Starting the Composition

During Julia Schauerman’s talk on her work and creative process, “MetalWorks” stood out to me. This piece uses recordings of a construction site, slowed down to create the majority of the piece. Doing this creates a great basis to construct on top, as it’s full of texture, rhythm, ambiguity and atonality allowing anything to be added.

I wanted to do something similar to this with glass, slowing it down to create this basis. 

I started with Soniccoutures Glass/Works “Cristal Baschet” on the Hard Mallet setting. This changes the cristal into a percussive instrument. I did this so that when it was slowed down, it would have more texture and interesting sounds.

After this, I added reverb and a heavy compressor to accentuate the peculiar sounds. Also having each hit has a reversed version underneath, so when the sounds started to fade out, they rose into the next hit too.

While I enjoyed this draft, I wanted more tonality and harmony to build the piece up. To do this, I got the same VST and recorded them on the accent setting, which is a staccato mode. After this, I slowed it down the same amount and used the same effects.

I enjoy both of these sounds, but I think I prefer it without the accented sounds of the cristal. I’ll look into other tones I can create with this method, perhaps with other instruments.