creative accountability, in my paradise

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

I've been shying away from samples—they seem hard to work with—but after being inspired by videos about Bitwig's Sampler instrument, I noodled together in-my-paradise-2022-07-13-2319.mp3:

This was a good exercise, but I'm not too happy with the final product itself. Finding good source material is an essential part of the process and can be incredibly time consuming. Even in the best of circumstances, I'm short on time, and in this case I was rushing to try something instead of taking the time to find something more ideal or taking the time to shape the sample into something that works better. That said, the process was fun: I went to archive.org and looked through their 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings, and eventually found Bing Crosby favorite hawaiian songs Volume One. Track 9 is "Paradise Isle" and I found something likable to try.

I tried to accompany the sample with drums and a melody on the Wurlitzer instrument, but all told it feels quite off kilter. I think I'll have to either find better samples or learn better techniques for noise correction, time stretching, pitch, and slicing them to be played in a more MPC-like way.