Aaron Parecki

Day 45. This is the first time I've recorded my own audio for a song, and only the third time I've used audio samples at all. The clinking glass sound I recorded on the kitchen counter. It's me hitting two pint glasses with the handle of a tea spoon. I recorded about 8 takes of 16 bars of the rhythm. I used the best five 4-bar phrases in the final song. It was an interesting experiment cleaning up the audio so that it worked well with the rest of the song. I first used a high pass filter to remove all the low frequencies which cut out the "thumping" sound and the sound of the glass slowly sliding on the table every time I hit it. I discovered that Logic Pro has a "quantize" function that works on audio, not just midi! I used that to get the glass hits better synced up with the beat. I used a pitch adjustment filter to drop the pitch about a quarter tone at the end of the first and third bars of each phrase. I liked the way this detuning sounded, so I echoed that in some of the other instruments as well. The on-the-beat high tone is detuned a step mostly at the end of the phrase, but there's a whole phrase I left it detuned the whole time. I included a brief snippet of video of me recording the clinking sounds just for fun.

Day 44 - Another attempt at using different kinds of pianos. The first one you hear is doubled, with the second track moving in and out of tune over the phrase. It's EQ'd to only hear high frequencies, making it sound sort of "tinny". The second one that comes in is actually two different pianos, panned hard right and hard left. They are adjusted to sound "warm". Finally the bass piano comes in which is restricted tightly to the low frequencies, with a peak at a frequency matching a low C which gives it a sort of resonance.

Day 43. This one kind of just meanders for a while without a lot of resolution. It seemed appropriate today for some reason.

Day 42. I'm heading to DonutJS tonight to film the evening's talks. I threw this together to use as the intro/outro music after I publish them. It's a re-creation in a similar style to the stock music I've used on those videos before, so nothing fancy. The video is the background of the donutjs.club website.

Day 41. I originally thought I would use a clean pulse synth sound for this one, but then decided it sounded better as a piano sound instead. I also added a bass line that mirrors the piano's low notes to fill out the sound. The bass line has an EQ filter that moves around during the sustained parts in order to give it a sense of motion until the next phrase comes in. I have a whole second part I want to add to this, but this was getting long and I was getting tired, so I stopped there. At the end, I added a very subtle crackling filter that fades in and out during the middle.