Jamuary 2nd
The prompt for Jamuary 2nd was “white noise”. I immediately envisioned a droning synth laid over a wash of white noise modulated slowly by various filters. Frankly, this seems like the obvious route.
I’ve been messing with sidechaining recently, specifically using Image-Line’s Peak Controller plugin to automate volume changes or filter cuts. Back before Love Philter came out, I would regularly use Peak Controller’s LFO functions to control filter cuts, but I don’t use it nearly as often these days. For this jam, I inverted the volume signal from my drum line to cut the volume on the white noise track in time with the kick drums. Sidechaining is a pretty common tactic in dance music: it creates that swell you hear following a kick.
I often use polyhedral die to randomize elements of composition. For this piece, I rolled a d12 and flipped a coin to land on a key of D minor. The main organ drone is a Sytrus patch I’ve been working on. Growing up, I would visit my great-great-grandmother (no shit!), and she had a Kimball Entertainer III/Swinger 700. Her house was straight out of the 70s, and organ sounds leave me brimming with nostalgia. I don’t have the space for an organ these days, so I have to make do with a softsynth imitation.
Anyway, I played a little chord progression with this Sytrus patch, and I added some bass notes on a second pass. The bass follows the tuned kick drums, which were created with the TAL-Elek7ro, an absolute unit of a synth plugin (it’s free, to boot!). For the main drums, I wanted that 808 feel, but kinda nasty. I have a bunch of 808 and 909 samples that I took directly from a Gameboy Color running LSDJ, and they have a nice grimy sound, so I programmed a little sequence using those.
At this point, I was basically finished, but the jam felt too stiff. For an organic touch, I decided to lay down a guitar track. I have an Ovation acoustic-electric that was a gift from my father-in-law. It’s a very beautiful guitar, with a deep green finish; truly a prized possession. I tried a few finger picking leads, but nothing sounded quite right. Instead of the staccato sounds of finger picking, I decided to lean into the droning nature of the rest of the piece. I purchased a Sound Stone sustaine a few years ago (damn that Instagram advertising), and this seemed like just the thing. Pairing the sustainer with a glass slide and generous distortion led to the guitar part in the finished jam. Ultimately, the mix was a little too muddy, probably owing to the long tail on my reverb. If I’d had more time, I would’ve bumped each instrument track out to .wav and mixed in a separate project.
For the video, I knew I wanted to juxtapose television static with snowy landscapes to keep with the white noise theme. I woke up on the 2nd to much colder weather than we had through December, and sure enough, there was snow on the ground. I recalled an episode from the first season of the X-files (actually, two episodes) involving a child receiving messages through television static. All the snow footage comes from pixabay. I’ve been slowly teaching myself video editing with Blender, and I like the way this one came out.
