Studio diary: July 19, 2023

Sampling, re-sampling, sampling the re-sample, etc.

In today’s studio diary breakdown, I’ll be writing about a recent improvisation I shared on YouTube. I recorded this while editing a track I’m working on for a new album (more about that at a later date), and the performance you see captured on video is actually the main element of the song. It has evolved significantly from a sparse 2-minute recording of raw piano chords into a stretched-out, droning, 7-minute adventure filled with obvious electronic elements and totally altered acoustic sounds.

Here’s the video in full, with track breakdown and thoughts on the process below.

The original sounds

As mentioned previously, this track began its life as an extremely simple piano recording. I was playing piano and jumping around in G Major and E Minor, and just so happened to stumble across a simple downward progression that sounded quite nice to my ear. I couldn’t stop thinking about it all day and had to record it later for posterity. You can hear it below, played with the Native Instruments Noire piano library for Kontakt:

Happy with this concept, I then recorded an extended version of it as a 5-minute free improvisation. That recording was then loaded into my Octatrack sampler. Through a fairly complex combination of time-stretching, pitch shifting, re-sampling, filtering, and all sorts of other treatments (I truthfully don’t recall all of the steps I used to land there), I created a completely altered version of the improvisation to act as a backing drone for additional ambience. You can still hear some of the digital artifacts and distortion left over from all of this re-sampling, and when pushed through Valhalla Delay and Reverb, the sound became even more spacious and otherworldly:

Most of my music is sample-based, and this is a technique that I like to use on almost everything I do: instead of creating a brand new synthesized sound from scratch, I’ll often take bits and pieces of instruments I’ve already recorded and use samplers to re-shape those existing sounds into ambient pads of their own.

I personally find this process of sampling and re-sampling to be way more enjoyable and exciting than using synthesizers. I also just prefer to use unique recordings that have personal significance to me as the basis for my sounds. This keeps the piece from feeling stale and preset-driven, but it also feels more personal and expressive to me. It keeps me focused on the original idea that I had, since I’m listening to it evolve and change with knowledge of where it came from, and it helps relax my brain when I don’t have to get lost in a pool of menu options and synth engines that have nothing to do with where my inspiration originally came from. Obviously, there are times when I enjoy creating synthesized sounds from scratch, but my definite preference is to start with a more “natural” sound source that I have captured myself.

With the piano recorded and a re-sampled version of it mixed in as a droning pad, the basis of a song was starting to take shape. I decided to add one more layer to this initial sketch: I felt there was room for a slightly softer sound between the drone and the piano, and the first thing that came to mind was a pianet. I love the sound of Felt Instruments Ciemno for this; it has such a delicate quality to it, similar to a Rhodes piano’s bell-like tines but even softer and less metallic. When the attack envelop is extended slightly, I find that it adds a beautiful bed of sound when mixed beneath the harder hammer strikes of a traditional piano. It’s a nice way to make a piano sound more ethereal without adding reverb.

I duplicated the piano part with Ciemno for use as an additional layer below:

Next steps

All of this was sounding pleasant, but the working theme for my new album involves a much more obviously electronic and “shape-shifting” kind of sound. I still had a lot of work to do to rough it up around the edges and make something a little more abrasive, digital, and unrecognizable from the source instruments.

This is the point where the video begins. I exported my draft idea from Ableton Live and moved that WAV file onto my iPad for experimentation.

Even after all of this mixing, I was still thinking about that initial series of falling piano notes that caught my ear in the beginning of this process so I zeroed in on that section of the recording and loaded the clip into Samplr for tweaking. In my session shown in the video, you can see that I have 3 instances of it in use: one is pitched down an octave, one is down two octaves, and the other is up a 5th. The entire performance is based on mixing these 3 instances in and out with the original, unaltered track idea playing softly in the background in Ableton Live.

Here are the 3 clips in Samplr:

The final element of the piece is Unfiltered Audio’s LO-FI-AF app: a truly incredible plugin, filled with useful and highly customizable effects to destroy and warp audio. The main portions I’m using within it are

1. a piezoelectric speaker simulation for a grainy, frequency-limited sound;

2. sine wave-shaped radio interference for the additional harmonic layer you hear fading in and out;

3. a big dose of tape hiss and bit rate reduction for digital artifacts and noise; and

4. the digital skipping effect which provides the rhythmic pulsing of clicks & cuts, magnified further by a dotted eighth delay from Imaginando K7D in AUM.

Throughout the video, I’m slowly tweaking these parameters to add some extra drama and evolving character to the piece. When blended in to the original track idea, it adds a much more interesting progression of sound than if the piano, pianet, and ambient drone were left on their own.

Here’s the lo-fi effect in action, briefly:

In closing

I’m looking forward to sharing the final state of this track on an upcoming album. I’ve been having a blast working on new ideas in recent weeks, and a unique set of songs that are unique in my discography is starting to take shape.

I also hope this provides some insight into how I use the iPad as a creative tool for additional adjustments on work I start on the laptop. As always, feel free to send any questions or comments my way, and thanks so much for reading.