Very early on in this project and once I decided what I wanted to create the sound for I made a demo project, where I could experiment with different sounds and concepts to see what works and what does not.
The idea of a demo for me is to have a space to experiment with multiple ideas. I think this is a very important thing to do, especially before starting a long project like this unit.
Before starting the demo I knew I wanted to experiment with drones, creating low and brooding drones has been a part of this process since day one. I also experimented with some foley recordings, at the 01:40:00 mark you can hear a scraping sound panned to the right. This is a recording of me scraping my student i.d. on the metal grates near the sound arts rooms. This was recorded with a zoom H5 recorder, pitched up and left warped. Ableton’s warp feature lets you time-stretch audio to the tempo of the project, I like to personally use it as a way to glitch and make your track trip up over itself.
Looking back on the demo from writing this (this was written after I mixed in 5.1 surround) it is not good, but clearly has ideas such as drones and vocal manipulation that continue into the final mix of The Alphabet. I think having a demo project where you can make as many mistakes as you want and experiment as much as you want before creating your proper session is very beneficial for me.