the alan moore project – vendetta

“…but the frozen mask just smiles…”

The Alan Moore Project, in which I tried to make an entire track using *only* samples from Alan Moore’s spoken word poetry, is done. You can hear a lofi version here, download a hi-fi mp3 here, or download a .flac version here.

Some thoughts, lessons, and such from the process:

– Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew. I told Dave that I’d make him a drum & bass track, which I don’t normally make, and then I said I’d do it entirely using speech samples, which is really silly. As such, the outcome is only 4:49 long. C’est la vie.

– Keep Processing. You’d be amazed at what you can do with just a high-pass filter, a pitch shift, and some compression. Combined that with a touch of distortion and still more compression, and sounds can take on character and shape really quickly. Also, doing harmonic EQ boosting by hand really helps. (For example: peak your kick drum at 60 Hz, 120 Hz, 240 Hz, etc).

– Dying Is Easy, Melody Is Hard. I’m the world’s worst melody writer as is, but when I have to make tones & chords out of timestretched words…well, there’s a reason there’s not very much melody or harmony in this one.

– Favorite Free Plugins Used: E-Phonic LoFi, Christortion Harmonic Distorition, Minion.

(for more info on the project, just follow the category link below.)