However, I have been working on my first drone composition for the past week and it's almost ready for prime time. I have avoided my usual journal style approach for this one because I've never written a straight drone piece before and I wasn't sure if it would even work.
However -- now that I'm down to the last couple of layers, I figured it would be safe to talk about it.
I've been wanting to write/perform/record a 'pure' drone composition since I got the Lyra-8 but other things have always taken precedence over it and ever since I got Clouds back in January and used it extensively during Jamuary, I have really been excited by the idea of a drone composition. But, like everything else I do, I needed a 'hook', something to grab me.
Since I've been experimenting with loops and musique concrete the past several months, I've been intrigued by the idea of a repeating loop with delay feedback creating a drone. I've tried experimenting with this a bunch of times but never liked the results. For this composition, however, I knew that would have to be my hook, and the base layer for the drone.
So I scoured Youtube for various recordings of the NYC subway system until I found a suitably gnarly metal-on-metal screech and created a 20 second loop from that. Using 3 delays, with 2 of them feeding back into each other, then adding the Blackhole, I experimented with delay feedback until I got a sound I liked; in the end, it sounds like the world exploding a little bit, or being caught inside a particle accelerator.
Once this was done (which took about a week of experimentation), I took one second from that screech, captured it in Clouds and then using Clouds' pitch shifting, recording four layers of Clouds. Due to the extreme length of the piece, this took me two days of experimentation to get where I liked it.
With the first 5 layers recorded, I then added two more layers of one of my Boomstar VCOs frequency modulating the other Boomstar VCO whilst also being PWM'd from an LFO. The final cherry on the cake was to take the sub out from the Boomstar and to pan the wave out and the sub out opposite each other and reocord two more layers, bringing the layer count up to 9 drones.
Today I added the Subharmonicon to the proceedings simply because the modular was out and I thought it would sound nice. I used all 6 oscillators on the SubH, also being modulated by LFOs and run through the Blackhole 100% wet and the Size also at 100%.
Unfortunately that's all I have had time for at this point. Like I said, the piece is very very long and each time I needed to get the level of the transcription loop lowered, that means recording it in real time in Logic and then re recording it back to the RC-5. This adds hours onto the process, but I like knowing that I have plenty of headroom.
The next step will be to add the Lyra-8 and see how that sounds, but for all intents and purposes, I actually like what I have thus far. For being a drone, and having NO melodic sequencing, or even tuning for that matter (it would be impossible to tune to the first layer of the metal on metal screeching anyway), the piece has a surprising ebb and flow to it. I have, on occasion, also been mesmerized by it, forcing me to start over because I missed an overdub point.
I am hoping to have it done in the next several days and when it is I will be sure to post it here. Strangely, I don't think this is my most experimental piece even though it's possibly the most out-there idea.
