February 9, 2025

Ominous thud

It’s been a bit of a grey and miserable day today so I’m indoors playing with sound.  After my last session where I was playing around with the different layers of ticking I got a bit stuck and couldn’t work out where I wanted to go next, so I decided to look through all the sound samples in Ableton and find some that I might like to work with. There are 801 different sound samples in my version of Ableton and I listened to every single one of them! (Never let it be said that I am anything other than thorough!) As I was going through I came across one I really liked called ‘Ominous thud’. I had my MIDI keyboard set up so tried out a few different notes to see what it sounded like with different pitches – literally just putting my fingers down wherever they landed. This came out as a little five note pattern that I really liked the sound of, so I temporarily paused my trawl through all of the sounds to try it out against the ticking tracks. I experimented a bit with how fast I wanted to play the pattern, how many times I wanted it repeated, whether it should go in time with the main tick or not, and then found a lovely sustained droning sound that could go alongside it. At the moment it’s very very simple and very basic, but for the first time I’m starting to feel an echo

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