I set myself the goal to create, record, and publish some kind of new sound every day of 2012. That goal got interrupted by me getting very sick, and then by us moving house, but I did keep it up for about 3 months. To hear everything I made, keep clicking the button at the top-right of this page. Here are a few of my favorites:
Monday 09 January, 2012
Saturday 14 January, 2012
Monday 23 January, 2012
Wednesday 01 February, 2012
Thursday 01 March, 2012
Tuesday 13 March, 2012
Wednesday 21 March, 2012
Friday 13 April, 2012
Wednesday 18 April, 2012
A simple drum loop in Ableton.
Tuesday 17 April, 2012
Playing around again with the Aphex Twin track from before. Not trying to make a perfect reproduction this time, just having some fun with it.
Monday 16 April, 2012
Playing with resonators (Ableton's built-in ones).
Friday 13 April, 2012
A simple drum loop in Ableton.
Friday 23 March, 2012
Playing with a found sound - this is one of our kitchen pans being hit. Not terribly inspiring, but it was worth a try.
Wednesday 21 March, 2012
Re-balanced yesterday's work.
Tuesday 20 March, 2012
Expanding on yesterday's work.
Monday 19 March, 2012
Playing around with something new in Ableton.
Sunday 18 March, 2012
Tweaked yesterday's work a little.
Saturday 17 March, 2012
Started with a quick sample of my washing machine, and wound up with this.
Friday 16 March, 2012
More using my own voice as an instrument.
Thursday 15 March, 2012
Using a short sample of my own voice as an instrument.
Wednesday 14 March, 2012
Playing with Ableton's Tension instrument.
Tuesday 13 March, 2012
Even more drums on She's Not There.
Monday 12 March, 2012
More drums on She's Not There.
Sunday 11 March, 2012
Overlaying drums on top of She's Not There.
Saturday 10 March, 2012
Playing with slice-to-midi.
Friday 09 March, 2012
More subtle tweeks to the Aphex Twin track. It isn't totally awful...
Thursday 08 March, 2012
If at first you don't succeed... I did actually manage to improve on yesterday's work.
Wednesday 07 March, 2012
A little more work on that Aphex Twin track. Sadly I think this is about as good as I can get it right now, which is frustrating - it's nowhere near good enough.
Tuesday 06 March, 2012
Made the bass a bit more aggressive. It still doesn't sound right, but it does sound (a little) better.
Monday 05 March, 2012
Added the bass to yesterday's work.
Sunday 04 March, 2012
Improving on that Aphex Twin remake a little. Starts with the original, and fades into my remake. Getting the right sounds is something I'm still really bad at. Need to practice.
Saturday 03 March, 2012
I wanted to see how close yesterday's recreation had been. Turns out pretty close, even though it was all from memory! The tempo was about 10bpm too slow, but the pitch was right, and all the timing is pretty good. A few of the sounds need some adjustment - I might spend some more time getting it closer...
This mix has the original as the right channel, and my recreation on the left channel.
This mix has the original as the right channel, and my recreation on the left channel.
Friday 02 March, 2012
Recreating part of an Aphex Twin track from scratch and from memory in Ableton.
Thursday 01 March, 2012
A basic drum loop using an effected 808 kit in Ableton.
Wednesday 29 February, 2012
Using Ableton's slice-to-midi on two different tracks... my first mashup :)
Tuesday 28 February, 2012
Vocoding using two non-vocal tracks.
Monday 27 February, 2012
More slice-to-midi. Not very inspired, but there it is...
Sunday 26 February, 2012
More slice-to-midi fun.
Saturday 25 February, 2012
Back to the autofilter I was trying to build on the 8th. It works fine now, and I added a wet/dry paramater too.
Friday 24 February, 2012
Went back and had a look at the effect I was working on between 16th and the 20th of January. Now that I know how to do oscillators properly, it sounds great :) There's one parameter controling the wet/dry balance, and another controling the frequency (440-880Hz).
Thursday 23 February, 2012
Same effect as yesterday, but this time with a parameter controling the pan frequency. Seems trivial, but I finally figured out how to implement LFOs properly :) I'll have to look back at some of my older stuff and see if I can make it better now...
Wednesday 22 February, 2012
An auto-panner, written in javascript.
Tuesday 14 February, 2012
Playing with Ableton's Tension synth.
Monday 13 February, 2012
Experimenting with sidechain compression.
Sunday 12 February, 2012
Messing around with an 808 kit in Ableton.
Saturday 11 February, 2012
More playing with slice-to-midi.
Friday 10 February, 2012
Playing with Ableton's slice-to-midi again.
Thursday 09 February, 2012
A distortion filter using exponents - we take Math.pow(x, p*2) where x is the sample and p is a parameter.
Wednesday 08 February, 2012
Back to the resonant low-pass filter, but now with the cutoff frequency controlled by a sine wave. The frequency of the sine wave is a parameter. It sounds great when you're not changing that parameter, but awful when you are - I need to figure out how to fix that.
Tuesday 07 February, 2012
This is the same filter as on Monday, but the audio is preprocessed - we run it through sin(x*pi/2). I think this is adding some distortion - perhaps increasing the high-frequency content? Anyway whatever it does makes the filter sound more aggressive, which is kinda cool.
Monday 06 February, 2012
Took yesterday's effect, added a delay line to it, and mixed it with the dry signal.
