52 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
52 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Stellar Chant
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tags: music
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---
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_postmortem_
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This was my first ever solo live and first ever ambient live.
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May 2022 at <a class="external-link" href="https://festiwalswiatla.hs3.pl/ ">Festiwal Światła</a>
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### How I prepared
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- I talked a lot with folks and gathered informations and inspirations
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- I was thinking about using Number Stations sample and got nice SkyKing recording link from my friend - decided to go with it, as it was great even without processing
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- Decided to go PC-less, so I took Deluge, Korg NTS-1, looper, singing bowl and drums
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- I decided to split whole thing into 3 parts:
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- first, most `dark ambient` like with the sample
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- second, more energy focused, with live drums
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- third, more `casual generative ambient` to calm down and finish off
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- I still prepared a lot of sounds in my DAW and exported WAV files to Deluge, where I would set them up in a song
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- I got idea for underlying beat for part 2 from listening to clipping.
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- I bounced demos with friends to get early feedback
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- Got in touch with friend to create visuals and control lights
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- Got in touch with other friends to do a fireshow during the second part
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- Printed (in multiple copies) a "cheat sheet" to know when and what to do
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### The setup
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Deluge was the main "brain" of the operation. It had the whole song arranged, so I had to do there is to press play. I had one track with noisy synth to play at the end of part 2. It was connected directly to the mixer.
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I had a contact mic on snare drum, that I played using brushes. This mic went to a looper (so I could do other things) that went into Korg NTS-1. Korg NTS-1 had `ensemble` effect on (to make mono signal stereo again) and heavy reverb with riser delay. I played with delay time and amount to create texture. It went to mixer as well.
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I had a single mic for singing bowl, went straight into the mixer.
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Lastly, there was a floor tom with cymbals (and mic to gather the sound) to play during the second part.
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### What went right
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- I survived
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- Visuals and fireshow added a lot to the live perfomance
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- I did learn a lot during all this time (more on that later)
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- I managed to do it all in under a month
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- I created a set that I actually really liked
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- PC-less setup was actually working great. Deluge may be a small cheat thou, as it's basically a hardware DAW
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### What went wrong
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- I was too quiet. Definitely don't soundcheck without external help.
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- I didn't test how singing bowl sounds on larger scale. Hitting it was really meh and I was to stressed to do proper sound in any other way. Quickly ditched it
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- I heard myself not good enough - to the point where I lost programmed beat and was playing unevenly on drums to it.
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- Fireshow was great, but when it ended and quiet, simple music slowly started to appear, many people thought it was already over.
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- Visuals were on a laptop that died day before the show, so I had quickly made up ones. Lesson - always back up those. And have them with you, so you don't have to rely on external folks
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- I let the momentum go away and didn't finish up live version to release as studio album. And, at this point, I will probably never will - unless I revisit it
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That's it as my memory is bit fuzzy.
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It was great experience, great first barrier broken and I've learned a lot to make [[Spectral Forge]] better.
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