I started this week performing at the Shacklewell arms with my band (rampressure). In the sound check the sound engineer seemed very passionate about their job which is good but maybe a bit to passionate. They asked me why I like using a sm57 for my vocal mic and I said I like the clarity and direct sound. They then said if you unscrew the capsule from a sm58 it become a 57 I’m not sure how much of that is true but you learn something everyday.
In the week I experimented with sampling sounds from around with fast and slow decay, a lot percussive sounds. With these samples I sequenced them up using my polyend tracker. I added a random pitch fx to each sample on the sequence. So when it loops back through the sequence is always going to be different never the same like a ever evolving percussion track.
Thursday me and Josh had an idea to do a combined set at the dark room social but not a back to back. 30 min before we had to leave to get to the darkroom we experimented with what we were going to do. We sent the stereo out from the dj decks into a 4 channel mixer, on the fx send of the mixer was a zoom gx4 multi fx pedal which I could use to add phaser and flanger sounds to the mix. on the other channels I had a dynamic microphone so I could do live harmonica and the other had my Sony walkman also on the fx send so I could bring in and out random bits of dialog over the tracks josh had chosen. The cassette I used for this dialog was a tape on how to speak Italian which I had picked up from a charity shop, it had some really weird and creepy in a way moments recorded. The output of the 4 channel mixer went through my Roland sp404 mk2, this is so I could live remix the audio coming through. for example the sampler has a scatter fx which chops up the audio coming through and re arranges it, glitches it and reversing it this was great for beat drops and flowing into the next track. The sp404 was also handy as I could use random samples at the same bpm as the tracks giving it a unique sound and random aspect.
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