[ Updated 2024-04-28 ] This page is sort of a snapshot of my workflow starting from about 2011. That’s 13 years ago now. I hadn’t thought about this piece for a long time, then I ran across the Pangur Ban poem in a completely different book. So it put me in mind of this piece which I therefore decided to revisit.
I’ve left the arrangement pretty much the same except I’ve updated the notation for the basic melody (for years there were only the first 2 bars, I fixed it and now you can see the entire 4 bars.)
My own personal workflow seems natural and inevitable to me. Then I talk to my other computer music / desktop producer friends and find out that each persons’ method is as unique as a fingerprint. So I’m going to outline mine as least as it currently existed in 2011 with no apologies just in case someone finds something useful in it for their own process.
It probably would have made more sense to have this page under the “How?” category but my website structure has run out of numbers to do that. That’s embarrassing. So this page may eventually move somewhere else, maybe to “How Part 2”.
I started “Pangur Ban” is a piece I started in March of 2011 (when I had more spare time than money). The title and idea of the monk’s cat came from discovering the short poem of the same name in something I read (you can learn all about it on wikipedia.) At the time, I was playing with samples from the OLPC collection. It all started with a single short (~25 sec) sample named “Bali Synth Melody”.
The sample has to me a sort of jangly gamelan feel to it, but on listening to it I thought: “there’s a melody in there; what would it sound like if I slowed it way down?”
This of course Ableton Live makes pretty easy. You can change the speed and/or pitch of loops, and the later versions of Live have better and better speed changing algorithms. I liked the way it sounded at 48 bpm (slowing the original sample down by a factor of about 2.1x); a pretty cool melody appeared; very reminiscent in my mind to something you’d hear out of the Buddha Machine. So here’s what it sounds like at 48 bpm:
Extracting the main melody out of that by trial and error I g0t approximately this (I revisited this project in 2024 and decided I had a better version of the notation):
With this, it’s easy to just assign the MIDI to a different instrument*:
( * Well, actually not that simple; it’s a layer of two Zebra synths and two Operator synths, all of them using different but related patches. )
So with this as a basis I came up with a floaty arrangement which you can hear here (MP3 length 5:39):
I don’t know if this is significantly “better” than the 2011 version I had up here, but it does have a whole new electric bass line that I think is nice.
(Incidentally, it’s cool that after all these years the WordPress “audio” shortcode still works.)
Last updated 2024-04-27
crow caw music works 