Day 226: Sunday 10 April 2016

Auxiliary Trilogy:

You may have noticed that I like series; images and sounds and tracks that fit together to make a larger whole. Sometimes I present them in the form of a playlist and sometimes, as here, I fit them together in one track.

I’m not sure which is the best strategy. Perhaps it depends.

Anyway this is a Beatscape/Soundscape in three parts.

I began with Auxy, an app that I got some time ago but never tried. I’m sure my initial play only scratched the surface but I quickly got something that I liked, and you can’t ask more from an app than that 🙂

I jammed into AudioShare by muting and triggering the parts, then did my fav trick of slowing it down in TwistedWave and effecting it with Dedalus. So I ended up with a track at 72 bpm which sounds like me. Cool.

But I was looking for something a little darker, a little harder. So I effected it with Muckraker and with Caramel to see which would give me the distorted edge that I was looking for. I liked both results so I loaded all three into Auria, panning each distorted version one left and one right and mixing them quite low so they provided a textural flavour without overwhelming the sound.

So far I was loving it but felt that the initial arrangement could be improved, so I did a little cutting and pasting. Once that was achieved I still felt it needed more darkness. Or perhaps abrasiveness is the word I’m looking for.

Earlier in the week I had used a flute sample by DJ Puzzle to make a drumbeat in Patterning which I feed into Grain Science and got some wonderful feedback like metallic-sheetmetal-on-the-chalkboard-of-your-soul kind of sounds, and I thought they would compliment this track. So I added them and cut/arranged them to suit.

Thus was finished Part One: Auxiliary.

I loved the combination of the feedback sounds so much that I felt they deserved a track of their own. I combined them and timestretched them to the same length. I felt they needed something else but wasn’t sure what, so I trawled my folders of sounds looking for a match and found a File that I had recorded last year using Thor.

Thus was finished Part Two: Ancillary.

Now, these two tracks obviously belonged together but they didn’t seem to be a complete thing so I went back to Part One and made a more compact, succinct version that I felt rounded out the story and the journey.

So if you are interested:

Part One: Auxiliary is 0.00-4.03

Part Two: Ancillary is 4.03-7.00

Part Three: Auxillary Reprise is 7.00-9.06

Thanks for your attention. Peace Out.