New track: Motion

It's been a while, but you know how it is when you're trying to keep your head above water in the world. Certain things fall by the wayside and unfortunately an online diary of events in my musical world is the least of my priorities. I have recently moved to a new location and finally managed to squirrel away some space for a dedicated studio at home thus avoiding a trip to Band HQ ever time there are some horns to toot.


So yeah, I dusted off my old trumpet and once again set forth to learn it. 'It's not like I play enough wind instruments already' I said to my Self and my Self just grumbled and requested a tea. I could already get a sound from it and pick a few different harmonics on each position, it's just figuring out what note is where. Anyway, a quick skip to the end and instead of sitting down and learning properly, I ended up recording some stuff instead. It turns out that a cheap trumpet, an SM58 and some standard reverb sound quite good with no EQ needed. A complete and rather irritating opposite of my beloved top-of-the-range saxophone.


I then built a track around some of the licks I'd recorded and after a few days tinkering came up with a nearly finished product. I always make a point to learn something or use something new in each work and this is no different. On listening to Flite by The Cinematic Orchestra late one night, I started to home in on the pedalled vibraphone sample and wondered how they had gone about making it sound like it did. I tried to replicate it by recording a series of sax phrases at the same speed of the track but on a faster tempo setting, then slicing the desired parts and putting them into a granular loop player to give a disjointed an uneven yet tempo matched sound. The outcome wasn't what I had intended, but I like the effect and for that reason chose to keep it in. All other instruments are pretty standard, got the usual Rhodes, piano and synthetic/real bass combo with a layered brass secion, some textures behind and samples taken from a CERES TV news broadcast about the 2011 New Zealand Earthquake. All the instruments were played by me.


Here's the linky:
http://soundcloud.com/dan-hillman/motion


I'll be bringing back the loop work soon after relocating to my new studio and will try to keep improving where I can.


FINÉ.