Pat Carroll

Tag: Ableton Live

  • Time Vials: Part 3 is coming out this Friday!

     

    Hey everyone, I hope you’re having a nice start to the year.

    On Friday the 16th of January, the third part of the Time Vials series will be released.

    It has three tracks — Purslane, Campion, and Abigail — which reference the book House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds.

    I was reading that book while I was finalising these pieces, and felt that the mood of the book really related to the music, so I ended up naming the tracks after three core characters of the story.

    If you haven’t read the book, definitely give it a go — I highly recommend it. It’s a work of far-future science fiction that looks into the nature of humanity and what could be considered ‘human’ in speculative scenarios involving cloning and the manipulation of the body with technology, in the spirit of transhumanism. It touches on core ideas of post-humanism — how has/does our concept of the ‘human’ change, and what can be considered human after technological additions and changes to the body. (The character of the ‘Spirit of the Air’ was mind-blowing.) But it’s also just a really cool story!

    The third part of Time Vials begins with the track Purslane, which was built using a modular synthesiser running through some guitar pedals. It was recorded as a single take and then further processed in the computer, with a few extra parallel layers added: The original recording was sent out into other pedals, processed in different ways, then brought back into the session and overlaid with the original. I’ve been experimenting with this approach to processing and working with hardware — making multiple layers from a single piece of material, blending them, fading them in and out, and allowing them to morph over time. These techniques come very much from the workflows of Max Cooper and Jon Hopkins I learnt about some years ago, as well as approaches to electroacoustic music composition.

    The second track, Campion, is a little simpler and came out of a jam I was doing one afternoon on the Prophet synth. It’s just a few chords looping and gradually building over time. Nothing too crazy with this one, but I felt it worked well between Purslane and Abigail, and I also used some of the same processing techniques on it.

    Abigail is a slower-paced piece, and it’s one I actually started in between teaching classes at SAE. I set myself up in one of the studios and explored a workflow using Granulator, a granular synthesiser in Ableton Live. I was listening to a bit of A Winged Victory for the Sullen at the time — if you haven’t heard them, definitely give them a listen. Their influence mostly comes through in the atmosphere and chords, but I went for more of a synthesised approach than they typically do. I also started playing around with really high-frequency ‘pings’, which I love hearing in experimental electronic music — particularly in some Japanese work. Those really digital, high-frequency bursts almost act like pinpricks of sound in the upper registers.

    Overall, this EP feels like it sits comfortably as a part three. It brings the energy down slightly (not that the Time Vials series could be considered heaps ‘energetic’) and focuses on sustained sounds rather than plucked elements or strong pulses; everything feels more fluid on this release. In contrast, I focused more on pieces with a clearer sense of rhythm and pulse in part four — not necessarily percussive, but with a clearer and stronger rhythmic grid.

    Part three is out on Friday, and you can pre-save it here. I’m really looking forward to hearing what you think.

    Much love!

    Pat

     

  • Reflecting on a simple creative process

    Yesterday I had a good session of composition. I feel like recently my composition practice has been a little too much in foreign territory: incorporating too many new techniques and pieces of equipment. (I tend to do this often). I have been incorporating too many new approaches into the process, which meant that I didn’t feel like I was engaging my existing skill set.

    Over the weekend I had the pleasure of working with a bunch of high school students through a composition and production session. Preparing for this required me to really slim down the creative process into its most basic form. While teaching it, I and my student helper both agreed that we often complicate the creative process too much. What we were putting the students through sounded so simple, yet fun and explorative. We both said that we wanted to be doing what the students were doing in our own studio sessions.

    So yesterday, I did. I just carried out the creative process in a very simple format: improvising, landing on a core sound and idea, looping this and recording more sounds around it, experimenting with different processing techniques, mapping it out into a structure. All the time, just using Live and the Prophet as my main instruments, both of which I am very comfortable on.

    I spent some time back in session view while the core materials were playing in arrangement view, which allowed me to record little loops and random flourishes. I then looped these and recorded them into arrangement view, automating their levels and filters to allow them to gradually grow and retreat when necessary.

    When was necessary? Well, this brought me back to how I have typically carried out the arrangement process in the past. The structure emerges from some initial improvisation. This involves me recording a long performance, building the sound as I go until I have a full structure. I then spent some time tidying it up and getting rid of any errors. Sometimes I will trim the structure if I feel like I stayed too long in one level of intensity. I then build elements around the trajectory of this sound. The main sound forms the macro structure while the other supplementary sounds articulate the structures on smaller time scales.

    This process worked well with this piece I worked on yesterday. I actually started working on a part two of the piece, but it grew to be something entirely different, so I’ll probably split this off into its own project file.

    The whole process was just nice. It was about 2 hours of work. It engaged my existing skill set while still forcing me to challenge my abilities. I’ve been conscious of applying the concepts of deliberate practice to my creative work and I feel like this session was operating in the perfect range of difficulty — just beyond the current abilities — for encouraging skill development.

    HERE is a link to the result.