fun with audio

i was in starbucks this afternoon writing when i heard a motown-style cover of "light my fire" come on the in-store play. i had the bright idea to try to record it with my laptop using the built-in mic. there was a ton of background noise...the baristas making coffee, a high school student and his tutor nearby doing a math problem. when i went back to listen to the recording, the song sounded pretty thin compared to all the other noise. i fussed around with this horn part until i isolated it, got most of the background noise out, and re-layered it using pitched-down copies of the original sound to fill in some bass. later tonight, i added some other bass notes following the original melody to round out the sound some more. by this point, the sound barely resembled the recording i made this afternoon. all the processing had added these artifacts which sounded like what you might hear if dolphins could play trumpet. i was pretty entertained by what i'd come up with.

i added a lazy drum beat and tried out my new breakbeat toy. it's a program which will chop up your loop and randomly mangle it but still keep some essence of the original beat.

all in all, i got some interesting and original results. not bad for starting with a recording made in a noisy starbucks.