Composition Challenge #15 - Voting - (GUITAR SOUNDSCAPES!)

Antique_Guitars

Hi Everyone,

This is the combined Voting and Discussion thread.

Thanks to all that entered the competition.

Please use this thread to cast your votes for your favourite entries to Fretboard Challenge #15.
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Voting System - voters can pick their top 3 favourite entries.

First choice gets 5 points - Second choice gets 3 points - Third choice gets 1 point

Entry with the most points wins.

Simply post in this thread your top three choices for winner in order, 1st choice first etc etc. 

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(Note for Entrants of the competition: Self Voting is NOT Allowed)


The winner will be announced just before midnight on the 30th November, voting will close at 11.30pm on that day.

(you can edit your vote up to the time voting closes)

A reminder of the competition Guidelines:

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GUITAR SOUNDSCAPES

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Create an amazing piece of soundscape music using only guitar, feel free to make percussive sounds or whatever you can but only use guitar. NO TIME LIMIT!

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Please see all the entries uploaded on SoundCloud below.

https://soundcloud.com/thefretboard/sets/fretboard-challenge-15

Fretwired

Had a first listen and there's a track a really like .. but .. is it a soundscape?? I will have to mull this over. Great job everyone.

thecolourbox

Fretwired said:

Had a first listen and there's a track a really like .. but .. is it a soundscape?? I will have to mull this over. Great job everyone.

I think if you have to ask "Is it a soundscape" then it is a soundscape, or something like that

Fretwired

thecolourbox said:

Fretwired said:

Had a first listen and there's a track a really like .. but .. is it a soundscape?? I will have to mull this over. Great job everyone.

I think if you have to ask "Is it a soundscape" then it is a soundscape, or something like that

Not necessarily ... I think its more of a rhetorical question ..

steamabacus

I had a listen to the playlist last night - it popped up on my SoundCloud stream while the FretBoard was down (for me) for some reason - and I have a definite 'top four'. I just have to pare that down to three and put them in order.

Another listen tonight.

steamabacus

Here's how I went about mine.


Elohim - recording notes

I’ve not been feeling very creative over the last few months and so, even though ‘soundscaping’ is familiar territory for me (although who knows if my definition is the same as anybody else’s?), I was finding it very difficult to sit down and try to record something.

My initial thought was to record a single live looping performance (which I have done in the past, both recorded and to an audience) but that would have required more focus and inspiration than I could muster.

So the fall back position was to take a looping performance from my ‘guitar diaries’ (a series of sketches and ideas that constitute the bulk of my ‘creativity’ these days) and revisit it, augment it and flesh it out into a fuller musical idea. It was always the plan that these recorded diary ideas could be the basis for more developed pieces but this rarely seems to actually happen.

So, I went back through what I have and settled on ‘Elohim’ as the piece to work with. The original looper performance (actually an edit down from about 12 mins) can be heard here …
http://stevebaker.bandcamp.com/track/elohim

The track was named back when that original loop was recorded - the sounds brought up images of William Blake and the illustration I chose to go with it is Blake’s ‘David Delivered out of Many Waters’. For this challenge I decided to try and overlay some ocean sounds (normally I would use actual recordings of the sea - I’ve spent a fair few hours of my life sat on beaches recording breaking waves as well as numerous other environmental sounds - but for this challenge I would have to construct them with the guitar) and then augment the original loop with ebow lines and guitar fx to ‘fill it out’ without changing the basic cyclical, looper-based arrangement.

For both the original loop and the extra parts added for this challenge I used my trusty old Line6 DL4 looper - it has its limitations (sums loops to mono, limited loop time) but its double/normal/half speed and forward/reverse functions are perfect for creating amorphous soundscapes; I also have a Digitech JamMan SoloXT which is a much better featured looper in many ways but it can't mangle sounds like the DL4 can.

The sea sounds were created using the noise bleed from a Boss PH-1R phaser and BF-2 Flanger. I switched on all my overdrives, turned off the noise supressor (NS-2) for maximum hiss, added a couple of delays and then looped up a series of ‘washes’ on the DL-4 (using a volume pedal to fade the washes in/out). I did this twice, recording the two noise loops alongside the original backing loop on Cubase SX, panned left and right. This was all done pretty quickly and haphazardly but I’m quite pleased with the effect.

