Thursday, July 7, 2016

Violin Layering Experiments - 20160706

Earlier today, I had another fun session playing around with making overdubbed violin recordings. This time, I was mainly playing around with the order in which I recorded the tracks (e.g. "3 - Delicate" and "5 - The Last Moose" had the melody line recorded first, while "D-F-A" was an experiment in layering things up with layers hovering around each of the notes in a standard D-minor chord). The result is a set of pieces that I've found are quite nice for listening to while working, especially when played in the order I created the playlist in (hopefully it appears the same for everyone else... for reference, it's: 3, 4, 7, 1, 2, 5, 6)



Some of the dissonance in the tracks is still a bit unsettling (I'm working on it! It's getting better in general I think) and as a result may not be everyone's cup of tea, though on the whole, I'm again quite pleased with these tracks :)




It's quite a lot of fun playing around with these techniques and hearing the results. The best part of the whole process is when you get little "moments" where all the stars are in alignment, and all the parts just gel together perfectly to create some juicy harmonies and textures. It's also interesting playing around with the balance of the tracks afterwards - changing not only the volume but also the Left/Right skew, and hearing how suddenly you can make some lines really pop out (and fell quite isolated), whereas a moment earlier they would've just disappeared within the soup.

The only pity is that the tech wasn't really in place for me to have experimented with this back when I still had to take music back in HS (a long story, that can be summed up in 3 letters: "SMP")... a few assignments might have ended up very very different, not to mention not having had to deal with the minidisk recorder ;)  (To be fair though, at that stage, I probably wasn't as far along the path of improvising stuff yet - especially not for secondary/filler/background stuff, so even if the tech was readily available, it wouldn't have helped much)

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