Track 2: Grapheme

BPM: 124

Duration: 5:16

Instructions:

- Track percussions are looped over 2 bars and unpredictable. First kick should be muted.

- Put a delay on master.

- Maximum number of sounds/samples used in this track is 4.

So, a grapheme is the smallest unit of a written language, a letter, or japanese character or such as. Glyphs are also graphemes. It doesn’t have to carry meaning on its own, but it can. So, I tried to tie together a bunch of disparate ideas in this track. Since a glyph is a grapheme, I tied in the idea of the “struggle” of my love by using as one of my sound sources a record titled The Truth About Adversity. It is a record made some time ago by the Christian Science Journal and Sentinel. I suspect, given the pretty open hippy metaphysical vibe of some of these records that they were done in the 60s, but I haven’t tried to find out.

You won’t ever really understand other people, and since you can’t see through another person’s eyes, much of what we say to one another all comes out as gobbledygook anyway, because, often, people’s motives don’t make any sense, so even with all of these ways of describing things, our own limitations make us misunderstood.

Overall, this jam has a little more serious of a feel, and I think the theme of adversity works well to where I was at during this time (ie: not working, arguing with my best friend about my plans to leave Colorado. Uncertain future, choices to make, you know, portrait of the artist and all that.). I took sound sources to mean that i could have four pieces of audio to draw from to build the track, but i used more than 4 channels, I believe, just multiple instances of one sound (I could be wrong, without going back to the project I can’t remember. I know there was at least one song on this album where i only had a handful of actual audio channels, this may have been it.). they are the record, the lead synth, the bass and a drum loop. 

The delay on the record’s channel, as well as the delay on the mater serves to break the reader’s voice into little wisps of sound and barely intelligible lumps of language, only becoming understandable in the brief instances that the beat drops out, and the speaking continues. So, again, I thought, little graphemes, some mean something, others don’t.

The drum sample is hand edited throughout the whole track, every measure has a change of some sort in it. I like to do this, it’s meditative, and you get results that are more interesting, I think, than what you can do if you allow a computer to chop beats for you. more deliberate, but almost more random, because after a while, if you’re not paying attention, you lose track of where you are, and the edits can become a mess. The way I fulfilled the “…first kick should be muted,” part of the track was by laying out the entire track, and then going through and removing the first kick of each instance of the loop as I was chopping up the beats.

The synth is pulling a lot of weight on here, and is the AniMoog, as is the bassline, just a different patch I made. There are so many fx on the synth, I don’t even know man. I’m not even sure how I got it to make so many noises just using the one patch, but it worked out. the delay over everything helped.

If you’d like to check out the album, you can go here.