Minimal gong

[ark]

A short project for the New Jersey Ableton Live/Electronic Music Artists meetup group.

The assignment was to compose a piece that was extremely constrained in some way. The constraint I chose was that all audio should come from a single (repeated) note from a single instrument--in this case, Collision.

I processed it through Corpus, Simple Delay, and Vocoder (with which I almost but not quite cheated by side-chaining a separate signal to control the filters).

You can listen here.

[wiresmith]

Its got Xmas Number One written all over it mate!

No, seriously, I quite like it. I believe Thomas Köner did a whole load of stuff (His album Teimo?) with processed gong noises, but I'm pretty sure he didn't use Ableton

You might also quite fancy a track called One String on Dani Siciliano's album Likes which is all made from the noise of one string.

Did you not allow yourself to reverse stretch and pitch the sample at all? Y'know using the warping and stuff? Resample chords of it using multiple tracks? I personally would consider this within the constraints.

[ark]

Its got Xmas Number One written all over it mate!

I'm quite sure I'm revealing my ignorance here, but I don't know the reference.

No, seriously, I quite like it. I believe Thomas Köner did a whole load of stuff (His album Teimo?) with processed gong noises, but I'm pretty sure he didn't use Ableton

You might also quite fancy a track called One String on Dani Siciliano's album Likes which is all made from the noise of one string.

Did you not allow yourself to reverse stretch and pitch the sample at all? Y'know using the warping and stuff? Resample chords of it using multiple tracks? I personally would consider this within the constraints.

Thanks for the pointers, I'll try to chase them down.

As for reverse stretching and pitching the sample -- there was no sample. I just used a MIDI loop containing a single note playing through a single instrument.

Oh yes, there was also a two-minute constraint.

What I really did was put together a group with 8 macros that I could tweak in interesting ways. Then, when I found something I liked, I went back over the automation and cleaned it up a bit. But that means that I now have a signal chain that I could use to mangle other stuff.

[Tone Deft]

cool idea for a project, I could use goals like that.

right when it got interesting it ended! could be a cool sound to go with some 4/4 kick thump stuff.

[ark]

cool idea for a project, I could use goals like that.

right when it got interesting it ended!

We had a 2-minute time limit

Also, I have recently been listening to Nine Inch Nails' "Ghosts I-IV", several tracks of which end abruptly like that, and I thought it was an interesting idea.

I should try doing something longer with the same strategy.