Worked for twenty minutes today
River Conga step one (working title)
First I recorded the sample of Roberta Flack’s “River”, taken from my scratchy copy of Killing Me Softly, then imported the track “Conga” from the Destroy All Monsters Gospel Crusade compilation and cut it down to the bit I wanted. Looped both of them—“River” a little awkwardly, which I’m fine with, and “Conga” more carefully because it’s the rhythm track. I fiddled with the timing—I slowed down “River” quite a bit, which I liked, but when I slowed down “Conga” even a little the sludgy aspects got too strong, so I went back to the original speed. I don’t usually do this, but I tried playing “River” backwards and realized that it gave it kind of a distorted reggae rhythm, so I kept it that way and added a bunch of reverb (small roomsize, large reverb time) to make it sound dubby (and actually a little carnivalesque, which is nice). Then I duplicated the “Conga” track twice, and applied a shitload of distortion to one of them to reduce it to uncomfortable electronic-sounding blips, and a bunch of echo and distortion to the other to give it a (again) kind of dubby feel.
I need to work on getting the levels of the three “Conga” tracks just right, and I think as the song progresses and gets longer the levels of distortion need to increase until the droning feedback aspects of the sample become intensified over the percussion. I also need to figure out a way to occasionally bring out the melodic and rhythmic aspects of the “River” sample without it losing its background atmosphere qualities during the rest of the song. Other than that, I’ll see what I need when I get to it.
