Holiday, Single Tracks

Darkest Night of the Year

Download courtesy of loopproject.com

In a global culture that gradually moves itself toward 24-hour days that are, on a vast majority, spent indoors, the aspect that maintains our agricultural sense of the harvest is the collection of holidays celebrated around the world between October and January. It is no coincidence that Christmas is four days after Winter Solstice, and that we celebrate the beginnings of hope for a better life and a better world on the darkest night of the year.
An interpretation of Stille Nacht by Josef Moht and Franz Xaver Gruber.

I made this for SounDevotion’s holiday-themed round 34 last year.  There’ll be another for this year too.

Single Tracks

Broken Machine

Download from battleofthebits.org

A garbled wall of happy ambience, made for the Battle of the Bits’ Ann Arbor 8 mix contest.  The samples for this mix were very lush and large.  The lesson I take from this round is that the lush samples can do a lot of work if you leave a lot of space in the mix for them, otherwise, they have to be filtered, thinned, and chopped down so that the big sounds don’t beat each other up.  Just as a composer should work with a variety of sounds and styles, a good mix should have a good range of sounds- small. medium, and large.

Congratulations to µB who won the contest by creating a very fun song from the same pallette of sounds.