snowflakes

Equipment used

• OP-XY
• ZOIA 10k
• Bitwig

Story

I made this one evening as the snow was falling outside of my window. The song started as just chord exploration, but expanded to some sound design. I found a delay preset on the ZOIA called Snowfall, and I started trying to make twinkly snowflake sounds. I arrived at this.

I added some slow drums and continued tweaking the sounds, eventually linking 3 separate sounds together, all being run through the ZOIA's delay and the OP-XY's reverb.

As far as 'songs' go, this one isn't my best, but I'm happy with the feeling it elicites, and I am happy to upload it as my first song for this streak.

one of the first sketches I did in koala a while ago. kind of happy with the jaunty feel of it but not sure if it can be taken much further so happy to leave it as a rough beat idea.

Happy new year! This one is similar to the last few years of guitar-only pieces I can put together in a few sessions, though there's a bit of a departure: I'd wanted to build a guitar with a neck fretted for just intonation, so I could experiment with precise intervals and precise difference tones. This piece started with the fingerpicking pattern you hear first, which foregrounds some of those difference tones, rather than sticking with consonance. Timing is a bit loose; I'd wanted to play with a little more elastic quality.

This ended up being a bit tricky to edit: initially, it was about six, seven minutes, though I reduced all of the sections to half, and took out a few. While I liked the suspension of time there, it maybe got a bit too meander-y at this slow tempo.

For this piece, I'm also reintroducing a pedal--in this case, the Reuss Effects Understate, which is a clean boost. The parts panned center and left get this, while the bridge pickup (panned right) does not. Otherwise, everything's straight into the UA Volt, which has a pretty good overdriven sound you can hear on some peaks.

There's some convolution reverb send, and the usual light compression/eq on the stereo channel.

The title comes from the somewhat arduous process of finding places with 575 feet of elevation above sea level. I ended up throwing in the towel and going with Presque Isle's Gull Point, which does have some patches surveyed at 575.

This is not exactly the track I wanted to do. I heard a song that mixed good rock, electronic, and shamisen and wanted to capture that. But I struggled with it overall so this ended up being a half baked shamisen/synthwave track. A track is a track, that still counts!

Happy new year 2025 and thank you OneZero for creating the streak this year again.

Back for another year, starting off with some spooky ambient made with VCVRack. I love the software but haven't figured out good ways to get well-mastered output from it, so you get some mad frequencies now and again. Still, I'm quite happy with this one.

This track is called Dust and sweeps away the remnants of the old year, making room for something new.
morse