Tag: Gavin Sutherland

07: Cheery Chirps

Listen out for these sounds in Cheery Chirps:

A guitar through a looping pedal

This is an idea I’ve been messing around with since you first asked, just noodling when I’m playing with the girls. So I recorded as a live session, one take with a mic in the room. I added a recording of the girls under it just to emulate how I’ve been working at it and to reflect how my days are spent playing with them. It was really fun to do, thanks.

Michael Lewis

A Kookaburra

The sound of the Kookaburra makes me happy because it sounds like a monkey laughing, an insane sound for a wee bird to make really. I didn’t really know much about the before we came (and I still don’t) but I love their jaunty squat tuftiness, and the fact that for being such an wild bird icon they are very ubiqitous and bring a feeling of being amongst nature into the hart of urban environments.

Sam Evans
A studio door being unlocked

It is ‘opening my studio door’ after I haven’t been able to be there for two months.

Roel Knappstein
Fish wire strung along a pier resonating in the wind

Also, this is a set of recordings I made in the Pacific Northwest a few years ago that I love – it’s an accidental aeolian harp that was made out of some fishing line that was strung up on a dock. It was super windy and it was making a completely amazing noise! I was so excited by it, and I still love listening to it. 

Yann Seznec (with Kristina Seznec)
Forest sounds in the Biligiriranga Hills, India

I am fortunate to live close to nature and forests in particular. A 4 hour drive takes me to the amazingly lush BR hills forest range with tigers, elephants, bears and a super rich bio diverse ecosystem. Being in the forest makes me incredibly happy each time. I could stay with the sights and sounds forever. I had to share this piece of heaven with you.

Babitha George

Track named by Ruben Cheong Bee and Samuel Cheong Bee.
Written and produced by Tommy Perman.

Get the album

Email your happy message to: happy@positiveinteractions.space – you will then receive an auto-respond email with a link to download. If it doesn’t arrive please check your junk / spam folder. I will try to respond to your happy messages personally if I can. Thank you!

08: Maybe Underwater / Soccer, Snowman, Snowman, Snowman

Listen out for these sounds in Maybe Underwater / Soccer, Snowman, Snowman, Snowman:

A backwards guitar

… for some variation I’ve included a stem of backwards electric guitar that never quite made the Fugitive Light and Themes of Consolation cut.

Andrew Wasylyk

A guitar through a looping pedal

This is an idea I’ve been messing around with since you first asked, just noodling when I’m playing with the girls. So I recorded as a live session, one take with a mic in the room. I added a recording of the girls under it just to emulate how I’ve been working at it and to reflect how my days are spent playing with them. It was really fun to do, thanks.

Michael Lewis

A guitar through a synth effects pedal

I hope your Wednesday has been going well.

I have just been working on some music for your project.

Firstly a slightly boring computer related story

A few weeks my 2014 MacBook Pro stopped working / I took it over to Apple and they helped the poor old thing out.
They installed a new operating system but with no garage band which I normally use for music.

I think if I had installed a new version it would have melted it.

I was going to send over some music I had made in the summertime.

Anyway today I was feeling the vibes of some kind and decided to make some improvised music.

So this afternoon recording on my iPad using Voice Memo / I made 4 pieces of music/sound for you.

These pieces were made with:

Acoustic Guitar
Microphone
Casio SK-1 Keyboard
Thunder Tube
Toy Saxophone
Loop Station
Synthesizer Bass Pedal

Recorded live in downtown Dunfermline on Wednesday afternoon.

I hope you can access the sound files / and that you can use them in someway for the project?

Marcus Oakley

A kick drum from a Casio MT-46

Sampled from recordings sent to me by Gavin Sutherland (Other Lands)

A studio door being unlocked

It is ‘opening my studio door’ after I haven’t been able to be there for two months.

Roel Knappstein

Door squeaks

I like door squeaks very much, I find them hilarious and poignant and lovely.

