Musicalpoetry’s Weblog

Then I set out to look for some melody bits. I found a great sound in Ableton’s Library – on the string machine! So I stole those and tweaked the sound – just a little, trying for a more haunting echo-y sound.

Then I played with some note patterns I had found (just as in Impulse really - see blog entry ‘B(l)eating on about rhythms’). I duplicated one pattern – shortened it to one bar  - and then pasted it on the octave higher to give a two-bar theme that kept rising (unlike the original that rose one chord over two bars and looped). I used this one again in the finale with some additional notes to make it fuller (see below). I also clicked in complimenting notes to give a fuller sound to some of the other clips.

Here’s another from the finale:

Having got my strings and beats and some fun drum bits for intros or solos or something – I’ll decide what later. I notice that they kind of over power the lovely voice (Irene’s) for my sung parts. I’m going to have to think carefully how they’re going to go together and about the volume levels.

I’ve attacked my melodies again and pared them right down to create five minimal tunes that are still related to the main themes, so that I can play in, as and when I want over the spoken/sung lines (I also put a volume envelope on them all and turned them down so I didn’t have to think about their levels when I was playing live. That also meant I didn’t have to put them on their own track and turn that down, I could leave them with the main melody clips - and so any later alterations I may choose to do with the string machine or effects will also effect them).

Above - the cut down version - below how it was originally.

Again below a cut down version of another of the main themes 

I’m probably thinking I’ll have a funky intro using lots of the nice sounds I’ve made/found and ammended. Then go for some beats with the poem triggering itself - then a nice instrumental bit which I can play live and then back to the poem again - and then a finale - preset scenes involving music, beats and some of the lines.

I thought that to give the finale a fuller sound it would be nice to have some accompaniement to the string machine sounds and I discovered this (below) - the Grand Section Sustain - after playing with it I ended up with a sort of electric harpsichord sound (haha well that’s just my opinion) - that’s what I called it and again played with the melody to give some harmonies to play in with the existing tunes in the final section.

OH YES! I’ve got my two tracks of poems triggering off nicely (all cut down, warped and renamed) - calls on one track and responses on the other - calls trigger down the track randomly (except one which is a two-part sentence so the first part (which would not work on its own) only triggers its second half, that then triggers randomly, and can be triggered randomly too as a stand alone clip). I’ve got them going off one bar after the previous one finishes. Then on the other track I’ve got the responses basically the same but triggering one bar and two beats after each other - so when I set both tracks going they don’t run at the same time (there’s occassionally a little overlap but that sounds quite good).

All I have to work out now is whether I’m going to use my voice as well as Irene’s? I’m thinking it could be in the noisy musical bits as I’ve got a totally different sound to irene and I don’t think the strings drown me out so much … hmm working on this.

AND I have made it easier to hear the two when they do run over each other a bit by panning the ‘question/call’ lines to the left a little and the ‘response/answer’ to the right using the panning controls at the bottom of each track.

See the first circle control above the oblong switches - you can see the line marker is to the left on the left two tracks and to the right on the right two tracks - this is the panning control.