Violin Layering Songs - 20160730

Here's another bunch of songs I recorded for fun (and a break from "work-like" things) this afternoon.



This time, I tried to keep things a lot more "tonal" than in previous recordings, so hopefully more people will find it less unsettling to listen to. Another thing I was playing around with here was tweaking the left/right balance and relative volume levels of each track (apologies in advance if one or two are a bit on the "loud" side) - I ended up optimising for headphones (tracks "8" and "3" in particular really sound a lot better this way; in particular, "3" only seems understandable this way).

My personal favourite of this set is the first one on the playlist ("8 - Horse Riding"). While there may have been a few places where the timing isn't quite perfect enough, the overall effect is quite nice, and really gives off that equine "galloping" feel to it :)



A few notes about the rest:
* "4 - Mystique" - The sound quality in this one ended up being quite weird (like an ancient recording from the 40's - 60's), due to the high pass filters I was using to try and get rid of the blasted "boy racer" car noise from passing traffic (ARGH! I naturally hate these kinds of "bass" noises, but grr... it's even worse when you start going on the look out to try and eliminate them - either before recording, or trying to remove it from the recording lest your ears start to itch uncomfortably while playing back the track). In the end though, this sound effect fit quite nicely with the style of this piece IMO.

The idea with this one was to have a "delicate" melody with "magical" bits and pieces overlaid/intertwined in the soundscape. Hence, heaps of harmonics + ponticello in the later tracks for "colour".


* "3" - This was an experiment in trying to see if I could try and set a melody against a bunch of pretty intense double stops. The resulting cacophony is at times confusing and at times quite fascinating - it sounds a lot like a portrait of a noisy neighbourhood, where one guy's tv is blasting one noisy show, and the other guy's tv is blasting something completely different. As a result, I ended up playing around with the balance (i.e. setting each part to blast from either the left or right side, as far as it would go) in the hope that by having each voice only coming in from one ear each, it would help strengthen this illusion.


* With one or two of the others, I was just playing around with trying to get the "richest" sound I could out of just using violin. (Interestingly, in "1", one of those passing cars interacted brilliantly with a low note, resulting in this organ like "low-A" droning sound coming through in a few places). While the noise filtering often put paid to those attempts (i.e. it tends to have then effect of creating a muffled, higher-registers only effect), I got a bit closer this time I think :)