Yann Seznec

Fish wire strung along a pier resonating in the wind

Also, this is a set of recordings I made in the Pacific Northwest a few years ago that I love – it’s an accidental aeolian harp that was made out of some fishing line that was strung up on a dock. It was super windy and it was making a completely amazing noise! I was so excited by it, and I still love listening to it. 

Yann Seznec (with Kristina Seznec)

Samuel – the noise of the trees

This is a recording that Samuel Cheong Bee made. His mum Clarissa explains…

As for recording those happy sounds, I finally sorted out my wee Zoom mic and whilst clearing the micro SD to make way for some really profound ambient nature/cooking noises, I found these recordings of the boys when they were wee.  Utter joy to my heart.  I might still send you some other stuff just for fun but these recordings of kids exploring what it means to record sound, to listen to themselves discussing nonsense, playing with song and word and foley, brings such a smile to my face and of course, being their parent, a wee tear to ma een.  

Ruben’s song was recorded up at Dunsapie Loch at Arthur’s Seat and we’d cycled up there to play with sound recordings.  He was laying on his belly next to the water and the reeds, brushing the mic against the grass and running around for effect.  I’d forgotten all about that day until I listened to the recording.  Sound, music and memory.  

Thanks for inviting me to send something.  Will be taking the Zoom out for a spin again soon! 

Clarissa Cheong

Synth sounds from Chris Labrooy

I don’t really try to make music any more even though I do play about from time to time to escape from all of the visual stuff. Happiness isn’t necessarily in the sound but in the process of pressing keys and pushing buttons.

Chris Labrooy

Synths sounds by Johnny Lynch

Just searched through some old stems from the Pictish Trail album, and found some sounds I really enjoyed making with Rob Jones, mostly on his swanky OP-1 and MS10 synths.

Johnny Lynch (aka Pictish Trail)

The white noise of the North Atlantic Ocean

here we go, two original recordings of noise (at day and at night) in the middle of the Norwegian Sea / North Atlantic 🙂
It was one the happiest moments and places I have been; I would sit there for hours and tune in—in a way.
Hope you like them and they provide fun for VC, chopping up, filters, or just leaving them as they are.

Jens Ewald

The track was named by Arthur Seznec, Lainie Lewis and Theia Lewis.
Written by Tommy Perman, Marcus Oakley and Michael Lewis.
Produced by Tommy Perman.

Get the album

Email your happy message to: happy@positiveinteractions.space – you will then receive an auto-respond email with a link to download. If it doesn’t arrive please check your junk / spam folder. I will try to respond to your happy messages personally if I can. Thank you!

11: Flickering Candle

Listen out for these sounds in Flickering Candle:

A backwards guitar

… for some variation I’ve included a stem of backwards electric guitar that never quite made the Fugitive Light and Themes of Consolation cut.

Andrew Wasylyk

A grasshopper singing

Nominated by Marijana Wilhelms.

Sound sourced from freesound.org:

https://freesound.org/s/58240/

A match taken from a box and then lit

this is one that I really like…

matches from a box and then lightning…

Markus Wilhelms

A studio door being unlocked

It is ‘opening my studio door’ after I haven’t been able to be there for two months.

Roel Knappstein

A Toyota Prius starting up

So my sound idea was originally the sound of a prius starting up – whenever I took an uber I loved the noise it made as it drove off.

So I found an example of the sound in a Japanese prius tutorial, and for fun I have left some of the language spoken in if you thought it might work. Prius sound is the focus though from me 🙂

Noah Ings

Casio Tone MT-40 Bass

Sampled from a recording sent by Gavin Sutherland (Other Lands)

Electronic bleeps

Sent by Josh Ings

Fish wire strung along a pier resonating in the wind

Also, this is a set of recordings I made in the Pacific Northwest a few years ago that I love – it’s an accidental aeolian harp that was made out of some fishing line that was strung up on a dock. It was super windy and it was making a completely amazing noise! I was so excited by it, and I still love listening to it. 

