Ottski – Composing for Spaces and Places

Granular Play 2 is such a fun and unpredictable software to use. I went into it expecting to make something beautiful and drone-like but instead ended up composing a sort of Half-Life 2 horror piece.

I used a small clip of someone singing a folk tune unaccompanied, not sure what the tune is as I just found it in the computer files and completely forgot to write it down or copy over the file. I had used Granular Play 2 a couple of times previously to get accustomed with it, mainlyuseing solo violin tracks and piano so it was more musical. However, I found myself leaning more toward the breath sounds and vocal flips this time as it sounded more gutteral… Oddly really nice!

I decided to just record about 3 minutes of me improvising with it, and at the halfway point, I cranked the pitch slider all the way up. It sounds akin to tinnitus, and that helped to give my final composition a solid structure and sound.

The tinnitus-esque bit, in my opinion, couldn’t have been accompanied any other way than with a distorted synth bass and blasting floor tom. It signaled a new stage in the composition, almost like a boss-fight or blast of energy. At first, however, I attempted to make this section into more of a Doom Eternal style apocalyptic EDM track with slow but punchy rhythmic drums and metal-sounding bassline. However, I came to realise it just didn’t quite sound right.

Instead, I focused on more of the atmospheric soundscape sort of feel to the second half of the track, limiting the bassline to just slow pitch bends using both the pitch wheel and mod wheel to make a wub wub wub wub wub wubwubwubwub wub wub wub wub wub sound (only way I can explain it). I changed the drum sound to a foley-esque industrial preset and used them as more of abstract percussion with a room reverb, such as the high-hat and tom rolls immitating creaking metal and floorboards. The metallic ring is a synth “sfx” that I, for the life of me, can not remember the name of. I put heavy reverb, delay and a toned-down bass chorus effect on it to make it really amp up the feeling of “something isn’t right here” and to fill out the empty space as it fades in and out.

The first half of the track features solely my vocals and the granular track. If I’d have thought ahead of time, or remembered later on, I would have asked a female singer to do the higher part for me as I just think it’d elevate it massively. I went for a creepy, Scandanavian vocal-flip and overtone style to make my vocals more of an instrument, rather than the main line. Both the lower and higher vocal tracks have tons of reverb and echo to fill out any empty space, and the lower vocal track ended up being the entire reason I learned how to use automation on Ableton, just to play with the rolling tremolo as a sort of glitchy build-up for the tinnitus sound and bass coming in halfway through.

Overall, I’d say I’m still really proud of this for how minimalistic it is, I’d say it might be the coolest dark-atmospheric track I’ve ever done (even though I’ve only done like four or five since I started learning to produce in my teens). It has purpose, a climax, a feel to it.