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 of what is in my head coming out of my computer. There will be more layers, and there will be bits that clash and build tension, and bits that release it again, but today I actually feel like I might be able to do this.
I hadn’t realised until now how vulnerable it was making me feel, trying to take something that is usually safe inside my head and put it on show for everyone else to see – but today I can see it starting to work, and it actually feels quite empowering.