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waking up in a stranger​’​s room

from first steps by bushytunes

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about

With nothing special in mind I recorded two acoustic guitar tracks, jamming gently around a couple of chords. I played it back; it was pretty dull.

‘Time to try something different,’ I thought to meself, so I did. I thought about William Burroughs and David Bowie, two people who have used cut-up text and randomised word association to spark off new ideas, to give their brains opportunities to create fresh connections.

Taking a leaf out of their books, I copied the two guitar tracks over onto six empty tracks. Without listening to the results as I went, I began randomly chopping the sound up - leaving one track fairly intact as a musical ‘anchor’ – deleting blocks of sound and moving others around.

Then I gave it a listen, without any particular expectation, and it seemed to work. Some bits were too busy, some too sparse, so I moved blocks of sound around some more until I liked how it sounded.

This was much more interesting. Despite the fair amount of randomness I used, sometimes it sounded as though a group of guitarists were playing together, a sort of ‘question/answer’ or ‘supporting/disagreeing with each other’ kind of feeling.

I was surprised how well this worked; I’m guessing it’s because the initial chords were simple and I jammed lots of short riffs and kept things pretty basic, so even though I didn’t plan anything out, it happened to fall into place quite quickly.

No effects used here, just the sounds of acoustic guitars chopped up and manipulated in a slightly odd way.

I did get some nasty cracking sounds where the odd audio file had been cut off abruptly, so I used the fade in/out function to smooth off the edges, and that produced more textures, sounding like a bowed instrument/backward sound.

This is the first time I’ve used blocks of sound/pieces of audio file in this way, and I had a lot of fun doing it. Interesting and a little unpredictable - I’ll probably come back to it in the future and experiment some more.

Overall, it sounds to me like a strange mix of pretty, bluesy and odd...

How about you? Are you a strange mix of pretty, bluesy or odd?

credits

from first steps, track released April 9, 2013

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bushytunes Christmas Island

Once upon a time there was a crazy idea: to create, record and upload a musical track every day for a year. And the idea floated round and round the planet, looking for a place to call home. After a long time of searching and wishing and watching, the idea chose to make a nest in the brain of a bushy fellow, coming to his aid and guiding him out of the doldrums, back to a magical pathway... ... more

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