When I started making my piece today, I didn’t really know where to start – I didn’t want to recreate the atmosphere of Werle’s original score, yet because I had already listened to it so much through analysing it I found it hard to imagine the scene with a new piece of music.
I decided to just push through this feeling of not knowing what to do and found a sound I liked and just went on from there. The sound that I chose was the ‘Metamorphosis’ patch made my Spitfire Audio, a company that specialises in making free plugins and software instruments. It’s very droney and quite breathy – it comes under their ‘Glass Piano’ category of sounds.
Here’s how it sounded on its own:
I decided this sound was a good bedrock to build my piece from.
Having originally started my journey in sound as an electric guitar player, I’ve been really keen to involve this aspect of my musical vocabulary in the sound art I make for the course. Around 15 seconds into the clip, there is a big white flash of light that I thought could use an ‘explosion’ of discordant electric guitars. I layered lots of tracks together with the exact same plugins, but all panned in different directions to give a full stereo sound. To lead up to this explosion, I recorded one track of me playing a harmonic on my guitar whilst pushing down on the tremolo bar. I then used automation to fade it in and to pan it from right to left, giving it a sort of swelling effect:
The explosion of guitars comes in halfway through the ‘swell’ guitar track, and sounds like this:
Two of the tracks in the explosion are played on a conventional six string guitar, whilst the other two are recordings of me sliding up and down the neck on my fretless bass. I wanted the guitars to sound very distorted, but not necessarily as though they were being played through an amp, so I took the dry signal of each track and just ran it through Logic Pro’s stock Distortion plugin.
I also added some convolution reverb to the tracks:
I found that the heavy, distorted tones of the guitar were clashing a little bit with the softer tones of the Metamorphosis synth, so I added on a very small amount of distortion onto the synth and slowly automated it in to help them gel together a little better.
After the explosion I recreated the sound of the of the reels of film running through the projector, much the same as in Werle’s piece. However, although in the original Werle uses an actual audio recording of a machine playing back the film, I decided I wanted to recreate a sort of, but not exactly, similar sound using a synthesiser. To do this I opened up the Retro Synth plugin on Logic and set the oscillator to only generate white noise. I then used an LFO with a reverse sawtooth wave to create the rhythmic sound of the machine. Here is what it sounded like:
I recorded another big ‘explosion’ of guitars to match the flashing black and whites of the film as the imagery gets more intense, and this time also recorded a few tracks of nonsensical noodling to build up a longer wall of sound to last until the children’s animation starts playing:
I particularly like the sounds of the fretless bass as it sounds almost like a low rumbling siren.
I then let the Metamorphosis and white noise synths carry on uninterrupted whilst the animation plays out. I gradually lowered the cutoff of the white noise synth so it would slowly fade out to leave the drone by itself, which gives a creepy atmosphere as the stopmotion film and footage of the spider play.
This is as far as I got today, and I think I’ve made good progress. I may only be just over a minute in, however now that I have a more concrete idea of the concept and sound of my piece it should be much easier to get going on it tomorrow.
(WordPress won’t let me upload the video of my progress so far as the file size is too big, so have linked it below as an unlisted YouTube video.)