The Cyber-Highwayman’s Occarina

A piece of music made entirely from samples recorded from an occarina. The end result gave me a few vibes including creepy, cyberpunk and horse. The organic windy noises create an eery atmosphere. The horse galloping feeling comes from the triplet feel of the shuffle that I ended up using as a sort of hi-hat, and the “snare” sounds like a hoof clopping. So the image conjured in my head was a cloaked highwayman trotting down a ghostly lit, misty road at twilight - except it’s somehow cyberpunk. Hence, the Cyber-Highwayman’s Occarina.

Here’s a link to the challenge playlist where you can find the song. I’ll put the song on my own soundcloud soon.

Sadness!

I have been unfortunate and recently lost all the things I’ve recorded since moving to Canada (about 4 months work) due to a failed SSD drive. Working on recovering this but I won’t be able to share any screenshots from the Reaper project :(

The SL Music Challenge

I’m still in touch with folks from a previous company I worked for. A small group of us would participate in a monthly “music challenge”, where we all contribute a small piece created during that month which aligns with a certain theme or rule. Examples have been a song about the summer, or everyone making a track from the same starting bassline. It’s a positive atmosphere and everyone is very encouraging of each other; I love to see the diversity across people’s contributions because we’re all quite distinct in our styles and approaches to making music.

I left the company several years ago but was very touched to be asked to get involved in the June 2024 music challenge “one instrument”. Everything had to be made from a single instrument, but all effects and modulation was on the table… time to get cooking.

Why Occarina?

I wanted to create a complete track with drums, bass and lead, so I decided to try to push myself and start withs something really unassuming. Glancing around my room I spied the occarina that my wife bought for me from a trip to Poland. It is very pretty but I’ve never been able to get anything “nice” out of it, let alone a performance of some kind. I should note that my lovely partner is an incredibly talented flute player and she certainly can make it sound good, but she wasn’t there!

This was an opportunity to explore sound design in a deeper way that I have previously. I’m slowly getting into analogue synthesis and it blows my mind how much you can do with a simple waveform. I figured if I can get at least one clean note from this thing then I could make it work.

This piece was a lot of fun to make so let’s break it down.

The Samples

I started by recording a variety of sounds. I ended up with:

• a couple of long blown notes, closest thing to a sine wave I could get
• blowing through the finger holes, a sort of breathy toneless sound
• tapping and clicking my nails on the ceramic surface for “drums”
• twanging the taught neck-cord From these I was able to make a real textural soundscape.

Synths

I took a single note and used Reasamplomatic5000 to resample this into a library of pitched notes that actually sounds quite good out of the box! I looped and overlapped the samples so I could hold a note indefinitely without it sounding strange, then slapped on some reverb and a bit of saturation and I had a lovely soft pad and a lead if I played higher up the keyboard. I slightly modulated the sound with a gentle EQ sweep to create a phasing effect.

Drums

From my recordings I had a clicky sound from my nail, a thud from heavy finger tap. These single shots were turned into a kick and a snare by a combination of EQ, compression, pitch shifting and saturating to give them some oompf. I also ended up with a kind of shuffley rhythm from taping my nails on the surface which I cropped to a sample of 3 notes; I repeated this sample to give a kind of triplet hi-hat backbone which dictated the tempo of the entire track.

I took a few samples of the sort of rhythmic trills where I’d hit the surface several times quickly with my fingers and introduced these later in the song as variation around the snare hit as grace notes.

Bass

This was the most fun and weird sound that pushed this from an organic creepy track into some kind of cyberspcae dubstep thing. I took a single low blown note and compressed the shit out of it. Resampling this gave me some notes to play with but I settled on a single bass note in the end. I added a lot of saturation with the free Melda Productions - M Saturator. This lets you adjust the harmonics and I found by modulating the 5th harmonic level with an oscialltor it created this bouncy dubstep vibe that I was not expecting at all. Awesome.

Ambiance

I took a bunch of the breathy sounds and some gentle scrapey scratchy noises and obviously drenched them in reverb. Not much to say here but I overlapped them in such a way that it sounded like a constant wind with perhaps some leaves ruslting in there for good measure.

The “woosh”!

Ah the woosh. I was definitely just messing about at this point. I took the twang sound from the neck-cord and cropped it down to a short thumpy plucking sound. Then resampled it and played a series of very short chromatic midi notes that rise up. Some delay and verb and this sounded very textural and cool.

Summary

So there is it is. I made the track in about 2 sessions as I tend to do when I get my teeth into something fun. I tried to not go overboard with the arrangement and kept it fairly lean with an intro, drop and outro. I am strangely proud of this one as I thought it was just be absolutely ridiculous, but it turned out to be one of the most interesting projects I’ve worked on.

Thanks SL, keep making music and I look forward to being included on a future challenge!