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From : DavidCourtney123
Added: Aug 30, 2009
This is from the Houston AV Swap for 2009. For this, the visuals were created by Samantha Pyra. The organisers of the swap then assigned it to me come up with an audio track for it. I struggled for several days to think of how I was going to handle it. My first attempt was to try and identify if there was some type of narrative which could be extracted from the video. It quickly became clear that this would not work. However, even though no narrative could be extracted, the video clearly presented the overwhelming feeling of being old; probably circa 1970. Therefore I decided against any type of narrative and decided I would pursue a musical approach. In particular I decided to compose a piece that had an "old" feel to it. I felt that this was no time to be brilliant or cutting edge. If I were going to convey the feeling of things being old, I had to fall back upon musical elements that themselves where old and easily recognisable. Therefore I decided upon a pastiche of elements from the 40's, 50's, and 60's but I assiduously avoided any elements that would be found on music from the 70's to the present. However even within these constraints I had a many things to choose from. I decided to make it slow, and somewhat blue's-ish in order to give a feeling of melancholic nostalgia. Since my budget was $0.00, I knew that hiring musicians was out of the question, so it had to be something that I could do all by myself. Therefore most of the musical instrumentation was based upon GarageBand. The only part of the instrumentation which was not GarageBand samples was an analogue synthesiser. I used PAIA -9700 series of analogue modules which are conceptually almost identical to the old Moog synthesiser modules that were so popular in the 1960's. I worked out some patches that struck me as being 60-ish in their sound, and I made a special point of utilising a lot of long glides to show the strength of this approach. These long slides were a forte of the old analogue synthesisers, but modern computer based approaches do not handle these sort of things very well. Just composing and recording retro-style of music was not sufficient in itself; it was too "clean". The finished product had a digital sterility about the sound that was completely anachronistic to the feeling that I was trying to create. Therefore I used the internal GarageBand equalisers to introduce non-linearities in the frequency response that would mimic the contour of a 1970 stereo system. Then I laid down tracks of vinyl surface noise. I specifically edited in the pops precisely at 1.8 second intervals in order to simulate scratches on a 33.3 rpm record. I even edited one skip and an indefinite number of repeats at this same 1.8 second interval, in order to simulate a broken record. The final step in giving it a classic sound was to come out of the computer and pass the finished mix through a PAIA 9407 Vacuum tube pre-amp with the valves (Russian made SOVTEK 12AX7) running wide open. The introduction of valve (vacuum tube) distortion gave a classic sound that I am not sure I could imitate using software approaches.
Category : Music

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