Not only did I record a new album in 2021 (during February, for the RPM Challenge), later in the year I also recorded what I can only really describe as a single (as in, it was only one track, and it wasn’t 35 minutes long!) This came about when Spitfire Audio announced a competition to record a piece of music using their “3” sound library (developed with the composer Alev Lenz). The rules were quite straightforward – we could only use the sounds from this library (and also external audio sounds, such as live instruments or audio recordings), and it had to be no longer than 4 minutes.
Getting started…
I bought and downloaded the library (yes, I see the cunning marketing ploy, but I wouldn’t have bought it if I hadn’t liked what I’d heard of it) and started to play around with it. Some ideas came around fairly quickly – one idea especially. I was impressed by how organic the sounds were, which lead to a plan for my external audio sounds…
Since I started working from home in March 2020, I’ve been going for a daily walk in the countryside that isn’t all that far from my front door. I also post a photo from the walk each day on Twitter with the comment “Socially distant” (a play on the UK government’s policy of social distancing at the start of the pandemic) – and this became the title of the track (and I also used one of the photos for the cover). One of the walks I do is around some woods that are just around the corner from my flat, so I decided that in place of percussion I would record my own footsteps as I walked round the woods.
Making the field recordings
I’d settled on 90 BPM for the track, so I recorded what was effectively a four minute long 90 BPM click track, saved it to my phone and walked up to the top of the woods with my Bluetooth earphones and my Zoom H1 recorder. I recorded myself walking along one of the paths (along the top of the woods and then down one side) and brought it home to have a listen. It sounded great, but it hadn’t really picked up any of the birdsong which I would have liked, so I went back into the woods the following evening just to record some birds (this is when I decided that the big red “record” button on the Zoom H1 is also a mute button for birds! They would be singing happily, I would press the record button, and they would all stop). Eventually I managed to get a few minutes of reasonable birdsong recorded when I sat on one of the benches, pressed record and left the recorder on the bench next to me for a while. I also went back again the following evening to record a few short segments of birdsong to fill in a couple of the gaps.
Listening back to the music (with the field recordings added), I could hear some annoying little high-pitched metallic tings near the beginning of the track. It turned out they were on the recording of the footsteps – I think it was my keys jingling in my pocket while I was walking. I was worried that I might have to redo the recording, but a quick EQ tweak fixed the problem. There was also some quite loud traffic hum on the shorter birdsong recordings which I was able to clear with Audacity‘s noise reduction tool. I tried applying the same noise reduction to the main birdsong track too, which was largely quite effective, but there is a plane flying overhead towards the end which sounded very weird with the noise reduction on, and as – by this point – the clock was ticking, I left it as it was.
The music
The music itself came together quite nicely. Being “limited” to just the one plugin turned out to be quite liberating. Instead of trawling through any number of plugins that I have installed, trying to find the ideal sound, everything I could use was right there in front of me. Before long I had the basis of the music recorded, and fairly quickly everything developed on top of that. There was a fair amount of time spent refining everything and getting it to sound as good as I could, and then it was ready.
Inspiration for my next album
The focus that came with just using the one sound library for the whole track made me think of doing something similar for my next RPM Challenge album. I’ve decided to try and use just one plugin per track on the album, plus percussion sounds (eg, from other plugins, or from my Hydrogen drum software), field recordings and other audio (eg, downloaded sound effects). So, although there may be some noises from other places, the emphasis will be to source most of the sound from just one plugin. And the way things are going with my VST library, they are likely to be from Spitfire Audio, or perhaps from the excellent Piano Book collection.