new song, "turtles on fire"

this song started originally with a loop being put through reaper's fft plugin in a way that let only the fundamentals of the bass and rhodes piano and a little bit of the snare drum through. i also used a really high fft window size, which smears everything together. for the trombone sound, i did something i've never done before, which was to reduce the stereo width of the sound post-reverb to make it dead center. usually i like the trombone to be full and stereo and engulfing, but there's something cool about having a sound with lots of reverb completely mono in the center. it feels lo-fi, distant, and pulls your ears directly to that sound. i think i'll reduce the trombone's stereo width to some degree in more songs from now on. i used ariesverb for the reverb as i do often these days. while it lacks fancy pre-delay and high-pass frequency settings and all that shit, it gets me exactly the sound i want everytime, whether it's adding what to me is a good-sounding room reverb or something long and spacious for ambient stuff. plus, it has a buffer-freeze function which i use extensively on improvised ambient stuff sometimes.

i also played some simple quarter, half, triplet quarter and triplet 8th notes on different pitches with my ukulele then sliced them up with dblue's glitch and mucked them up further still with audio damage's dubstation, putting the buffer-loop function to good effect there. i also used dubstation's buffer-loop effect on the trombone part. audio damage's stuff is pretty great. check it out.

lastly, i recorded some ambient noise off my 8th floor balcony outside with my zoom h4 and put that in the background of the song. this is something i started doing a few months ago to add air to these kinds of songs. just adding some low-level background noise of traffic, birds chirping, kids playing at a playground or something really helps to make sort of a framework for all the fake reverbs and delays to sit in. also, i often have trouble getting enough high frequency content in my songs, so a little noise from outside takes up that space and rounds out the frequency spectrum nicely. i also high-pass the outside noise around a few hundred hertz so the bass doesn't muddle things up. oh, i almost forgot. i also made a bass drone with synth1 widened up with ariesverb and just let it play the whole song.

that's it.