To augment the main loop, I layered up three more ebow tracks played ‘live’ along with the backing rather than looping them. One was a ‘bass’ part (using my TC Sub’n’Up octaver), one was a ‘lead’ part and, finally, one ‘top’ part comes in towards the end to give a bit of a lift. I deliberately kept these parts as simple as possible - the idea wasn’t to develop the arrangement but rather to fill out and augment what was already there. All three parts were improvised in one take using just three or four notes. There are also a couple of ‘fx’ tracks, scratching and scraping the strings through two or three delays. The twittery percussive effects (which are also on the original loop recording) use a brass slide - actually a bit of cut-down curtain rail I’ve had for thirty years - scraped and ‘bounced’ on the strings. I love these sorts of noises. I blame Syd Barrett!

It was then just a case of mixing the ingredients - original backing track, two ‘sea noise’ loops’, three ebow parts and two scraping/scratching tracks for eight tracks in total. All guitar.


Considering I was bereft of inspiration and slapped everything down in a pretty rough-and-ready fashion, I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.

kuryakin85

Had an initial listen and this is super fun! Definitely a job for headphones though!

Sporky

steamabacus said:

Here's how I went about mine.
[snip]

Blimey.

I knocked up a patch, retuned the 7-string for more droneys and flogged away at it for four minutes or so.

No wonder yours sounds better!

Fretwired

Sporky said:

steamabacus said:

Here's how I went about mine.
[snip]

Blimey.

I knocked up a patch, retuned the 7-string for more droneys and flogged away at it for four minutes or so.

No wonder yours sounds better!

I was going to give you 5 points but you've just done a Gerald Ratner so now I'm not sure ... :-) :-)

Sporky

It's the first recording I've posted in a few years.

So you can either encourage more, or put me off forever. THE POWER!

I did spend a day or two getting ideas together, but the final recording is just one guitar track - recorded, topped, tailed and normalised.

kin

Great pieces everybody, I have my top three but no idea in which order yet.
Thanks for the breakdown of your track @steamabacus , really interesting.
I'm amazed that some of you spent as little time as you say and still come up with such good stuff.

   Mine was, Three guitar tracks using the Bias FX app and then four tracks of guitar triggering various iOS synths via the midi guitar app.
   Moog model 15 for the first melody, Synthmaster player for a low droney thing and then Thor for the Theremin and choir sounds.

Fantastic to see so many entries this time around and thanks @Antique_Guitars for putting the challenge together.

Antique_Guitars

Listened to some of this stuff and its really good!

DulcetJones

Antique_Guitars said:

Listened to some of this stuff and its really good!

I just listened to all of them and found the whole thing to be a great experience.  I may have to download them.

Fretwired

Sporky said:

It's the first recording I've posted in a few years.

So you can either encourage more, or put me off forever. THE POWER!

I did spend a day or two getting ideas together, but the final recording is just one guitar track - recorded, topped, tailed and normalised.

Some of the best riffs in history were recorded in a few minutes ..... taking two months to record something is no guarantee its any good. Mine took less than 1.5 hours from beginning to email.

Fretwired

My setup was:

Guitar: Yamaha Pacifica Mike Stern signature
Pedals: TC Ditto X2 > Strymon OB1 > Strymon Mobius > TC Flashback Triple Delay > Strymon Dig > TC T2 Reverb
Pedals wired in stereo into Steinberg UR44 audio interface
Recorded in Cubase via Amplitube 4 using Fender Deluxe amp routed in stereo with two SM 57 mics
Final mix via iZotope Ozone

I recorded a series of loops and then setup the three delay engines on the Flashback to ping-pong, digital and tube delay routed in series. This created loops that regenerated automatically as I switched the delays on and off. I mixed them together and applied EQ. The slow lead lines were a digital and I used a volume pedal. The boom was me banging the guitar and then applying EQ and the shaker was a shaker sample.

