Music composition inspired by Bernhard Lang's mesmerizing aerial photography (bernhardlang.de)
Native Instruments' Reaktor has become my new best friend. Their new Blocks software has been an incredible creative power house of options to pull from. This track began with the arpeggio with me shifting and playing the entire piece live (there are only 2 or 3 edits throughout that entire piece).
The image conjurs up lots of open space and wind to me. Sometimes though a wind SFX just doesn't cut it for me. The "wind" you hear is actually the sound of steady rain hitting vinyl, with a beatiful delay (feedback cranked) to simulate the sound of a beautiful and airy wind.
I knew that eventually I would like to animate the image a bit, and the idea of a tape machine was forefront in my mind. There's a few specific sounds to give the impression of movement and mechanics found in my sound library and tweaked to match the timbre of the track.
Next came the drums, which were really aggravating at first, but then I flipped a switch to reverse a bunch of nonsense I had recorded and wasn't liking very much AND HOLY SHIIIIIIIIIIIII… Brought the entire track to life. AND I HADN'T EVEN ADDED THE ACTUAL DRUMS YET (i.e. Kick, Snare, Hats, etc)!!!
Finally found the rhythm and simplicity that I wanted for the percussion side of things using another one of Native Instruments' awesome tools PolyPlex (originally designed by the talented folks at Twisted Tools (www.twistedtools.com).
And the final touch…a stereo recording using the Blue Mikey Digital microphone on my iphone while I got ready for bed. I wanted the movement and warmth of a recording with the gain turned all the way up, but very subtle and quiet sounds to add in the details.
N-Joi.
