The Imperfect / Sept.27.2024
LOOMING BRITTLE / PRO TOOLS BREAKDOWN
on October 4th the first single from my forthcoming EP called Ash is being released via Nettwerk. it’s called “Looming Brittle.”
Ash is a collection of songs that started with various sources of noise, from field recordings to synthesized and mechanical noises. i wanted to lean into the noise more than i usually do and go for something a bit darker, a bit rougher around the edges. it morphed and took its own course as the creation of the songs went on, but i hold onto the noise as the important genesis of these works.
i thought i would take “Looming Brittle” here and break down the ProTools session and share a little bit of what went into creating the song. it’s a good example of a song that started with a lot more noise than it ended up with. the noise was pushed to the back of the mix to help create an internal arc of the 5 songs on the EP.
MAY 28, 2009
we’ll start with the noise. this is a field recording of some sort that i did for my One Sound Each Day project in 2009. (this project used to be online but, sadly was on a now defunct 12k Blog and isn’t so available anymore.) i keep this folder of sounds close and often mine the 300+ field recordings that i made for current songs i’m working on, it’s a wealth of nice sounds. in “Looming Brittle” i use not only the original recording but also a layered vari-speed shifted in ProTools 5 octaves down.
MAY 1
the field recording from 2009 is layered with this sound, which i made as i was writing the piece this past spring. this is created with the Beetlecrab Audio Tempera granular sampler. it is a number of samples recorded via the built-in microphone outside of my studio door, capturing the sounds in the woods with the song-in-progress itself playing through the speakers in the studio. that’s the quiet musical tone you hear in the recording. these rough samples were then granulized and spit out by the Tempera and then fed into the Goodhertz Lossy plug-in to make what you hear here.
JANUARY 20 + MERCURY X
the melodic bed of the piece. created on some January the 20th, i don’t know which one, nor do i recall how it was made. a modular synth patch perhaps… or some synths into looper pedals. it is heard here with a layer of Meris Mercury X pedal FX. not much post processing in ProTools except for a little EQ and some outboard EQ during mixdown as noted in the track comments. there’s a roughness to this sound that i enjoy.
MOOGS + JUPITERS
we move on here to some of the fractured melodic elements, courtesy of a Moog Matriarch in the beginning, followed by Cherry Audio’s Mercury 6, which is a plug-in version of Roland’s Jupiter-6 synth. I have owned 2 different Jupiter-6s in my career and it’s a synth i really love. such a strange, metallic sound… but i have also sold both of them as i would consistently struggle to use its particular sound in my music. when Cherry Audio released the Mercury 6 i grabbed it quickly as i have fond memories of the synth and the plug-in is quite accurate.
the end of this sound is a highly processed Matriarch line that forms the falling-apart conclusion to the piece. to add to the strange timing of the phrase i recorded the Moog part through a short reverb on the Bricasti M7 reverb and then shifted the reverb’s audio file to be out of time with the source Moog. you can see in the image above the Bricasti (dark grey track) doesn’t really line up or follow what the synth is doing.
PIANOTEQ
we come to the final track, which was added at the very end of the song’s production. i felt like it needed a more emotional element and called up the very cool Pianoteq plug-in piano instrument. i’ve known about Pianoteq for many years, first introduced to me by Kenneth Kirschner but only very recently purchased it.
here it is looped.. i believe by a pedal looper (perhaps EHX22500, but i’ve forgotten. (does not sound like my trusty Volante)) and it was the final track that i felt the song needed to bring a little bit of humanity into the fold.
it is used here quite unadorned. a simple EQ in ProTools and some EQ in mixdown.
those are the tracks and sounds that make up “Looming Brittle.” you can hear the piece in its mixed entirety on Friday, October 4th. your streaming service of choice can be found here. and it’ll be on Bandcamp as well.
The Ash EP will be out on November 15th and concludes the trilogy made by Eev and Aer before it.
thank you for listening along. sharing studio discussions is one of my favorite things to do.
Such a generous gift on this gray misty morning! So much to take in here. A takeaway from your process comes on the form of permission...I toggle between trying to take explicit notes (even as basic as accurate titles to iPhone voice / field recordings) and being in the moment where everything has default file names and I have no idea what these sound objects are beyond what I hear.
I'd love to hear more about your mic setup - you have a permanent mic pointed outside? And just an indoor switch to pump the sounds into your space?! So simple/brilliant!!!
Thanks for showing this side of the process! I love hearing the history and tech notes behind each compositional layer, it's like having a little private studio sesh.