A Seagull's Requiem for A Sloth

1 week ago by @reinderd

A Seagull's Requiem for A Sloth

reinderd

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Liner Notes

Every once in a while I try to use an instrument to do the thing it's the least suitable for. Today, I'm making ambient #slothcore with a Seagull Merlin! Let's see how far I get with that, a shimmer reverb pedal, a volume pedal and, oh, let's add more reverb in the DAW! Except the volume pedal was too noisy, and generally keeping noise from the rest of my pedal board under control was a nightmare, and, oh, I couldn't read the text on my Strymon Blue Sky so I initially recorded a part with regular reverb instead of shimmer. Once I figured it out, I overdubbed the part one more time with the correct reverb, but the volume pedal had to go, as did the distortion pedal. But a sample on the MicroFreak made for some interesting … moving drones, honestly (seriously, I've lost track of what that synth is actually doing), and a screech from an actual seagull from a vinyl record of stereo effects fills out the texture a bit.

Way outside of my comfort zone, but I can't think of a better way to beat the mid-FAWM doldrums than doing something like that. One thing I learned is that once you start using a shimmer reverb, the high frequencies can get really out of hand; I had to dial them way back in the mix. In fact, I mixed this mainly by lowering volume on individual things trying to make everything quieter than everything else. Normally, I let my mixes get fairly hot, but this time around, there was always something that seemed too loud to me.

Tempo is 25 BPM which is lower than the MicroFreak's internal clock can handle so I set that to 50 and the LFO to 8/1, which created a good enough illusion of the rumble going very very slow.

Lyrics

Caw, caw, caw

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