icom 7-17-11 ipa-arse pennies Click to listen
I have been out of town this week, so I had to use my net-book for the last ICOM. It’s not a very powerful machine, so I didn’t want to bog it down with capturing the screen-cast. So just audio this week! Also, I didn’t bring my new ICOM compliant instruments, so that will have to wait until the next chef to make it’s debut. Regardless, I am pretty happy with this last submission. I used a tool that I have been playing around with for a while, but never used in a composition until now. It is Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch, and it lives up to it’s name. This tool is made to stretch sounds to ridiculous lengths such as 50x and up. If you ever wondered what a song would sound like over the period of a few days, this tool is what you would use. I really enjoy the textures it creates, and melodic sources sound very pleasing and grand. Check out this absolutely transcending 1000% stretch of the Jurassic Park theme to see what I mean. Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch is open-source and available for Linux and Windows. It’s free, so why not give it a spin?
You can find this week’s ICOM source and submissions here. The source was the audio from an ad for bit coins. I chose to utilize the melodic sound effects to create my instruments. Unfortunately, a lot of the vocals were layered with sound effects, making any type of clever rewording difficult, so I just went with an instrumental piece. The long pad in the background was from a short vibraphone flourish stretched to over 8 minutes. A shorter pad makes an appearance in the middle of the track which is just a pitched sample from this stretch. The rest of the instruments are just pitched vibraphone notes, and the drum sounds are mostly from other sound effects from the source. This piece is quite a bit longer than my typical 2 minute songs, but I feel like there is a lot less going on in this one. Still, the pads are quite pleasing, and the pace is a nice change from the norm. The title (bit coins=butt coins=butt pennies=arse pennies) is a low-brow homage to this Upright Citizens Brigade skit.
Let me know what you think!
Drums from Anything
Ironchef of Music is a competition to create new music from unlikely sources. We love ICOM because it allows us to use sample manipulation in new ways that otherwise wouldn’t be necessary in typical music production. One such practice is creating drum sounds from any given sound.
Typically you would just record a drum, or use one of many drum synthesizers or sample packs. However in ICOM, we do not have the luxury of using outside sounds, or any outside oscillations from drum synthesizers. So what do we do? Using similar techniques of drum modeling found in synthesizers, we reshape the sounds we are given to become more drum like. I was giving some fellow “cheffers” some tips on how to do this, when I decided that it’s a rather tedious task to redo for every chef session, where time is very limited.
Where there is a need, there is innovation! So with a night of tinkering around in Reaktor, I put together a genuine ICOM compliant sample oscillated drum synthesizer. ICSODS uses the mystery sample as the heart of the synthesizer, and models a drum sound out of whatever you throw at it. Since it is all live, you can tweak all the parameters live, making it sound close to a real drum synth in one second, and like a bizarre sound-scape the next. I still have a lot of work I’d like to put into it, but I’m very happy with the different and unexpected sounds I could extrapolate from it that I never would have been able to achieve hand editing the sounds.
Give a listen to a sample of ICSODS as I morph between several presets I made (morphing presets is another unexpected bonus to the machine!) The following recording is produced entirely from the sound of Obama talking about ducks, a sample from a previous ICOM competition.
ICOM DRUMS test morphs 1
Above is a recording of the plug-in morphing between 3 presets and finally slowing down to a stop in real time to show some of it’s capabilities. The presets are: non-drums, junkyard kit, and a house kit. I use presets to make new kits from the same sample, and because there are so many controls, it is an easy way to mess with it. Morphing between presets is a Reaktor feature that works well with this instrument.
The kit consists of 8 modules; bass drum, snare, closed hat, open hat, low tom, high tom, zip, and cymbal crash. Each module can be output to a separate routing channel and can send to rudimentary delay, reverb, and phaser modules. I might work on more modules like claps and cow bells. You always need more cow bells.
Ring-like modulation from Anything
One tool that is common in electronic music is a ring modulator. Typically a ring modulator multiplies a sound source with a sine wave. This the reason hard-core “cheffers” frown on the tool. It inserts an outside oscillation into the mix. But ring modulators are a lot of fun, and very useful sound designing tools. So to be able to produce something similar, I made a machine that replaces the sine wave with oscillations found in the mystery sample. It turned out to be easy to make, but also very fun, creating lots of unexpected sound textures.
The first recording is a few examples using a Glenn Beck sample on a Glenn Beck sample from a previous ICOM session, and another using a tone sample with different oscillations on both left and right channels to show off how it works with stereo signals and to show off the updated stereo icom drum machine which is also using the same sound.
ICOM Ring-Like Modulator Test_Beck
ICOM Ring-Like Modulator Test_stereo tones and drums
Hope you like the weird sounds. I plan on using these tools for the next ICOM, so keep an eye out! Let me know if you have any suggestions!
This week, the Ironchef of Music’s mystery sample was a speech on LGBT rights by President Barack Obama. The speech was interrupted by someone’s duck quack ringtone.
Find other entries on the ICOM site here.
ICOM is essentially a producers music competition. It differs from other competitions by it’s unusual constraints. Producers are only allowed to use the mystery sample and nothing else! No synthesizers, no guitars, just very skilled manipulation of the source sample. To make it even more interesting, the whole process can only take two hours! Watch more of our screencasts on our Vimeo Channel here.
Ironchef of Music 5-15-11 from ipaghost on Vimeo.
This week, the Ironchef of Music’s mystery sample was a string of gibber jabber from the Fox conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck.
Glenn Beck Making Funny Noises
Find other entries on the ICOM site here.
ICOM is essentially a producers music competition. It differs from other competitions by it’s unusual constraints. Producers are only allowed to use the mystery sample and nothing else! No synthesizers, no guitars, just very skilled manipulation of the source sample. To make it even more interesting, the whole process can only take two hours! Watch more of our screencasts on our Vimeo Channel here.
Most of you might have heard about the The Royal Wedding featuring Prince William and Catherine Middleton. If you haven’t, most likely you have just awaken from a tragically long coma. Welcome back.
So what does ICOM have to do with the Royal Wedding? Well, it was the mystery source of course!
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