One day something clever will be written here...maybe...: Week 6 – CC1

Although this kind of work is at times very art like it is still a job and working to a brief is part of that job. There can be an individual stamp on the work but it still needs to meet the requirements that the client specified. Enter the brief (the score) supplied by Christian. Hopefully I’ll actually get paid working to a brief one day.

For this soundscape I wanted to try a looped, trancy type thing where the different textures on the score would represent different loops. Everytime I’ve tried this sort of thing in the past, it’s ended up cheesy and sounding pretty terrible. Nevertheless, I figured I’d give it another go as my other soundscapes have been rather abstract. After about five hours of coming up with nonsense I’d just about given up on trying the looped idea when I thought of a slightly different approach. I tried making one loop and having different sounds enter and leave the soundscape as the score progresses. This worked much better and I came up with the basic structure in an hour. After a couple more hours of volume and panning automation, waveform chopping and lots of pitch shifting and time compression/expansion I was done.
I used Grid mode to set the loop as can be seen in the picture, and I changed to Slip mode to squeeze sounds around the loop. I was a bit worried about the bass. The VU’s are pegged while calibrated at -15 but switching them to -6 has them hovering around -7dBVU so I’m assuming the levels would be safely around 0VU if I could check it at -12. 0VU = -12dBFS is still safe? Could you let me know if I am completely off the mark with this thinking. When I listened to it in headphones the vibration in the cans and the air rushing out of the sides didn’t seem healthy. The scramble for the volume knob as my eyes vibrated in their sockets certainly woke me up. I think I overdid it, but I think it sounds cool.

Finished Soundscape