Assignment 3 – Matthew Xie (Kalimba Project)

For this project, I used a recording of a Kalimba riff from a friend.

  1. Recorded IR1 (Maggie Mo Hallway), IR2 (WestWing staircase, balloon pop at top recorded at bottom). Recorded IR3 (myself saying “Kalimba”. Used a sample for IR4 (a water drip sound effect)
  2. Ran the kalimba riff in Max through all 4 convolution effects and recorded through ‘sfrecord~’ Code: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/978888ce9c3f36fe2fdfb96b659bee4f

Here are the results:

I really liked the sound of this, and decided to make a track through Ableton Live.

Track explanation as follows:

  1. Percussions (kick, clap, claves, woodenruffle, drip, underwater-twirl-sound, chimes): except for kick, and chimes, all other reverb effects were used by running the original sample through the Max patch with IR1 as the convolution effect.

Kalimbas:

  1. Starts off with the original riff, adding the IR1 IR2 IR3 IR4 riffs each loop. IR3 is pitched down two octaves to provide a bass-ier feel.
  2. Once all are included, the oiginal riff IR1 IR2 IR4 fades away in order each loop. IR3 is kept at the very end (wanted to end the track with the distant “kalimba” voice within the kalimba reverb.

Apart from a tiny bit of compression (Ableton built-in) and limiter (George Yohng’s W1) added, not much else mixing is done (my apologies).