano. This added a nice gritty, ethereal texture to overlay on top of the, now fairly abstracted piano recording. I added some programmed beats, which I put through some lo-fi erosion and gated reverb. The piece came to a point where I wanted to make the piano recording fit more tightly with the programmed drums, so that is exactly what I did: I sliced up the remainder of the piano recording and forced the slices to play the same rhythm as the programmed drums. This gave the piece a fairly menacing quality, which I quite liked. Overall the piece seems to move from, typical moody ambience, into a abstract version of that, then finally into a more electronic / machine like / menacing space. I liked how the programmed drums sounded on their own, so had these for the very end. The final touch was automating some tempo changes over those programmed drums just to add an even more unsettling gesture.
Enjoy
Cheers ^_^
