Make-A-Thon -

There are still 3 projects this semester, but the first one has a new name, "Make-A-Thon". I often dream of going camping or sitting under a tree somewhere to dream some more. This bit of music was produced in 4.1 surround (front center speaker not used), which is my usual practice in reproducing ambisonic playback.

The mix of cuts came from a mix of places: the opening and closing synth (Deep Pad 01), the Shaker, and Borealis are all from GarageBand. I played the slow reflective string bit that fills the majority of the piece on my Yamaha DX11 synth. The rain and thunderstorm came from my collection of many hours of sticking a microphone out my bathroom window and recording storms to a 2-hour DAT. That, of course, was when it used to rain in Texas (now 25-inches short over the last 2 years). Loons are not easy to find in Texas, either, so I resorted to my Sound Ideas effects CDs and a couple of cuts from AudioSparx. Good loon recordings are not easy to find anywhere.

I knew of the Deep Pad samples (2 measures long) and tried to add a few riffs of the reflective strings. I thought the shaker added interest to it and intentionally put it in at odd intervals. I like the unpredictable.

The Borealis added some tension prior to the storm, and either its ending or the forcast of rain disturbed the loons. I could say that the reflective strings rising in tone after the second loon call was significant, but my whole synth piece was just what I played from the gut that particular night long before anything else was added. It was not composed, just played, written only in the MIDI notation on the computer. The storm added texture to the work. I have camped in lots of them.

I exported each instrument track from GarageBand to a seperate file and loaded them into Adobe Premiere. I had never used the surround joystick, and, in the 4.1 version played in the ACTLab studio, discovered its value by slowly moving the tracks about the room. The stereo version is simply folded down to left and right and not nearly as interesting. Stereo is so passé.

So, in the ACTLab fashion, this was new territory for me, moving surround. Hmmm... Now if I could just do it under computer control!