Sunday 05 February, 2012
A nice resonant low-pass filter in javascript.
Saturday 04 February, 2012
One of my favorite sounds: Zoe babbling just after she wakes up after a nap :)
Friday 03 February, 2012
A randomized repeater, in javascript, with a single parameter controlling the amount of randomness. Here it's ramping from minimum to maximum randomness.
Thursday 02 February, 2012
A little echo with parameterisable feedback, written in javascript.
Wednesday 01 February, 2012
A little more polish on the track I was working on last week.
Tuesday 31 January, 2012
Same effect as yesterday, but with (linear) interpolation of the sample buffer. No more clicking noises :)
Monday 30 January, 2012
A dead-simple (but flawed) flanger in javascript. A flanger is just what you get when you mix the dry signal with the output of a simple delay line, where the length of the delay is variable. I'm not doing any interpolation, which I think it the cause of the crackling noise. Will try refining that tomorrow...
Sunday 29 January, 2012
A dead-simple variable distortion effect in javascript. Simply clips at a level that can be parameterized and automated.
Sunday 28 January, 2012
A very simple variable bit-depth reducer, written in javascript.
Friday 27 January, 2012
A simple 1-pole low-pass filter I wrote in javascript. It's not very resonant, so the effect is subtle, but I'm impressed with how smoothly it responds to automation, and how little cpu it uses.
Thursday 26 January, 2012
A few more fine-touches. I like it :)
Wednesday 25 January, 2012
Expanding on yesterday's playtime. You know, I quite like this actually!
Tuesday 24 January, 2012
More fun in Ableton, mostly using slice-to-midi again.
Monday 23 January, 2012
I am addicted to slice-to-midi. It is so much fun :)
Sunday 22 January, 2012
More playing with slice-to-midi. Not as good as yesterday's, but still a lot of fun.
Saturday 21 January, 2012
Ableton's slice-to-midi is insanely fun to play with.
Friday 20 January, 2012
A much more gentle version of the effect I've been playing around with. This one sweeps the since wave frequency from 10Hz to 20Hz, and has no artifacts, which makes me even more certain the artifacts came from aliasing.
Thursday 19 January, 2012
Ableton's slice-to-midi makes it fantasticly easy to push around bits and pieces of existing audio into something completely new.
Wednesday 18 January, 2012
A bit of a cheat: I reimplemented yesterday's effect from scratch (this time all in c++) to see if I might have made a mistake somewhere (I'd already tried cubic interpolation - it doesn't help). The rewrite didn't solve anything. Now I'm becoming convinced the nasty noise is due to aliasing. I'll ask some dsp people if there's anything I can do about that.
Tuesday 17 January, 2012
Same effect as yesterday, but using cosine interpolation on the sine wave frequency. It doesn't sound good - just recording it here for posterity. I'll try cubic interpolation next...
Monday 16 January, 2012
Multiplying by a sine wave that slowly sweeps from 440Hz to 880Hz. I'm pretty sure the nasty clicking noises are due to me not smoothly adjusting the sine wave frequency - due to the way I implemented this, it's stepping every 400 or so samples. I'll give it another try...
Sunday 15 January, 2012
Playing with Ableton's vocoder.
Saturday 14 January, 2012
Using Ableton's 'Operator' synth to emulate a 303 and make some late-80s style acid techno.
Friday 13 January, 2012
Same as yesterday, but without the echo at all - now we're just multiplying the input with a 440Hz sine wave.
Thursday 12 January, 2012
A simple echo again (0.4 seconds), but with the output of the read-head multiplied with a 440Hz sine wave.
Wednesday 11 January, 2012
Another javascript echo effect. This one has one write-head, as usual, but it has 5 separate read-heads each moving at a random speed between 0.5 and 1.5 times realtime.
Tuesday 10 January, 2012
Another effect written in javascript: Combined vibrato and tremolo.
Monday 09 January, 2012
Stacking lots of echoes gives you a really nice shimmering effect. This is over 50 of the javascript echo effects I made yesterday, all working one after the other. It pushed my macbook air's cpu up to about 90% but still worked in realtime - impressive!
Sunday 08 January, 2012
Wrote a basic echo effect in javascript. This is actually 12 instances of the effect, running in series, so it's a pretty extreme result. Amazingly though, these 12 instances run in realtime on my macbook air with the cpu still under 50%
Saturday 07 January, 2012
Working on my own cover of 'Somebody I used to know', using Zoe's piano and my guitar. You can still hear the original, at a very reduced volume - I have that on one track, and I'm building up all the other tracks using it as a guide.
Friday 06 January, 2012
Audio processing in javascript. The drum-loop was done in Ableton, using a classic 808 kit, and the distortion effect was written in javascript.
Thursday 05 January, 2012
Some weird combination of morse-code and bagpipes :)
Wednesday 04 January, 2012
Making a little drum loop using some Collision instruments in Ableton.
Tuesday 03 January, 2012
Playing around with dubstep-style 'wobble bass' sounds in Ableton.
Monday 02 January, 2012
First time playing with Ableton Live Suite. I like it!
Sunday 01 January, 2012
Playing around with some very basic AM and FM synthesis. I made this using javascript and it plays in realtime! The spidermonkey JS engine is incredibly fast - only a factor of about 3 slower than C in my tests.
Happy new year everyone!
Happy new year everyone!
