4/29/11

240. return of the glock

After long loan, I finally got my glockenspiel back! which may not be such a big deal to others, but I'm excited, anyway.

4/28/11

239. candy rain

Looping and sinking, looping and sinking. I HAVE been eating a lot of sugar lately.

4/27/11

238. enter the ring

Old vibraphone/xylophone samples. I blame my stomach issues for excessive reuse of old samples.

4/25/11

236. pegasus lullabye

Just me singing to myself with the recorder on my stomach. Well, mostly to myself. It reuses some techniques from the "she moved through the fair" entry.

On a side note, this is probably the best post I've ever made in under an hour and a half. Certainly the most satisfying.

4/24/11

235. bone knitting

Samples of Trevor, my supervising instructor, playing student pieces for trombone and piano. With stuff done to it, of course.

4/23/11

234. ketchup sandwich

I know it's faking it from a previous blog. YOU probably know it's faking it from a previous blog. Let's hope it's at least interesting faking.

4/22/11

233. one-minute wonder

Another impromptu late-night blog. Hey, this time I fell asleep at 9:00 and woke up an hour ago to blog. It's a short mishmash of old samples, true, but going back and listening to the samples I've made in the past, I have to say I'm kind of proud of them. Not bad for a girl and her freeware.

4/20/11

231. place-slipping

Another funky technoish track with ukulele, clave, cheap organ settings and some filtering/decimation.

4/18/11

230. rota

Me making some throat-singing noises. Well, more like burping noises. Either way it's the kind of beautiful music my mother always hoped I'd make.

229. music11 sketch 2

Another sketch of material for my still-in-progress piece for Music11, put together with real flute and fake clarinet/celesta.

4/17/11

228. dear oh dear

A few cymbal samples, a lot of Reaper and Cubase, a little Audacity, and voila! Very tasty.

4/16/11

227. the air full of song

A project for today I've had in mind for quite a while; I went on an extended walk around my neighborhood (a dense maze of hilly winding lanes and back streets, populated by a mix of working-class folk, retirees and young professionals), recording as many different sets of windchimes as possible.
This turned out to be much trickier than I thought: besides the most obvious technical problem (that is, when windchimes make sound, it's because there's WIND blowing, usually right at the microphone), there's the issue of how to get close to people's porches without being observed creeping around. There's also cars, people, lawnmowers, and dogs generally everywhere--it seems many people who like windchimes also like irritatingly yappy dogs, which says something about how much they value their own aural comfort over that of passers-by. There are also a number of people who really REALLY love windchimes, who collect and display a dozen different whimsical sets on a porch glassed in on three sides onto which nary a breeze will ever blow. And a girl with a recorder might wait for ten minutes for an artsy-glass-metal-sculpted chime thing to make a sound, as it stubbornly refuses to yield to the most vigorous breezes.

Anyway, real world sound-gathering is fun, but a bit involved; I tried to look less sketchy hanging out front of people's houses by holding the recorder to my head like it was a phone (as if that could fool anyone), or by putting it on the ground and pretending to tie my shoes. Hmm.

4/15/11

226. vocabulation

Samples from the early days of vocoders! all found on Berkeley's vocoder website. Oddball voices mostly.

4/14/11

225. classroom chorus

The sounds of today's Intro to Western Music class, enthusiastically humming and clicking at my command. I hope they had fun becoming part of the blog, as I always enjoy sharing the blog with people. Here's the end result, gussied up with a few bowed vibraphone samples.

4/12/11

223. natural flavoring

Drones and drones. A journey into romantic sensuality of droneness. And by romantic sensuality, I mean scratchiness.

For the record, I had some neat bowed vibraphone samples for today, and then had to wipe my recorder to reset it before I retrieved them later.

4/10/11

221. margins

A tribute to artificial toast toppings. Utterly fake and unrefrigerated (that's bad, right?). Seriously, it's very late and this is a hasty redux of yesterday's blog, in fact.

4/9/11

220. left-handed rage

As has been foreshadowed from time to time almost from the beginning of this blog, here's me wailing away on my bucket of a snare drum and screaming. What it lacks in finesse it makes up for in raw emotional authenticity. Lots of frustration about lots of things in there (including not least my complete lack of left-handed drum technique).

Oh yeah, caution: extremely loud.

4/8/11

219. two walls

Simply two big walls of noise, made from everything from weights rolling on the basement floor to the cat purring.

4/5/11

216. muffin happening

Some sketches for the piece I'm writing for Music11; all done in flutes, cuz flutes is what I haz. Sort of...folksy? Feldmanesque? folksy Feldman?

4/4/11

4/3/11

214. pin pushin'

Borrowing from the underrated blog #113, this features an extended sample of metal pins on a porcelain plate, which is more interesting to listen to than you might think.

4/2/11

213. borrowed sweater

It's loose and scratchy. Made from old cello samples and a bit of keyboard.

4/1/11

212. music the netbots will love

Hey hey. It's maybe not super fancy, but it is kind of special in a contemplative sort of way. Using viola samples from the University of Iowa's free sample page, plus some special specialness in Reaper.