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I’ve been digitizing very old cassettes again. The glockenspiel and guitar for this come from the original 4-track cassette recordings for The Land’s debut back in 2005. The tracks were recorded on a TASCAM rackmount 4-track recorder – which records at almost double the normal speed. But I don’t have that machine anymore so I am digitizing them at almost half the original speed with a regular (dying) cassette deck – which gives the guitar and chimes some nice rich depth. The viola comes from some recent improvisations by Judith while setting up a delay pedal/amp combination, recorded onto an old tape at normal speed.

The collage is created in Reaper using the Shortcircuit plugin. This plugin lets you slice up an audio file into a “key map” so that each note is assigned to a different spot in the file. I created separate tracks for each of the audio files, assigned them the same key map, and then dropped in and looped some old midi files from other recordings I’ve done. I added a photo to show the map and setup.

There are some delay, reverb, and loopers layering the original base sounds over time for a gradual accumulation of mush.

The last three weeks have been an iterative process working towards the final trio that came this week. The idea was for artists to add a new layer to a duet created by other musicians the previous week (which was created in the same way using a solo track from the week before that).

Judith and I improvised a bit on piano and guitar (respectively) and then snipped, looped, and granulated them gently up the middle between the excellent duet, “Whatever1”, created by @Joule with @Anatol.

If you want to follow the journey, here are the two previous iterations –

Solo: Disquiet Junto Project 0472: Jam Time – #34 by Anatol
Duet: Disquiet Junto Project 0473: Placebo Effect – #120 by Joule 1

This has been a really fun three weeks of collaboration!!

This week’s task was to add a new layer onto a solo track created by another musician last week.

Judith and I thought that the soft and fuzzy/chimey/drifting music that @mdh made would go well with Judith’s viola, so she improvised for a while through her Flashback delay and then I “collaged” her raw materials in Reaper with cut-paste, more delay, reversenesses, loops, granulars, &c. The two timbres match pretty closely!