There are some days where the feeling just isn’t there. Today was one of them.
Polyend released a new beta for the Tracker today, 1.3.0b1. It added a bunch of new features, including the ability to monitor the line in during playback, and destructive time stretch. For this jam, I wanted to try both out.
To test out the time stretch, I took an 80 bpm guitar loop from Samplified and stretched it to 95 bpm. It was a bit warbly, so I added chorus and reversed it. That is the opening part of the song. Given the ambient sound that came from the loop, I decided to go in a more mellow direction. I sampled a couple of my Pocket Operators (PO-32 and PO-16) and my Korg NTS-1. I also used a live bass guitar sample, and a Circuit Monostation sample. Finally, I added my trusty Korg Kaossilator to the line in with a little 2-bar piano loop.
It turned out…fine. There wasn’t much motion to the song. I specifically avoided making anything that sounded like a melody, and maybe that was the missing glue that could have stuck it all together. At least I got to play with some new features on the sampler.
Song Imagery From Miss BC
The camera looks through a window of a second story brick building. We see the back of a man seated at his large drafting table…empty cups of coffee surrounding him and crumbled pieces of paper on the floor. He has his head in both hands and is distressed. He picks up the pencil and adds to the character on the page, but sighs in exasperation. He is about to crumble the sheet of paper but the character in the drawing winks at him. Shocked, the man looks closer and notices the character motioning for the man to draw a pencil on the page. The character smiles as the pencil appears on the paper. Using that pencil, the character begins to draw his own backdrop. The character indicates in thought bubbles for additional colors and he begins to bounce around the page filling in the drawing. The character eventually draws a ladder for himself to climb out of the page. The man is still watching in disbelief as the character tosses the crumbled sheets of paper on the floor onto the drafting table and motions for the man to uncrumple them. The character gets to work and excitedly motions to the man where to draw more. They work like this all night until…the sun is streaming through the window which awakens the man. His face is plastered to one of the drawings and he looks and sees a stack of finished drawings and thinks, what a weird dream.
