“I Am As Dry As A Fish” by Smile Puppy (disquiet0619)

Recorded, mixed & mastered 08-09 Nov 2023 by Jim Lemanowicz at Blissville Electro-Magnetic Laboratories of Massapequa.

Process notes

First day –

– Not intending this to be for the next Junto – it was Wednesday – I decided to program a samba beat in FL Studio from a book of drum patterns for four percussion instruments and then added a second snare. Nothing especially out of the ordinary, it just felt like practice. I went to sleep wondering if I could take it apart somehow.

Second day –

– Spent probably too much time getting MIDI out of FL and into Ableton Live.
– I used a template that I developed last June for this particular concept, (”band”), I call Smile Puppy I used this concept for Juntos 0546 and 0599. This concept started for me in a very primitive way in FL 3.5 back in 2001-ish, so I always try to include FL somehow, so it seemed natural to use that concept name.
– Juggled the percussion tracks to have the thing build as it went, with some open spots too. Didn’t want to be linear, it felt less musical to me.
– My template included a track for raw audio that I removed and a track with a marimba sound and another one with an Operator pluck sound.
– I used a Max For Live thing called TreeSEQ by Gross9978 to generate the notes for the two melodic tracks, with the pluck aiming for the bass sounds. I then captured these two parts in two MIDI receiver tracks.
– I liked the pluck sound but not for bass. It didn’t have any hint of bass oomph and what can I say, I’m really fussy with bass.
– So I duplicated the bass part and with some messing around, I found something in Kontakt that was more bass-sounding to me but also a little off. That was it, I was going to slick with that.
– I took the original bass part, cut it in half, increased the octave I was in and half timed it as a solo near the end of the track. I also processed it with some of Live’s guitar-oriented effects but also a gate to gently tame it. Still it eventually took over without any intention from me and I liked that happy accident for an ending.

Artwork: Penn Station, NYC 17 Dec 2010, by Jim Lemanowicz

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This original version of “I Am As Dry As A Fish” was submitted as part of Disquiet Junto Project 0619: Beat Accrual. The Assignment: Rebuild a complicated rhythm from scratch.

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