Week 78 (again): Droning on
(This is a supplement because I forgot to add it to Week 78.)
I took part in the Disquiet Junto again. I thought it was a fun prompt this time:
The Assignment: Make a drone using just your voice.
Step 1: Think about what constitutes drone music.
Step 2: Make some drone music from nothing other than the sound of your own voice. You can manipulate and layer your voice, but please add no other instrumentation.
I set a guide tone to the lowest note I can easily sing (F2) and recorded myself singing various pitches over it until I had a collection of samples at the root and octave, and most of a scale above that. Then I chopped out some fairly seamless loopable sections, and played each one in its own track with a little reverb. For the highest couple of notes that were out of my range, I had to pitch up a sample by a few semitones. I mapped each of 16 knobs on a MIDI controller to a track, and brought them in and out while recording the output.
While I was making it, I was reminded of the way that sutras are chanted in Japanese Buddhist temples, and that put me in mind of a trip to Mount Kōya over a decade ago, where I watched a goma taki fire ritual early one morning.