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

I took the original track processed it through the Borderlands ipad app and several FX on the Allen&Heath Qu-16 (plate reverb, ADT, "Kraftwerk Delay") and then played that out of my monitor speakers while people in my house were getting ready for bed, along with some sequential circuit six-track, and recorded the combination with my Zoom H6. I also took my bluetooth speaker around the house throughout the day while I made lunch and yardwork was going on outside. I recorded those and made a collage in Ableton.

A Moveable Heart - Disquiet0484

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

I finished this project a couple passed the deadline for the disquiet junto blog, but I still wanted to post it.

I took snippets of audio from my life in 2016. Some are voice memos, some are projects I recorded, some are voicemail messages, and some are recordings of rehearsals. I tried to line up the each clip in chronological order, but it's not exact.

____________________________________________________________
Disquiet Junto Project 0261: Audio Journal 2016
The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen five-second segments.

This week’s project is a sound journal, a selective audio history of your past year.

Step 1: You will select a different audio element to represent each of the past 12 months of 2016. These audio elements will most likely be of music that you have yourself composed and recorded, but they might also consist of phone messages, field recordings, or other source material. These items should be somehow personal in nature, suitable to the autobiographical intention of the project; they should be of your own making, and not drawn from third-party sources.

Step 2: You will then select one five-second segment from each of these dozen audio elements.

Step 3: Then you will stitch these dozen five-second segments together in chronological order to form one single one-minute track. There should be no overlap or gap between segments; they should simply proceed from one to the next.

Step 4: In the notes field accompanying the track, identify each of the audio segments.

(Level Up: Alternately, you can use more than 12 audio segments — do two a month, or one a week, or one a day. Whatever you choose, just keep them evenly distributed across the year. You might make the segments shorter, to keep the full track length to 60 seconds.)

Five More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Per the instructions below, be sure to include the project tag “disquiet0261″ (no spaces) in the name of your track. If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to my locating the tracks and creating a playlist of them.

Step 2: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 3: In the following discussion thread at llllllll.co please consider posting your track.

http://llllllll.co/t/make-a-2016-sound-journal-disquiet-junto-0261/5891

Step 4: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 5: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Deadline: This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, December 29, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 2, 2017.

Length: The length is up to you, but three to four minutes sounds about right.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0261” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Linking: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this information:

More on this 261st weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Audio Journal 2016: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen five-second segments — at:

http://disquiet.com/0261/

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:

http://llllllll.co/t/make-a-2016-sound-journal-disquiet-junto-0261/5891

AudioDiary2016_disquiet0261

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

Disquiet Junto project number 430 — 
The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio that others will complete (disquiet.com/0430/)

Tele with glass slide through Ernie Ball VP Jr w/Thrutone Mod, WIIO, MF Drive, Mood, and DL4 into Allen&Heath Qu16 with Ableton. 

I took a few passes at improvising along with the waves and cut out the parts that I didn't like. If you want to add another instrument to this, I can tell you that I tuned my guitar from highest pitched string to lowest: E,B,F#,C#. More or less Emaj7 tonality by moving 4ths around.

Thank you @zoundsabar for the beautiful and inspiring ocean recording:
https://soundcloud.com/zoundsabar/vigil-sc-waves-disquiet0429


Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-pr…tary-ensembles-x-2/

Surf Waves (disquiet0430)

Layers of guitar and field recorded ocean waves from Disquiet Junto participant. Manipulated in Ableton.

No Waves Past Signal Depths

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.

Submissions

Matthew Thomas Davis