Etude001

A short minimal-glitch etude of sorts made from guitar-fret noise

Look ma! I make something! My first in an "étude" series. This one has been built out of 3 very short samples of guitar fret noise from a blues recording, stretched and sync'ed in Ableton Live and manipulated with a noise gate. Everything you hear here is made by these 3 samples, a noise gate, and a MIDI bass kick.

Note: the bass kick is pretty deep, so this track will sound really thin on laptop speakers.

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posted by LMGM (8 comments total)

This is intriguing. The only thing I would wish for is a couple of longer samples over it for some contrast - all the sounds repeat really quickly. For some reason I'm imagining a long sample of a dot-matrix printer, but that's just me. Congrats on putting this together.
posted by arcanecrowbar at 2:06 PM on January 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Hey thanks for the comments! I see what you mean about having some a more sustained pad or wash to provide a bit of continuity through the clicks and clacks. I had hoped that sample #3 (the one that alternates between two pitches) would give a more continuous feel, but the jumpy looping broke it up too much, methinks.
posted by LMGM at 11:19 AM on January 6, 2009

Really interesting sounds, nice textures, especially the ones that come in around 0:58 and 1:05. Is that from the sample or is it from some kind of effect?
posted by god particle at 1:06 PM on January 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

Nice, and it will be interesting see where the rest of the étude series goes.
posted by micayetoca at 1:31 PM on January 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

Thanks again! God Particle: All of those sounds come from the samples themselves, although they're pushed through a noise gate with a Threshold of -30dB to make it a bit cleaner and to make it pop and crackle more.

I don't want to flood MeMusic with my stuff, so I won't be posting all of the etudes here, but you want to follow all of them as they come out, I'm posting them to a separate blawg here.

Oh, and this is all being done with Ableton Live. I'm debating finding a sound editor program (any suggestions for mac?) to actually cut the loops beforehand, as Live makes it a bit complicated to cut clips from longer samples.
posted by LMGM at 1:05 AM on January 7, 2009

hypnotic, and well sampled, cut, executed, progressed

keep posting em
posted by ageispolis at 1:26 PM on January 7, 2009 [1 favorite]

sound editor program:

Try Digital Performer. I have been using it for years (in addition to Ableton Live) Its awesome. I run DP5.
posted by 5imian at 12:21 PM on January 8, 2009

Thanks, 5imian! I'll check it out.
posted by LMGM at 4:28 PM on January 10, 2009