How Wry I Am

A track I made in Ableton Live with Push 2 using a single pre-recorded bell sample. You can hear the original sample begin to enter just after the 4-minute mark. Well...almost original, I shifted it down 3 half-steps to match the key of the track.

There are four tracks in this mix. Two different pads created from a single bell hit, a drum rack with 10 sounds (one per each bell sound in the original sample), and a melodic lead instrument created from the lowest bell sample and processed with a distortion amplifier.

Workflow-wise, the first thing I did was to create the drum rack and begin finding different textures for each pad, making the samples as different from each other as possible as I created rhythm patters in a step-sequencer. There was one exception, two drum pads that shared the exact same pitch: for those two, I panned them mid L and R and de-tuned one sample by 10 cents while filtering out the overtones for the in-tune one so that the whole drum rack had these spooky slightly flat overtones. I also used an LFO to make the highest-pitched pad warble quite a bit, which comes in around 2:08.

To transfer from session to arrangement view, I experimented with loop lengths of each element across seven different scenes, eventually expanding to a total of twelve scenes. During this process, a clear notion of where the lead solo would be emerged, and I created follow actions so that scenes 1/2 and 6/7/8/9 would all flow into each other automatically once I triggered them, allowing myself time to free up mental bandwidth to perform a solo in scene 10. 

I plan to use the session view of this set for real-time live performances in the future. That was my notion behind follow-actions: so that once scene 10 is looping, I can riff freely over it on the melodic lead track and then trigger the scene 11 fade-out once the solo is nearing a conclusion.

Simpler Bells

Ripple

Ripple

Devin Farney

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