Noise

Staying true to the title of this blog, I’ll first share the ideas behind two of my most experimental ‘songs’. The first track I’ll discuss was recorded several years ago. Back then, I didn’t have much fancy equipment, so I had to be creative. At my disposal were an electric guitar (an Epiphone LP black beauty), a Boss HM-2, a Boss FZ-2 and a 5 watt Blackstar amp. I simply put the guitar in front of my amp and let it feedback. With the controls on the guitar, effects and amp, I had some basic control over the color and pitch of the sound. It turned out to be quite an interesting exercise, as the sound responded both instantaneously, but also on a much longer timescale. Balancing between uncontrollable ringing and no sound at all proved to be difficult, but not impossible. It’s also worth noting that the distance between the guitar and the speaker are crucial if you feel like trying this.

The second track I would like to discuss was recorded much more recently, last week actually.

After buying a HOG2, one of the first things I wanted to try was to manipulate (white) noise and hum into music using additive synthesis (i.e. by adding harmonics to the fundamental). The noise mainly comes from a hyper fuzz, with no input signal and high gain settings. This method proved to relatively easy compared to my first attempt at harsh noise, as the signal is always in a stable state (it won’t change, unless you turn a knob). The down side is that it’s harder to create a slowly, organically, evolving sound. Some delay and reverb help, but it’s not the same.

Who knows, maybe I’ll combine to two methods to get the best of both worlds.