I’ve been feeling a bit stuck on how to start with my piece – I have a sort of general idea as to the elements I want to include, but not a concrete idea of how I want it to sound. I felt a bit daunted by starting the piece with the text-to-speech bot, so instead I’ve experimented with some sonic textures, using the self-oscillating guitar pedals that I mentioned in a previous blog. These sounds may end up as a ‘bed’ for the bot voice to sit on top of, however I haven’t quite worked this out yet.

The whole process of recording with these pedals a bit of trial-and-error, they can usually act very unpredictably. I started off by creating a low bass drone with my chorus pedal. I did this by setting the bass knob to full, and gradually bringing the treble knob up and down, whilst keeping the depth and rate at quite a low level. This is a snippet of how it sounded:

I quite like the sound by itself, but find it hard to imagine how I could place it in a mix with other textures.

The next sound I tried was a similar chorus setting, but with my pitch shift pedal set to a fifth above, with the original signal blended in:

This creates a really gritty, low rumbling sound. It sort of sounds like the two pedals are fighting each other, having an argument. Also reminds me of the TARDIS sound from Doctor Who a bit? I definitely think this could be a texture I use in my piece.

The next sound I experimented with was very abrasive and harsh for most of the time. It was a mix of my distortion, pitch shift and reverb pedals. A lot of the time it seemed to produce a really nasty high-pitched noise (you may want to turn your volume down before playing):

I don’t think I would use most of these sounds although I do like the sound of the reverb coming in and washing everything out around 10 seconds in. This was a long take, and I did manage to get quite a usable sound in the end that I could use on top of the TARDIS-esque sound for some extra texture:

Again, very gritty and very fizzy but it does mix well with the other sound:

I also tried making some sounds with just my distortion and reverb pedal, and whilst the sounds weren’t bad, I don’t really see how I can make them fit with the other sounds I’ve made so far. I find the texture a bit one-dimensional; not bad, but not what I want, I don’t think:

One sound I made that I do like but feel as though I don’t know how I would bring it into the piece is a short glitchy sound I made by feeding my wah pedal into the chorus pedal:

Again, sticking to the Doctor Who theme this blog post seems to be taking, it sounds sort of like a sonic screwdriver. The sound itself is good, but again I don’t know how I would slot it into the piece.

I also experimented with recording my zither, and seeing if I could bring in some acoustic textures, but after attempting, and adding some plugins, it didn’t sound sufficient to my ears.

I think some of the sounds I’ve come up with have been interesting, although I am still feeling unconfident on where to take the piece. I don’t really know where I will fit the voice in, and I’m not sure about a structure or timeline for the piece at all. I’ll experiment with chopping up some of the text-to-speech bot’s sentences next time I work on the piece to see if that adds an interesting dynamic, instead of just reading the texts out in full. I could also reverse the soundfile, add strange modulation or experiment with it in a number of ways to see if it works.

Either way, I’m happy to have experimented some more, improvising with this very unpredictable technique. My favourite sound was the very bassy, rumbling ‘TARDIS’ concoction made with the pitch shift and the chorus, and maybe this could be because it’s the sound that had the least human input? I just turned the pedals on, recorded the sound for 4 minutes and listened to them fight, as it were. That’s probably why I didn’t come across any particularly obnoxious sounds that time round, and I will most likely try to build the piece around this.