Saturday, March 19, 2011

Creative notes of Calico Pastry Sunshine from Dave posted on The Muse In Music

"The main idea for these tracks was to use samples of sung vocals. I had done stuff with spoken vocals before, and I really wanted to try to come up with some settings for sung parts. The other idea was to use sounds that I associated with early psychedelic music.

So the first thing I did was comb through all the vocal samples at ccmixter.org, a site where people upload samples for remixing. One of the ones I really liked was “the heartless bastard thought” which is by a woman named CiggiBurns. She has a cool accent, and an acerbic style, and that line really appealed to me. So I pulled that line, which, of course, completely robbed it of its context, but for my purposes that was a good thing.

Once I had the sample I put a really simple kick-snare beat under it. I had the sequencer set to 140 beats per minute, and I was using common time, and the line really didn’t lay well over those setting. So I moved the pitch of the line up a whole step, which also increased its tempo a hair, and then it actually fit pretty well, and I was able to start fleshing it out. I subbed a djembe sample for the kick and the snare, and put little guitar hits on the second and fourth beats, and that gave it a little reggae flavor, and from that point on all pretense of getting an early psychedelic sound pretty much vanished."...

here