Yann Seznec (with Kristina Seznec)

Hamacide’s happy guitar

It seemed like a simple request, but the more I thought about it, the harder it became to think of a sound that made me feel happy.

So I took the complete opposite route of digging inside and did a finder search of my Hard Drive.  I typed in “Happy” and an old, unfinished session came up with the word “happy” in the title.

I listened to it and it made me want to finish it, AND it made me happy.  Here is a portion of the guitar track from it.  I’m starting to remember how I started to write the song, and all the stuff I was doing at the time, and it makes me happy.

Yusuke Hama (Hamacide)

Owls on a swing

The owls nest in the garden, and in summer sit around chatting to the fledglings. The swing is their favourite spot. The owls are very much part of my sense of home – a co-habitation. 

Rose Ferraby

Sandy Carson’s guitar and bass playing
Synths sounds by Johnny Lynch

Just searched through some old stems from the Pictish Trail album, and found some sounds I really enjoyed making with Rob Jones, mostly on his swanky OP-1 and MS10 synths.

Johnny Lynch (aka Pictish Trail)

Track named by Maja Wilhelms. Written by Tommy Perman, Yusuke Hama and Sandy Carson. Produced by Tommy Perman.

Get the album

Email your happy message to: happy@positiveinteractions.space – you will then receive an auto-respond email with a link to download. If it doesn’t arrive please check your junk / spam folder. I will try to respond to your happy messages personally if I can. Thank you!

15: Space Babies

Listen out for these sounds in Space Babies:

A Tom Waits song playing while hail falls on a studio roof

When I was working in my studio one day, a heavy rain and hail storm poured down on the roof and made quite a nice mix with some Tom Waits music I was playing

Roel Knappstein

Casio Tones

When considering what might constitute a positive noise to me, personally, many things came to mind as possibilities – from early recordings recently unearthed of my daughter at a very young age, before she could properly speak, to nature sounds collected from close to home or further afield. 

I figured you might be getting a bunch of stuff like this sent your way already anyway so instead decided to pay homage to the keyboard which arguably started my obsession with making music, particularly the electronic variety, from a very young age (3 or 4 years old I reckon) – the Casiotone MT-40.

This very short piece features the three Casiotones I now own – the MT-40, the MT-46 (which I bought off ebay when still playing with Found, still adorned with a sticker featuring Kev Sim’s illustration of Herbie Hancock), and the MT-68 which I was lucky enough to retrieve, in pretty immaculate condition, from a skip last year. 

All parts were played live, going through one of my more recent and frequently used bits of studio kit, the Polymoon Meris delay pedal.

The first tones are the sound of me scrolling thru the tones on the MT-40, a mode in which you could only play one note (A), so I took this as the basis of the piece, adding either bass, drums or chords from the other Casiotones.

Being that none of the equipment has MIDI, all rhythm parts and delays had to be tweaked live in order to stay in sync, another nod to the days when I had limited access to the sort of home studio technologies we might take for granted these days, when I had to be quite resourceful in order to achieve the results I was after.

These days I’m often trying to recapture those feelings from my earliest days of making music, when it was almost always entirely fun. Quite often I will give myself strict parameters to work within now, I suppose in a way to mimic the limitations I used to have, but also to force myself to work quickly and intuitively. 

Although I gave this piece quite a bit of thought before approaching it, I effectively wrote, played & produced it all in one evening – and intend to leave it at that.

Gavin Sutherland (Other Lands)

Fireworks and a bonfire

I changed my mind about what I wanted to send, as Bonfire Night is my favourite night of the year and usually sees me go to visit my oldest friend, stay at her house, go back to my home town and see an amazing parade of fireworks and a huge bonfire (it’s near Lewes and much of the same paraders that repeat the festivities a few days later). But this year of course it was cancelled. Instead I went with Sim to our nearest hill in Bristol, Troopers Hill, where lots of people had gathered (distantly, though it doesn’t really sound like it!) to watch little fireworks twinkling all over the city. Then later we went down to the river to make a campfire of our own and I recorded that just as a plane flew overhead, jarring with the timeless sound of a fire, and hopefully giving some lovely sub-bassy frequencies. If there’s anything I can do to boost those or improve the sound quality, let me know.

