#contained herein are all my Trade Secrets. or a Making Of. however you see it

[latefrequencies]

I just started listening to From Home and I am soooo excited, I've been really getting into noise lately and this is the sort of thing I want to make! How'd you make these noises? And also, do the numbered titles of the tracks hold any significance? Thanks for another awesome release Jude! :D

oh thank you!!!! people’s reception of that album has been much more positive than i would have expected (not that i expected people to hate that album outright but i rly only know two people who i knew for sure are into noise, and one of them is going to be in a noise band with me and the other is already a noise artist), so i’m very happy that people like the album as much as they do! also i’m going to put the answers to your questions under a cut if that’s okay, i’m going to basically answer Every Question Anyone Could Ever Have About This Album, including the ones you’ve asked directly:

so the equipment i used (outside of the non-musical items i used to produce the sounds) was the following: an iPad, GarageBand (which was run on the iPad), a bass guitar, this cord thing called an iRig that allows me to plug the bass into the iPad so i can use the amp simulator stuff, earbuds that had a microphone on them, and headphones that did not have a microphone on them. the headphones that didn’t have the microphone on them were important because, when you use earbuds or headphones that have a microphone on them and the microphone is too close to the earbuds themselves (which is the case with most if not all earbuds you get in stores), you record what you’re listening to along with what you’re recording on the track you’re recording. this might not be a problem if you’re just trying to get as much sound as possible, but that wasn’t what i was going for on this album.

i personally see all of the sounds on the album as being in one of five categories: musical synthesized sound, non-musical synthesized sound, bass feedback, intentionally-produced non-synthesized sound, and background sound. which is hella pretentious but let me break it down further:

musical synthesized sound: i used the synth settings in GarageBand to produce things that sounded musical (anytime there’s chords or a melody perceptible on any of the tracks)

non-musical synthesized sound: i used the synth settings to produce things that didn’t sound musical (mostly i used settings that are categorized under “sound effects”. a good example of a track featuring these would be track 4, “68454″, where there’s sort of a mechanical buzzing noise and a slamming noise that sound like they’re reacting to each other. those were both produced with GarageBand and weren’t actual sounds I recorded from my environment)

bass feedback: i plugged my bass, made some custom amp settings that were meant to make the feedback sound like ungodly loud and awful and just let it record. sometimes i did actually do things with the bass, such as touching the neck or body to produce generally non-musical sounds or touching the strings in a way that produced musical sounds in that each string is tuned to a note but where i wasn’t really playing a note on purpose (very audible on track 1, “593045″). anytime there’s the sound of something churning (for lack of a better description), that’s bass feedback (and I’ll get into how that works in a bit)

intentionally-produced non-synthesized sound: i took objects around me and made them make noises (”68454″ has this sort of crackling sound in the background that was produced by doing and undoing the velcro on a plush toy I had with me, there was a point at which i just recorded myself photocopying and putting together a zine and the low whining sound on “182495″ came from the photocopier and the scraping sort of sound on the same track came from me handling the paper afterwards because i recorded both processes on the same track)

background sound: i just plugged in the non-microphone headphones and let things happen. this picked up sounds intentionally 

a lot of the time, with the intentionally-produced sounds, i would try making them while listening to how they’d be recorded through the amp simulator and i messed with the settings to make it so that they’d be less recognizable or sound stranger or more discordant. a lot of the idea behind what i did was to take sounds that would have been normal and make them very abnormal. you don’t hear sounds like what you hear on that album in your everyday life. the world would be bloody chaos if everything sounded like that all the time. everyone would have to wear industrial-strength earplugs. it’d be awful. part of the concept was to take the familiar and make it as unfamiliar as possible. i presume you’ve looked at the album’s description, and if you have, then you’ll know the context in which it was made was one of really just a lot of unfamiliarity while also having with me individual things which were familiar, so that’s where the idea to make noise in that specific way came from.

now here’s where i get into the exact methods and if you don’t have access to GarageBand, this might be a bit useless for you, but if you’re using a program where you can use an amp simulator and it has the ability to let you simulate effects pedals, you’ll probably find a way to do the same as what i’m describing here.

the first thing i do with the amp settings is i turn the gain up real high (usually at maximum) and i put a fuzz pedal on it and turn everything on that up to the highest setting. sometimes i let there be a bit of variation (like sometimes the tone is a little bit down, sometimes the fuzz setting isn’t completely up, etc.) but those are the primary things i do. i choose the fuzz setting because that produces the most amount of additional noise while also distorting the sound (which is why i choose it over, say, overdrive)

i get the churning sound by turning both the knobs on the tremolo part of the amp way up. if what you’re working with allows you do to so, experiment with having the speed and depth be at different places, because i find that sometimes having them always be equal to each other or having them always be on maximum doesn’t get what i want for a particular track or moment. i’m not sure if screwing with the tremolo like that is the exact thing Sunn O))) are doing on all their albums but i bet it is and regardless it makes it sound just like Sunn O))) when i play a note and the amp is like that and I like sounding like things that i like.

other effects pedals i like include the phaser one, the vibe one (there’s a lot of fun to be had there since there’s different kinds of vibrations you can play with), the echo one (that can get you some REAL fucked up sounds if you play it right), and the chorus one.

where the synth is concerned, i use settings from the Alchemy Synth options (again, not very helpful if you’re not using GarageBand but what you’re using may have something equivalent to what i’m about to describe). the reason for this is that there’s all those knobs and that x- and y-axis thing you can control to get a really precise sound, and you can mess with those while you’re playing the note, meaning that the note will record the exact way you’re hearing it change. (i make that distinction because messing with something in real time with something from the amp settings doesn’t do that.) this was useful for getting strange sounds from the more musical sounding settings.

i think the reason the synth parts of the tracks are more emphasized than the non-synthesized sounds was because the synth was the stuff i had more control over. there was a lot of incidental sound (random things like me typing or drinking water got recorded, and i mentioned my housemates on the album credits because i did end up getting them recorded, not on purpose but because they were obviously in the same space as me and they were producing sounds so onto the tracks they went). i’ll probably do things differently as i work more with noise because there’s a world of potential where the non-synthesized sounds are concerned that i haven’t scratched upon at all yet. really the non-synth sounds on From Home were more like background things for the synth parts. or maybe i’m downplaying those parts too much. either way in the future i’ll be looking out for more naturally-occurring noises, i’m just describing the role they played in that particular album

really i just made the noises either by doing stuff with the synthesizer, recording whatever normal things i had or that were happening and processing them to hell and back, or plugging in my bass and letting fate take care of the rest.

also there is no significance to the number titles at all. i had just been titling files by the number track they were supposed to be on the album and then i went “this doesn’t look right” but i also had no interesting or intelligent things to call them, so i tried making keymashes for titles but they just looked wrong for some reason, so sticking solely to numbers for the keymashes somehow did the trick. chaos within intentional boundaries. i guess that’s a good descriptor for how i did the album really. 

anyway thank you for asking these things and i wish you the best in the world of noise and your exploration in the genre, frankly i’m excited to explore it too and if my work inspires somebody else to try out something like this, that’s honestly one of the most exciting things i can think of.