As part of my practice/process I make one of these little 10 second loop pieces every day (here they are each looped 4 times, fading out by the end, to give them some context as a loop based piece). This is something I've been doing since the start of February. The technique involves four instrument layers; guitar, synth, piano, beatbox, plus usually two auxiliary fx sends. These parameters fluctuate from time to time, sometimes adding and subtracting from the template, but this is the foundation of how it works.
In doing this, I've been able to progressively improve my recording and mixing skills, and also experiment with some sounds and processes that I don't normally spend a lot of time on. One of the things I've been experimenting with is guitar playing with an Ebow. An electronic bow device that creates a focused electro-magnetic field that resonates the guitar string and causing it to sustain. Using this to create drones, and processing it through a number of synths, filters, resonators, beat repeaters, and panning fx, both hardware and plugin types, to create different types of ambient stereo guitarscapes.
I've also been using this project to push my knowledge of synthesis, and in particular, my ability to program the MicroKorg, which has some great potential, but due to the interface, patching and programing sounds is a bit tricky. Most people who use these pretty much just knob twiddle on the presets, but I'm totally not into using presets, even though some are pretty cool. I prefer instead to customize a sound more or less from scratch, and then build variations around that to suit my needs in each new song. Those variations might mean cutoff/resonance/lfo changes to suit the melody lines or to fit with a certain tempo, to compliment the other sounds in a mix, or sometimes, just to see what else I can do, I'll re-patch something just to see how it works and sometimes that makes something interesting happen.
In my opinion the piano is the king of all instruments. I wish I could actually play it. I know my way around a keyboard on a rudimentary level. The sound of a piano is just my favourite thing. It's so rich and complicated. Simple melodies just sing and pierce my heart, sometimes a single note is enough. But it's also tough, and when it gets deep, it's a great bass sound. The range of the piano means regardless of what else is going on in various registers, when you need to add colour, the piano will always be able to fill the right gap. That's pretty much how I approach my piano parts, especially in this process, as the splashes of colour that, if it were a painting, would be the ones that attracted your eye the most.
Ever since I could hold a microphone I've wanted to use my voice as an instrument, in particular, a percussion instrument. I don't consider myself a beatboxer, beat boxing is a hip-hop sound. I don't really like the conventional hip-hop style, mostly because I don't really like hip-hop (I like some, I don't want to get into that here). I consider myself a vocalist on some levels, I sing, I love to process my voice and make sounds that aren't "singing", and I love to play with rhythm. Some years ago I studied tabla with a nice Indian chap in Northcote. I bought a really nice set and had lessons every week. I loved the instrument and I loved the language. I couldn't say I remember any of it now, but it's certainly had an effect of my vocal style. So rather than program "beats" from the multitude of drum samples I have made and otherwise accumulated over the years, I thought the music would sound better if I made the percussive elements more human, and in making this choice, have been able to further develop my beatbox/vocal percussion technique into something more than it was in the past on tunes I made like Black Comedy or Green.
All of this I see as a form of ongoing development. The compositional practice, production practice, and the various sound crafting and performance practice that this process/project creates has been invaluable to me, and has also built up a great sense of discipline.
In a ten second piece that loops, the only real drawback is the limits to the tempos you can play in. So a lot of these little pieces begin to feel the same, I've played around with odd time signatures to freshen it up along the way, but even then there's still a limit. I don't consider any of these to be finished works of course. Some I'd like to explore further, maybe even mash together to create new larger works. Some exist purely as R&D for sound noodling.
As they exist with the animations that Sophia makes (sophia hanover on vimeo), that is something else entirely; a development of two artists, working separately with a similar practice, marrying the work to show the relationship of process.
Check out the month of February here
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