Living in Scotland, you’re bound to hear bagpipes. In fact I hear them most days because I live next to a park where bagpipers like to rehearse. So every now and then you’ll get an entry on bagpipes like this one or “This is Not a Bagpipe”. Today, I recorded two bagpipe players who were standing opposite each other, their positions gave for a nice stereo recording.

I love the idea of a grain of sound. In Max/MSP I used the simple granular synthesiser Gabor example [gabor.granular] from the FTM library by IRCAM. For the sound, I loaded a short segment of the recording where different sounds were happening (such as a breath, an attack and a sustained note) and used grain lengths ranging from 1 millisecond to 1 second while changing various settings that you see in the image. I didn’t process it further, other than a bit of compression and EQ.

(recorded on Zoom H4n with on board mics)
http://www.soundplusdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/audio/Bagpipe_Grain.mp3
Download High Quality [44.1kHz; 16bit]

[photo by Robert Scoble but processed in Max/MSP/Jitter]