Disquiet0387 Encumbered Interlocutor by Nate Trier

This week's assignment was to create the second half of an asynchronous musical collaboration. Encym (https://soundcloud.com/encym) and I enjoyed collaborating last year (https://soundcloud.com/triermusic/they-call-me-the-backwoods-debussy-disquiet0316), so we revisited our partnership for this year.

I listened to encym's short guitar improvisation, and heard a motif a few times that grabbed my ear. I figured out the tones and then used that as the basis of my half.

I improvised my way through it, using MIDI so I could go back and edit my performance as need be. I tried to use some unexpected tonal shifts - moving the outer voices by half-steps and not thinking about the chords. I ended up making a few tweaks to my MIDI performance, mostly for timing.

The next, unsuccessful, step was to try to run the MIDI data through a hardware synth, but I had some weird problematic distortion, so I ended up just layering two different Ableton organ presets.

The final step was to mix - finding the right balance was tough (different instruments at recorded at different times in different places). I ended up using Ableton's Spectrum plug-in to see where in the frequency spectrum the guitar "lived," and then use EQ on the droney organ to cut out that space. Also, I set the compressor on the organ to be sidechained to the guitar, which worked well.

Next week's project will be to add a third part to this; join in!

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More on this 368th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Engage Duo / The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio, adding to a pre-existing track.) at:

https://disquiet.com/0368/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0368-engage-duo/

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Image associated with this project is adapted (edited, color altered, text added) from a photo by Anna J and is used via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/gcojn

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/