Songs that I composed for contest entries or music blogs.

Disquiet Junto: http://disquiet.com/2012/01/27/the-disquiet-junto/
Composer Quest Podcast: http://www.charliemccarron.com/composer-quest/

Photo Credit: Matthew Davis 2006

Submissions

Kitchen_disquiet0265

For this track, I included many layers of different metronomes, typewriters, church bells, mechanical camera sounds, steam whistles, etc. at a train station. I also recorded several bass and guitar parts.

I imagined that the beloved "Society for the Advancement of Metronomic Activities" arrive by train, and once disembarked, commence a groovy party.

I recorded bass, guitar, and some metronomes myself, but the rest of the samples were found various places online. All the pieces were assembled and edited inside Ableton Live using native plugins and some Waves plugins.

While working on this project, I was reminded of the usefulness of gates. At one point in the track, there are 8 layers of different metronome samples playing at different BPMs. By gating each track separately and adjusting the release times, I was able to cut out a lot of the extra unwanted noise in between the metronome clicks, which resulted in a much cleaner sound.

For the beat at the end, I decided that a typewriter can sound pretty metronomic, so I cut out over 50 individual keystrokes from a typewriter sample and lined them up as 16th notes. I split the 1st and 3rd 16th notes onto one track and the 2nd and 4th 16ths onto another track so the downbeats and upbeats could be processed separately. First, I put a slight hi-pass filter on the upbeats to differentiate them from the downbeats. Secondly, I shortened the length of the samples on the upbeats. The keystroke from a typewriter has a slide into the transient and another slide after. Imagine the arm of each letter lifting up to slam into the paper and then returning to rest. For the upbeats, I cut the keystroke short while the downbeats have the full motion.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to fully develop the beat at the end. If I had more time, I would build that section up more and then drop it back down to the metronome clicks from the beginning of the song.

Metronomic Society_disquiet0267

I tried to imagine the feeling of a square room and a square window to look out at the sky. The quarter note guitar line (which is pitched down to the bass register and then reversed and displaced in layers above it) is meant to evoke the geometry of the window. The downbeats and backbeats are the corners, and they were created by dropping a heavy book and opening and closing it near a microphone.

I included vocal samples of a lady singing "Blue Skies" a cappella and me saying "square" which were stretched with various ableton warping algorithms, chopped rhythmically, reversed, and repitched among other process. 

The string scraping is meant to represent Bassel's free-flowing thoughts as he looks out the window. I recorded myself running a pick up and down my electric guitar strings with overdrive. Then I chopped them up and sequenced them rhythmically.


More on this 271st weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Prison Sky: Mark the 5th anniversary of open-source software engineer Bassel Khartabil’s detention” — at:

http://disquiet.com/0271/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

llllllll.co/t/prison-sky-disquiet-junto-project-0271/6877

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Image associated with this project is a detail that Bassel Khartabil wrote to Jon Phillips on January 31, 2014, from the Damascus Central Jail. More on Bassell’s detention at freebassel.org. Major thanks to Christopher Adams, Niki Korth, Jon Phillips, and Barry Threw. See the full letter and information about actions to mark the fifth anniversary at:

http://freebassel.org/campaign/events/freebasselday/2017/03/09/freebassel5years/
Disquiet Junto by Marc Weidenbaum (Disquiet.com)
POB 210429 San Francisco, CA 94121-0429 USA 


disquiet0271

Square Blue Sky - for Bassel Khartabil_disquiet0271

This track was created for the Composer Quest podcast from October 2016 (http://www.charliemccarron.com/2016/08/composer-quest-olympics). We won 2nd place!

My section starts at 2:05. All sounds sampled from the previous sections.

Relay Race Final

I wrote this arrangement of the Columbian National Anthem for the Composer Quest podcast's Olympic Games Composition Competition in September 2016:
http://www.charliemccarron.com/2016/08/composer-quest-olympics/

I used many layers of electric guitar and electric bass. One of the lead lines in the bridge section was played with a tight spring on the highest guitar string.

Columbian National Anthem

Born in San Jose, California. Started piano age 5. Electric and upright bass at 16.  Awarded the John Coltrane Scholarship for Composition and Performance. Studied jazz bass at California Institute of the Arts with Alphonso Johnson, Charlie Haden, and Derek Oles. Taught at summer music camps, K-12 music classes, private lessons. Toured and recorded with The Broadcast (www.thebroadcastmusic.com) from Asheville, North Carolina. Composer. Audio engineer. Live Sound. Recording. Mixing. Bass Guitar. Electric Guitar. Noise.

Relay Race Final

Matthew Thomas Davis