/028 - Cousins

The Electra recorder is full of character. I’m not sure it can do anything else, though it’s very possible that the old tapes that came with it are a contributing factor. It also has very low headroom so I needed to bring the input way down to avoid crazy feedback. Sounds rather nice with a little crunch, I think.

Played a generative sequence with dunes (internal audio and midi out to Digitone) and recorded simultaneously on the h4n pro and Electra. No post processing other than adjusting the levels to get them in the same range.

A little spider came to visit while I was editing,

/002 - Winter Walk

We got a lot of icy rain yesterday that turned to snow overnight. I have been meaning to try more field recording so thought this was a good chance. Was looking at hardware options last week, but since I don’t record much I decided to use what I already had - a Audio Technica AT2020 usb mic and my iPhone. The recording turned out fine for my purposes, but was very fiddly dealing with getting the app to recognize the mic via usb adapter. I will try another adapter I have laying around here, but it’s very likely that getting something standalone will be easier to work with. I was walking fast because I was on my lunch break…

/001 - Bells

I have a few small bells around that I would like to work into my music, so I thought it would be a good idea to try to find out what notes they ring. I started by trying a few tuner apps on my phone, but quickly found (surprise surprise) that there are so many overtones created that they couldn’t get a solid read. A quick google search led me to the amazing work of Bill Hibbert, specifically his program Wavanal, which let me record the bells and run frequency analysis to show the fundamentals and overtones. Turns out there are no sharps or flats in any of the the fundamentals, with each ringing in varying amounts of cents +/., There are a few picked up in the overtones, but not sure how present they will be to the ear. Will be interesting to hear how they sound against solid synth notes, or each other.