It was a lovely evening despite not being what I am usually used to, and quite touching / almost a little eerie – the fireworks could definitely sound warlike and menacing as well as celebratory.

Sarah Tanat Jones

Night drumming in the BR Hills

This is from a forest outside Bangalore in BR Hills. The Soliga tribe lives here and the drums you hear are them drumming at night to keep wild elephants away.

Babitha George

Track named by Eva Sutherland. Written and produced by Tommy Perman, Gavin Sutherland and Sarah Tanat Jones.

Get the album

Email your happy message to: happy@positiveinteractions.space – you will then receive an auto-respond email with a link to download. If it doesn’t arrive please check your junk / spam folder. I will try to respond to your happy messages personally if I can. Thank you!

20: (sway) row, row, let’s go

Listen out for these sounds in Track 20:

A Toyota Prius starting up

So my sound idea was originally the sound of a prius starting up – whenever I took an uber I loved the noise it made as it drove off.

So I found an example of the sound in a Japanese prius tutorial, and for fun I have left some of the language spoken in if you thought it might work. Prius sound is the focus though from me 🙂

Noah Ings

A volin

I was really touched when Tommy asked me to take part in this project. As I was shielding and had additional caring responsibilities I hadn’t been able to play the violin during lockdown, not even open the case, and this was literally about 5 minutes after I started playing for the first time, having pressed ‘record’ just in case anything was usable. I was warming up with some very basic two note motifs based on a ‘perfect cadence’, a closing chord sequence which often ends a piece bringing it back to the ‘home’ key, and then some improvised simple short melodies. I ended up layering the motifs over each other, with some deliberate flux in the timings, to make that repeated pattern. As I was in a very hectic work and home period, was using podcasting software to record and edit on my iPad without the skills to make it sound how I wanted (plus find it quite difficult to listen to myself) and then got floored by a virus, the actual process of creating it probably skirted wildly around the definition of ‘happy’, but Tommy worked wonders with it and, for me, that very simple chord sequence feels so grounding, and almost comforting, that I can’t help but smile when I hear it! 

Kate Miguda

Balgay birds and dog walkers

Here is a grouped field recording of birds and dog walker’s chattering that features on a new piece of music I’ve made for a new album. The song in question is a reminder of my cousin for me and I think it turned out okay. Clare’s been propagating cuttings from plants in our flat with a view to passing them on to folk. It made me think that it might be nice to share a ‘cutting’ from this song for you to sew into your new project.

Andrew Wasylyk

Casio Tone MT-40 Bass

Sampled from a recording sent by Gavin Sutherland (Other Lands)

Fish wire strung along a pier resonating in the wind

Also, this is a set of recordings I made in the Pacific Northwest a few years ago that I love – it’s an accidental aeolian harp that was made out of some fishing line that was strung up on a dock. It was super windy and it was making a completely amazing noise! I was so excited by it, and I still love listening to it. 

Yann Seznec (with Kristina Seznec)

Queen Street Station, Glasgow

Queen Street station is the first and last space I encounter on most of my visits to Glasgow. Taken at the end of November 2016, my recording of Queen Street reminds me of the years I’ve frequented the city, going to gigs, buying records, visiting friends, and waiting on the train home.

Gav Brown

Track named by Coralie Scott. Written by Kate Miguda and Tommy Perman. Produced by Tommy Perman.

Get the album

Email your happy message to: happy@positiveinteractions.space – you will then receive an auto-respond email with a link to download. If it doesn’t arrive please check your junk / spam folder. I will try to respond to your happy messages personally if I can. Thank you!