Aaron Parecki

Day 47. Today I wanted to use a bunch of samples from NASA shuttle launches. I started by finding a countdown I liked, and then grabbed samples from a bunch of different NASA launches to overlay them. I retimed the countown to fit the beat, and took some liberties with the order of some of the sounds, like adding the mic chirp in places it wouldn't normally exist. I used a recording of a shuttle launch as the foundation. The video is an assortment of clips I found on the Internet Archive from various NASA missions.

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.