How to perform in your own private Gun Bay

Just as crossing the line had to be made in my studio using samples from onboard HMAS Onslow, I’ve put together Gun Bay over the last few days. If the sampling was detailed in crossing, it wasn’t anything compared to this. As you may remember from this earlier post, the score itself includes floor diagrams and photographs of all of the objects that should be hit in concert. The sampler itself now includes several hundred sounds from the Gun Bay, and I’ve been able to trigger them with a variety of MIDI instruments including an Alesis drum pad to give a real “performed” sound.

This has literally given me the ability to play on any of those objects right here, in my studio, and to perfect the resulting recording. There are almost limitless ways it can be performed, since the score allows performers to put the sections together in any way they like, and I’m having fun choosing the order that I’ll present the ideas in the final, fairly short performance, for the CD version of Noise Husbandry.

James studio set-up

My studio with an electric piano, Alesis drum pad and Ableton Push set-up for recording realistic MIDI performances of “Gun Bay”

Bree & Claire in the Gun Room

I’m putting together the recording of Gun Room at the moment using samples (more of that in a post soon), but I do also have recordings of Bree and Claire jamming on some of the repeated rhythms that I composed … so these have become my model – trying to achieve a sound with samples that sounds this “real” and musical …

Sometimes you don’t like what you write

I think many people imagine that a piece of music just pops into a composer’s mind, complete and ready to write down. I mentioned Skempton’s process in an earlier blog, and mine is similar. For the Operations Room, the epicentre of the action, I wanted something exciting and adventurous, and decided to play around with Mission Impossible ideas combined with morse code rhythms and playlist harmony. The result? Well…

Ops room Draft score

Somehow the influence is obvious, but the piece sucks. While the directness of the filmic style works when it’s serious, there’s too much obvious humour (or satire) in this for it to work in an exciting space (which MOD are designing really amazing changing lighting for).

So there you go, composers don’t always get it right first time, and the first sketch of this piece is still a “to-do” on my list…

Codes (Comms room) 1st draft

I’ve already blogged quite a few times about using Morse Code to create rhythm in music … and which space should more be inspired by morse than the Communications room? I’m still in England, and today I composed three sections of a piece called Codes for that space which Ensemble Offspring will be able to rearrange in any order. Here’s a mock-up using some fairly dodgy MIDI playback…

In the installation I also intend to have “actual” morse code over the top – perhaps triggered by the presence of someone in the space, or by pressing the button on a straight key…

Planning out a performance in a gun bay

Last year I wrote about how I’d like to use the actual materials on the ship to get the “industrial” sound that Hamish was after. With Ensemble Offspring on board (literally!) now, and a workshop with them coming up soon, I’ve been playing around with more morse code rhythms and metallic samples. In this recording, the morse code is much more proportional, and I’ve explored canon and changing metres.

I want to get the main material for this piece worked out in advance, so that once we’re in the space I can listen for the sounds that I want to use to put it together.

Inside the gun bay

Brand new draft

Having spent the whole week last week encouraging young composers to get creative, I thought it was about time I took a bit of my own advice, and digitised another one of my drafts for this project to share here. The above movie uses the compound (that’s where each beat is divided into 3) version of the rhythm you get when you spell “Vampire” out in morse code (for those who haven’t read many posts, “HMAS Vampire” is the name of the destroyer at the Australian National Maritime Museum), combined – yes, you guessed it – with the some pitch material inspired by and manipulated from one song on the song list. In fact, it’s the same song I used for the “flimic” excerpt back in June.

Combining recomposition with the heavy metal

Ensemble Offspring

Ensemble Offspring

While the metallic canon of “Vampire” in morse code that I made two days ago wasn’t exactly something catchy that you could tap back to me, I thought it was really effective (and I’m really pleased with the rather expensive metal samples and reverb that I purchased a few months ago now!) and so today I thought I’d try to extend it with some pitched material that uses some musical material from another song from the songlist, recomposed. I don’t think this is very successful, but then that happens in composition. Sometimes you can improve things, and sometimes you have to throw them away (and usually that decision is best left for another day) – so I honestly wanted to include some material that probably won’t get into the final project.

So, why the bass flute and bass clarinet? Well, I’m imagining myself composing for core members of Ensemble Offspring, so it will include Lamorna Nightingale (flutes) and Jason Noble (Clarinets) – you can see them in the photo at the top of this post – and I was thinking that using the lowest of those families of instruments would be really effective for two reasons. One, because the percussive metal-hitting will probably result in lots of high frequencies, and so I’m thinking in two different frequency spaces, and two, because the submarine goes down low, and the destroyer is big, and these are big rich sounds that fit these visual metaphors in some way.

I will be very impressed if anyone can guess which song from the songlist this is. I’ve just taken two little elements, and the whole flute and bass clarinet parts improvise around them. To record this, I improvised in Ableton live from a MIDI controller, playing around with different samples for these instruments from a big sample library, for several hours until I was happy … or, at least, decided to abandon it for today!

Encoded Vampire in scrap metal

Having had the idea about using the amazing players of Ensemble Offspring in this project, I decided to go back to some of my drafts and experiment with them today. I have the idea that percussionist Claire Edwardes, Bree Van Reyk and I might explore the vessels and find out what kinds of sounds were made by engineers when they were working there. These sounds could then be the impetus for the more “industrial” sections of the work: percussive sections made with industrial sounds…

Even if you’re a regular reader of this blog, I’d be particularly impressed if you recognised that rhythm from an earlier post here. It’s the word VAMPIRE in morse code – but this time, instead of the usual beeps that you hear morse code in, I’ve used samples of various metallic sounds such as car wheel hubs (since I haven’t actually recorded any sounds on the vessel yet) intuitively to “orchestrate it”. The code repeats, but because it takes 13 pulses to repeat, your mind can’t attach itself to a send of “downbeat”, so it’s disorienting and unsettling.

What you then hear is the same rhythm repeated on a second set of metallic samples, beginning in canon (like a children’s round, but way more complicated in this case!) a few beats behind – imaging Claire starting and then Bree starting the same thing but with different sounds and in a different place – and then each player plays their own internal canon (the same material, offset in two parts, at the same time).

Have a listen again, and see if you can hear it. Oh, I made it a little more musical by adding a certain “randomness” to the velocities (loudness) of each strike, just as you would if real humans were playing them, too. This mock-up was made in Ableton Live, rather than Sibelius – I use Sibelius when I’m scoring and Live or Pro Tools when I’m working with audio… for those interested in the geeky stuff.