Sulk Rooms Video Q&A - studio tour and production chat - last day of half-price too
- quiet details
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
Hey friends - hope all good :)
Great to see Songs of Soil still going strong - big thanks to everyone that’s supported it by buying the album, and also by commenting and sharing across all the various platforms - much appreciated!
Thomas has done a fantastic job of documenting the making of this album, so highly recommend following him on Bandcamp, social media and checking out his Patreon - loads of good stuff.
Today’s the last day of half-price digital and CDs are still available - moving fast, they’re there now if you want one.
Now here are both parts of Thomas’s Q&A, awesome to see and hear about his ideas, working space, techniques and gear - and some words about the making of each track below too.
The Losing Grip : The intro into our worm world! The worms are pretty loud here and covered in saturation and slappy delays. All other sounds come from my Novation Summit (a phrase I’ll be repeating a lot in this article) and a little bit of string sampling towards the end. I love a dramatic intro and I think this does the job nicely.
A Hidden Life : Again, this is a huge amount of Summit synth action and some deep worm thrashing. This time, the worm noises are activated by a sort of sidechain/gating technique I use so that they step in and out alongside the bass notes. The vast majority of reverbs/delays on the album are the Ableton stock ones with LFOs controlling and changing parameters over time. It’s a lot of fun doing it this way and it means I can put the kettle on whilst the machines do the work.
Thrashers : This one is made from a bit of strange guitar I had lying around in my ‘ideas’ folder, which I brought out and masked with a mountain of horrible noise. I have this cool plugin from d16 called Frontier, which is a super brutal limiter that can be used in a creative way. It deals with extreme sounds very well indeed and there’s a preset called ‘Atom Smasher’ that’s perfect for what I do. I quite like how this one ends so abruptly.
Open Up To Their Will : The worms are a bit slower in pace on this one, but still extremely audible. I experimented with recording them deeper in the compost bin and found that because everything’s more compacted, things creep around differently down there. There are two choirs in this one - the first one that enters is my voice and then the other is a sample from a famous band that I can’t mention. The weird bass/drum sound is probably my Summit again and there’s also a little bit of the Arturia Buchla softsynth in there, which is a synth I’m trying to learn, yet failing miserably.
Pay Your Debts To The Mire : This is my favourite track on the album and was a nightmare to finish. I have this cool fx plugin called Duck, which makes everything rhythmical (hence the stuttering pacing), but it’s really hard to tame and I couldn’t quite get it bang on here. There’s loads of spluttering and crackling, but I think in the end it adds to it nicely. It’s the only track to feature an actual drum sound on it too, which is a TR-808 hi-hat.
When I Am Earth Again They Will Be Here : The title for this track comes from the idea that we’ll all eventually pass away and return to the Earth, where the worms will still be working and tending to the ground. The piano recording is a good few years old and was recorded in my village theatre when I shot a live video there (the video for my track ‘Empty Theatre’). It’s been hibernating in my ‘ideas’ folder and I thought it’d be a nice inclusion here. Underneath the piano there’s lots of other noise too and various synth resonances humming away.
Writhing Masses : Short and sweet - a simple improv with the Summit synth.
I Can Only See The Loam : More stuttering synth action here. Most of the sounds on this are degraded using a plugin I love called...err... Degrader from Klevgrand. It reduces the bit rate in a highly pleasant way and makes everything... fluffy (?!). Huge bass sounds from the Summit again.
Clew : This is me getting to grips with the Arturia Arp 2600 softsynth and Ableton’s new(ish) Roar distortion fx unit! Essentially, it’s a quick jam with some weird bleeps and sweeping noises. I had in mind a film trailer type pacing structure with angry textures and a heart monitor beeping away.
Forget Your Place : This one has got some really cool parts. I made the first rhythm synth with the Arturia Buchla, but then it trails off due to the 112dB Mikron Cascade reverb plugin, which makes this never ending soundscape out of anything you put through it. It’s a great tool to use and I fade it in very slowly so that it takes over the regular sound. There’s also the same sound going through my EarthQuaker Devs Avalanche Run guitar pedal, Guitar Rig’s Twin Delay fx, Ableton’s Vocoder and also a Reaktor phaser/filter called Anima, which I use a lot. It’s got this wavelike motion to it and great for ‘swooshing’. The bass/low end is actually coming from the worms in this track!
Eat A Peck Of Dirt : Probably the strangest sounding track on the album. It’s mainly made from the sound of spring reverbs pitched up and down and some other raspy noises I found. There’s a bit of wobbly synth in there too. A bit of an improv job!
Flattered By Burial : This is an improv on the Summit that’s been processed through the Soundtoys Crystalizer echo plugin, which does reversing and cool pitching things. There’s also some Soundtoys Tremolator on there too and the Arturia Tape Mello-Fi.
Homespun Black Gold : Check the end of the Q&A Part 2 video for an Ableton deep dive!
Survivalist : It’s a simple sounding track, but I had so much fun making this one. I’ve been really into the Ableton Granulator 2 instrument and I’ve used a bunch of them here to slice up worm sounds and synth textures. Everything is highly resonant and seems like it’s struggling to escape due to the amount of gating/limiting from the d16 Frontier device. There’s a high pitched synth sound that’s being triggered via the worms and you can hear it quickly spluttering out at random intervals. The bass is from the Arturia Arp 2600 with an Ableton Overdrive on there for added aggro.
The Worms Shriek! The Earth Creeks! They Will Rise! : The ending of an album is always a tricky one and for ‘Songs Of Soil’ I wanted to go BIG. It felt good ending on a cheery note too and it’s nice to write in a major key on occasion! It’s all Summit, Arturia Arp and Vermona Mono Lancet 15 for the spiraling melodies playing through Soundtoys Echo Boy delay. I did a demo of this a while back that had the bass playing just one note throughout, but I thought it’d be cool to have a moving sequence. There’s a ‘comedy’ ending too as the worms take a final bow and the curtains close.
Today’s the first night of the Sulk Rooms tour - where he’ll be showcasing the album and playing some incredible live versions, plus loads of new material.
Barrow tonight - get to one if you can!
Shout out today to the always excellent No Place Like Drone crew over on Dublin Digital Radio - thanks to them for playing a track from qd48 fields we found
Check them out here
Thanks again and have a lovely weekend!
Alex
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