Jet Jaguar - Tide's Out [disquiet0007-subtract]

A contribution to the latest Disquiet Junto

The brief was to all use the same recording of some waves ( http://www.freesound.org/people/Luftrum/sounds/48412 ) and make something by only removing sound. No changing pitch, no layering, no rearranging etc.

I thought trying to write a funk / hip-hop style beat using this process would be a good time. I'm not sure I was right. :) Just to be explicit: I didn't add drums or sample bits, I just shaped the volume of the recording.

I recycled some processes that Shanan Holm & I came up with for Montano tracks http://www.nonwrestler.com/montano

For the fellow producers out there, all I've done is split the track into low / mid / high frequency bands and then gradually started gating them with different rhythms to make kicks / snares / hats. This was really easy using Audiomulch SouthPole contraptions, the track took me about an hour at most. I'm reducing the "floor" / "base gain" / whatever between the un-gated peaks as the track goes on, which is where the cheesy title came from. ;) The natural changes in volume in the source recording keep things quite dynamic - the noise gates aren't making individual hits louder or quieter, just letting whatever sound is there through. The kick has a resonant lowpass filter envelope on it, plus a big EQ boost around 60Hz as well, the other two bands are not filtered / EQed after they're seperated out. Doing that to the kick felt a bit outside the brief, although as people have said in the discussion group, I could have achieved the same thing by subtracting the opposite frequencies on the other frequency bands, so whatever.