Last sunday there was a brass band playing in our neighbouring garden, mostly old salvation army songs. Here's a snippet I captured and slowed down by a factor of 10... makes for a nice ambient track. This will probably be the last I'll do of these, time to get a little more creative with alternative processing.
aah frels mig - hurtigt
This summer holiday I took some essential travel gear. Zoom H4, Yamaha Guitarlele and my iPhone 3G.
I really wish that the iPhone could use the Zoom as an audio interface... but alas the usb connection kit only works with the iPad and not the iPhones. Even just having access to the audio files on the H4 would be great.
Around the forrest cabin in Småland I made a number of field recordings with the handheld recorder. Percussion samples of objects not intended as percussion instruments, such as wood, firewood, old rusten barrels, lake (YES! It is possible to play percussion on a lake, just try it!), wood claps etc. Later I turned these into drum racks in ableton and started building a rhythm only using these sounds. Martin inspired me to make the clips in ableton with different lenghts and not following the bar lenght:
The effect is that fairly simple rhytmic patterns are creating a quite complex rhythm when playing together. Of course I added the Forest Reverb from this post.
If you like this kind of playing percussion on "non-percussion" instruments you should check this out:
Next exercise must be to sample tones from field recordings and create a piece of music with that....Coming up!
Just a product of last weeks late nights/early mornings of jet lag.... using a freeware moog synth called ASynth, the demo of the Aether reverb by Galbanum and some distortion from good old Audio Damage. Arranged and mixed in Ableton.
Spending 2 weeks in a swedish 1860 lodge out in the woods in Småland constantly reminded me of the lack of the background noise of the city. There's quite another kind of ambience in the woods. Each tree and stone scatters sound and creates a dark and atmospheric forest reverb. So with my little H2 handheld recorder and two pieces of wood I recorded a number of forest reverb impulse responses.
Listen to the effect in action (using LAConvolver) below the image. Download the impulse responses (24bit stereo waw-files).
I'm off on holiday, but for those of you still working hard, I made a samples set of my guzheng, played with a bow. Yes, yes... Sonic Couture have already made an excellent Guzheng sample library. In fact Rasmus bought it after he messed about with my Guzheng and has made several nice bits of music with it, which may pop up on this blog sometime in the future... if we all just poke him enough times.
This sample set is kinda different... comprised of short staccato bows with looped layers of gentle mallet playing. Therefore this is of course not a realistic Guzheng sample library (for that, get the Sonic Couture). On the other hand, the samples below have a little more sass and if you have Kontakt, you could always extract whatever samples tickle your funny bones.
Enjoy some samples of a Guzheng played the Atlastop way (right click to download.... warning it's 154mb!)
I seem to record this song whenever the family travels out of town without me.
local news predicts collapsing horizons
Done with stretched and effected Guzheng
Need that boxy bass sound? What about a complete sample-set of the Bogdon Box Bass that I built a while ago? 
The tone is halfway between a contrabass and a bucket bass, which we also sometimes use to record.
Of course this not a pro sample set, it's intentionally 'rustic' in it's vibe.
Download for Kontakt
Download for Ableton Live
As always, this is a CC release. See the sidebar for attributes. Have fun!
I recently found my girlfriends old Game Boy in a box in the basement. It's in great condition despite the fact that it was made 20 years ago. These old 8-bit wonders were really built to last. I bought a rom image of the music making software LSDJ from the developer and then bought a cartridge from Nonfinite Electronics who also flashed it with the software.
LSDJ running on Game Boy
Here is a short disturbing tune I made in the first hour of playing with it. I just made a few patterns and recorded it DI in LSDJ's very nice "Live" mode while tweaking the synths and the noise generator.
This new found couch friendly device is gonna add a nice color to future work. I must say I don't intend to get on the Chip tune train although some of that stuff is very good like this remix from little-scale.
Now off to rest my eyes after peering at a non-backlit screen for to long.