In the late 80s/early 90s, Tsui Hark became a very famous filmmaker in the West with the success of his Chinese Ghost Story movies. Mixing traditional Chinese atmosphere, humor, mysterious horror, and romance, they are classic, especially the first one. And fortunately, they are on some streaming services, at least where I live. Rediscovering the movies made me want to play around with the horror atmosphere and traditional Chinese instruments.
The strings are a Guzheng, using several note samples and getting them into Directwave. The drums are Japanese taikos. This is mixed with some violins samples, and xylophone and bells. The drums might be a bit too much for the mysterious vibe I was going after, and I am not satisfied with the melodies used for the Guzheng. I like how they feel strange and slightly eery, but I don't like that I was not able to reproduce the type of melodies that are typically played on a Guzheng. This sounds more like a weird piano played on a stringed instrument. But this is a step in the right direction.
Anyway, I had some fun making this track. :)
I started a few tracks this week, including but not limited to a disco track with bagpipes and a rock track about stupidly inebriated evenings but in the end nothing really motivated me so I was playing around with samples on Saturday morning. I enjoyed the combination of drum n bass like staccato drums and guzheng and shamisen. I have used that in quite a few tracks last year during weekly beats, but hey I think it deserves more investigations and experiences!
So this is a track mainly built around guzheng/shamisen/traditional Japanese singing and then aphex twin like drum patterns. There is some neuro bass there. I wanted some more low ends but did not find the right sound and ran out of time. It's still raw, it's a draft but i kinda like it. This is one track i'd need to go back to and plunder for bits and ideas. The structure is a bit simple and would benefit from some variation as the end is really just a repeat of a previous section.
Done in FL Studio, featuring samples from Splice. I played with risers - from inverted toms to piano chords rendered as audio and inverted.
It's already week 9, time flies! I enjoy listening to the range of music that the community produces, from jazz to video games music to goth wave. This is inspiring and motivating!
Here is a speedtrash that ended up a bit better than my usual speedtrash or even some tracks where I did spend some time (looking at you, Week 8 track!).
It is a pretty straightforward EDM + Guzheng (Chinese string instrument) + Travis Barker drums but it works. I learnt a couple of things when doing that track so it was really worth it in the end.
What I need to try out next time: start earlier in the week instead of waiting until Sunday morning to get started. The streak name is "weekly streak", not "Sunday streak".
