"The Red Balloon" is essentially an exercise. I decided I wouldn’t use any sample libraries or anything that wasn’t my own. At core, it’s using a couple of different passes using guitars and outboard gear and then using recordings of a whistling tea kettle. 

Initially, I used my guitar routed through a looper pedal. It’s a simple three chord progression and then reversed. It’s routed through two distortion pedals and then through a dual-delay module. It’s all running through a small amp that I have mic’d with an sm57 and going into Nuendo. I basically let it run and record for several cycles. After cleaning it up a bit in Nuendo, I grabbed the guitar again and did the little melodic passages using essentially the same setup (although I changed settings on the delay), although I didn’t use the looper. I recorded that stuff live.

Red Balloon

singlefrequency, an experimental music project by award-winning sound designer Zachary Quarles, merges post-rock and cinematic motifs with analogue grit. Each track is a tape-worn journey through mysterious soundscapes. 
For more content visit me on Bandcamp: https://singlefrequency.bandcamp.com/music