Seven Still | Album Collaboration Preview w/ ChaseBliss MOOD, A/C Noises Respira, Digitakt, Rhodes

Hi, I'm Jason and for some reason I make music as Sycamore Willow.

This week I'm sharing a track I've made in collaboration with Luke Elliott. He and I met over Slack at work. We live 9 time zones apart and have never met face to face, yet we've managed to become friends and collaborators.

I'm excited about the music we're making together. I've always found the best collaborations create happy accidents and situations where 1 + 1 = (something bigger than 2).

For most of these tracks, they started with sound design. I sampled the Rhodes in all kinds of interesting ways and shared those files. Luke has been a master of transforming short weird sounds into full-blown compositions. Just as a quick rundown here are some of the ways I experimented and created interesting sounds.

With the Rhodes:
Contact mic on the exterior
Mic without amplification
Lid off hit the tines with a metal allen key
Play through various effects: phaser, Generation Loss, Strymon Iridium, Strymon NightSky
Record onto tape and play back at half speed
Manipulate sounds through granular synthesis tools like Morphagene and Mutable Instruments Beads

There's a lot here, so I'll be sharing some of my sound design process soon if you want to get a look at some fun ways to create sound. The beauty of sound design is that the process is the means and the ends :)

See you soon.