Edit: This was originally a thread for Drone Day 2024, but who needs a specific reason to make a drone or two? Share your drones and drone adjacent music, share tips and tricks and methodologies, etc.
Original post below:
By pure coincidence I chose today to start exploring the Analog Keys as a drone instrument, and then discovered it’s apparently International Drone Day, whatever the hell that means.
So I’ve decided to record my experiments and share them here, and I’ll be expanding the depository of drones as the day progresses as well as setting them up for future performance.
Share your drones, freshly squeezed or bespoke. Got any drone performance tips? Share them too.
so what makes a drone a drone? are there definitions to how much change it should contain? I don’t record mine often, I do it occasionally with DN but compared to most drones I’ve encountered it’s way more evolving/changing so just wondering if there’s any definition to that genre?
I don’t define it strictly at all, more a feeling. It needs to contain long held tones, have movement, and generally be ‘slow music’. It can be as simple as a slightly modulated sine wave.
For me, it’s more about the effect than the means. I love to make and listen to drones that envelope you.
I also try to present my drones as excerpts of an everlasting event. For my own personal uses I can leave a drone on for hours, and I enjoy listening to long form drone works from other people, but mostly I like the idea of a drone track as something that I walk into as an ongoing process, which I then leave.
Managed four tracks, need a break now. I think I have the starting point for a longer project, where I can create interludes between these drones, and create a longer set that can be elaborated on over time. I want to spend time delving into setting up performance macros into a useful template to use over all of the patterns, but that’s for another day.
@Prof_lofi Enjoying this very much. Digitakt is a fun device for creative manipulation. I made a ‘techno’ ep recently by just manipulating a few scraps of audio I nicked off a friend. I’ve always wanted to explore drone with it, but bumped into frustration due to the difficulty with cross over points.
I hear you about the crossover points. I put it for play only on first trig and then slowed tempo down to 30 bpm and did maximum steps. It was a challenge to be sure though.
The tracks were more minimal than I normally write but it was made for a drone label that specialised in very minimal material (they have stopped pressing for the foreseeable future) and so I released it on my own label.
Anyway looking forward to other’s tracks and listening to yours when I can dedicate some quality time to do it (I have a newborn atm so it’s a challenge!)
i played the analog four for drone day one year, 1 step sequence at a very high bpm, poly mode, massaging params, sounds went from harsh rhythmic beating to smooth tones drown in reverb, was a really fun set
Participated as well (and missed a lot of such flash mobs like “exquisite corpse” challenge here).
Decided to go unprepared, by using octa with older loops/drones and some pedals. The biggest challenge was to cut loops without clicks
