Sounds of the Abbey

Sometimes you find sounds in unexpected places

Hi folks, hope you’ve had a great week?

I was planning to record loads of sounds last week whilst on holiday in Cornwall, to the point that I packed my Zoom recorder, sampler and iPad, took along with us but ended up using none of it. We took the three grand kids with us, plus their parents aka my step children and their partners - so as you can imagine, the kids needed lots of entertainment, activities, beach time, fresh air. It was an absolute blast. We celebrated two birthdays, mine and Aurelia’s. One of us turned 5 and the other 53. Another trip around the sun for me.

Since getting home on Monday, we have had the chance to visit somewhere much much closer to home, just a few miles away rather than 200 or so, and that was Reading Abbey.

More on that in a bit but first, breaking product news

New Products

Oxi One mk2

I’ve just heard that Oxi instruments are soon launching their mk2 sequencer and will be taking preorders imminently.

• 8 sequencers

• 64 tracks

• SD card

• Bigger screen

• Added dedicated function buttons

• Performance mode

• New accumulator engine

• Groove

• 8 mod lanes

• Custom scales

• Custom instrument definitions

• Enhanced connectivity

Dialekt

Another Groovebox, yay!

Just joking because I am a fan of such things and this one from Sugar Bytes looks really interesting. Available now on desktop and very soon on iOS - I will share more of that with you when it does.

Found sounds

This week’s sounds…

Reading Abbey

I’ve often recorded interesting sounds I’ve stumbled upon whilst out on walks. The other evening we popped into nearby Reading for a walk around the Abbey, to take photographs and see if there were any sounds worth recording and indeed there were both in abundance.

Exploring Reading Abbey and the old gas works

I took a number of photos with my Ricoh GR3x and came home with some absolute “keepers” and whilst reading some of the information panels scattered around the abbey that depict the history of the site, we came across one that played audio. My wife found it first whilst I was taking pictures of an interesting stone and she set it off tom play one of the audio recordings, I jumped out of my skin, thought the ghosts had come to life!

I found her and the audio panel, which featured a wheel you spin to generate power and the recording plays. I used Koala sampler on my iPhone to grab these recordings.

On one of the walls of the Abbey is a stone tablet that presents an early form of musical notation, I took a photo because Tina wondered if I could somehow translate it to modern notation and therefore MIDI - well maybe, could give it a try, if anyone out there is familiar with medieval music notation, do please drop me a line!

Apparently this song contains the word “fart” when translated to modern English.

The next sound starts off with an instruction on how to use the audio player and is followed by the sound of Monks singing. Reminds me of Enigma a little bit, just needs a little pan-flute in there.

I am going to archive these recordings somewhere, to use in something at a future date and time.

iPad musical sketch of the week

One night whilst away in Cornwall, it was raining cats and dogs outside, we were all huddled in our holiday lodge drinking beer, wine, reading books etc. The cosy vibe got me thinking about making some music, so grabbed the iPad, fired up AUM and made the following track using the plugins you see in the screenshot above.

I think I will upload this to Soundcloud or Bandcamp at some point.

Anyway, that’s it - have a great weekend and will see you all again soon.