I wanted to create an idea of dawn slowly breaking.

kuryakin85

Seeing as it seems to be the norm, thought I'd list the setup;

Gretsch 5422TDC > Memory Boy, Ts808, Rams Head Muff, Arpanoid, DL4 > Vox AC15.
Recorded with one '58 (the only crappy mic I have) into garageband.

I had two sessions, maybe an hour and a bit each, and just made noise, I am obsessed with how that guitar feeds back, its so musical and controllable that I always start there, record a track of me just manipulating feedback with delay and just build around it. Having finished one that came out with bright I had a crack at something a little darker and found myself liking it a little more. I also messed around unplugging the input jack, running it through the pedalboard and waving it around, seeing what contact would make it do something fun, touching the pickups is pretty interesting!

I really think this challenge was so open to interpretation that people indulging in a little experimentation made for something really fun! Sometimes structure is the enemy of creativity.

Still haven't found winners, all rad, only my second listen through!

stratman3142

They're all really good and show great imagination.

I'm not sure that mine really qualifies as a soundscape now I've listened to the others. Oh well, it's all good fun and a spur to creativity.

My setup was Strat > Zoom UAC-2 Audio Interface > Reaper (DAW) > S-Gear-2 (based on American Clean Preset) VST > Valhalla Ubermod VST > Valhalla Shimmer VST > Voxengo Elephant Master Limiter VST

The picture is a photograph I took of Exmouth Estuary. I then used GIMP to add a lens effect, which led to the title of Refraction.

Grunfeld

I have a definite favourite.  Undecided for the 2 and 3 slots.

ElectroDan

Just had a good listen to all. Congratulations chaps. My points go to:
1st - Fretwired
2nd - Stratman3142
3rd - Steamabacus

Grunfeld

I have listened to all at least a couple of times now.  Gotta admit that having a dog in the race makes one’s ears sharper!

5 -- Steamabacus
3 -- Kin
1 -- Fretwired

@Steamabacus    My favourite.  For me, a sound scape is somewhere between noise and music.  This piece puts me there.  It is a place between two horizons:  in one direction the structures of musicality become noise that get increasingly chaotic with greater distance; in the other direction musical order and recognisable forms become gradually more formulaic until at the very edge of perception you can hear the smooth sounds of Magic FM.  Between chaos and muzak it's a massively wide spectrum and the soundscape is in there somewhere.... not quite music, not quite noise.
"Elohim" unfolds, grows, concludes.  When I saw the screen shot of the recording I understood why.  I don’t know how I feel about screen shots:  I love the way they explain what I’m hearing, but they also show you how the trick is done.  Listening obviously has to be done in the present, I.e. you can’t hear the beginning, middle, and end simultaneously.  The screen shot shows the passage of time in a snapshot though.  It's as if you can see the rabbit waiting to emerge from the hat.
Anyway, love this.

These next two could nearly be interchangeable for me vote-wise.

@Kin This is a lovely little piece however for me it’s kind of ironic that it was the choirs and the heavily-filtered, resonant synth-like sounds which were elements that kind of detracted.  The sparse guitar behind those sounds was really nice.  I liked the conclusion to the piece.

@Fretwired Definitely ticks the sound scape brief and although it didn't grab me at first I've liked it more with each listen.  

And other thoughts:  
@Sporky 60s psychedelic vibe, clearly made after a few hallucinogenic hob nobs.  It could easily be worked into a song or more structured bit of music.
@Veganic Tidy little vignette.  
@DulcetJones Tardis noises are great!  Horror scape.  Pretty cool horror scape but I struggle with discordant music…
Which was similar to the experience with @Kuryakin85 ‘s creation — again, the limitation is with me on this.
@Stratman3142 Pretty lovely as it happens — the opposite of discordant and I liked it.  I talked about two horizons and this is much more towards the musical horizon of “sound scape.”

I enjoyed this task.  Like Sporky, it has been the first thing to inspire me to post anything for quite a while.

Fretwired

@ElectroDan and @Grunfeld -thanks for listening, voting and the comments. Much appreciated.