Other Audio Obscura
St. Louis Clay Bells [disquiet0284]

This track is part of Disquiet Junto #284. We were given a source audio of sounds from hand made clay taken out the ground in St. Louis and made into bowls. The source recording was long and had some interesting ambient sounds from the bowls and occasionally 'other' sounds from the recording location. We were asked to use no other audio sounds except the source.

I like these sort of challenges with the Junto, I like to see how far I can mangle the source audio and take it somewhere away from the original. Ableton is powerful enough to radically alter audio and with time you can turn it into something totally new and different. This piece has taken around 15 hours work since Thursday evening to get to its current state.

I spent an entire evening (Thursday night) using Ableton Live to take the source sounds and turn them into drum percussion sounds and then develop rhythmic sounds. I do this by using 'simpler' the Ableton Sampler, I load the source audio and then use the midi effects pitch control, this can seriously alter the sound. I did this for a few different hits of the bowls but keep each hit to a few seconds at most and saved then as an audio file. I opened these new audio files and EQ'd them a lot, cutting them shorter still. I saved them again and then loaded them as new audio files into a drum rack, editing them still further and adding effects. Once I had around 8 different and interesting sounds I created drum parts and loops. These were again, saved and mixed down and re-opened as audio files. These were then edited again and EQ'd a little more.

On Friday night I started a new session and worked on new bits of source samples, taking a lot of the tail from the bells and editing them together and creating longer drone sounds and playing these as midi keys, this creates new ambient sounds which with a bit more effects sound different from the source sounds but all derived from the source.

I then started to mess around with the sounds from both nights, live looping and playing them through the push controller. I jammed for about 30 minutes and then hit record and jammed for another 20 minutes.
I edited this down to 10 minutes. It needs a decent mix though and more EQing on the master but I am not in a position to do that this weekend as I got loads more things to do, so its a bit muddy in places, a bit too dense as well but I am rather happy with the process and development of the sounds.