Episode 32 – Sampling Firepits, Feeling Flamenco, Finding Tonás
In Dorset, Steve turns a resonant campsite firepit into a full mini-track using Ableton Note. In Manchester at WOMEX 2024, he sits down with Seville-based flamenco dancer Josie Sinnadurai to decode Tonás — one of flamenco’s oldest unaccompanied vocal families. Sparks, song, and how music evolves in the wild.
Clip ’n Mix: The Firepit Experiment
Recorded on holiday in Dorset with just a phone, the firepit’s metallic overtones become kick, snare and cymbals — then a bass and texture layer — all built inside Ableton Note. It’s a practical demo of making music from found sound: sample, pitch, shape the decay, arrange. You can try this at home; the phone in your pocket is a studio.
Genre Tombola: Tonás with Josie Sinnadurai
At WOMEX 2024 (Manchester), Steve talks with Josie, a British-born flamenco dancer based in Seville. Tonás are sung a palo seco (unaccompanied), with roots across Andalusia and threads from Jewish, Moorish and Roma traditions. The songs often carry themes of suffering and faith — raw, melismatic, and emotionally direct.
Improvisation, Emotion & Evolution
Flamenco’s live language mirrors jazz: shared frameworks with freedom inside them. Dancers, singers and guitarists negotiate sections in real time — cueing, stretching time, resolving together. It’s exactly the kind of evolving, collaborative system the show loves to unpack.
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Full Transcript
Verbatim transcript from the episode, included in full for accessibility and search. No edits have been made.
Hello, this is a tweaked version of episode 32, and there are two reasons for that. One of which is that I had a copyright strike on the podcast theme song. Now, for those of you who don't know what that is, that is where a provider, so in this case, Spotify and some parts of YouTube have said, oy, someone owns the copyright to that song, you can't use it.
To which my response is, yes, someone does own the copyright to that song, it's me. And so I'm trying to join the dots, I think it's some sort of automatic recognition system, and flags it up anyway, so it's a bit of a faff, but I'm working on that. But meanwhile, you'll hear that I've re-recorded a somewhat hasty version of it with just my voice.
So yeah, that's why it sounds weird at the start of the episode. And the other reason I've put out a slightly tweaked version is I've just trimmed some bits about the fire pit sampling. So if you've listened already, then welcome back.
It's the same episode, with just slightly shorter bits in the fire pit sampling and with a new podcast theme. If you haven't listened yet, you won't know what I'm talking about, but you will when you hear the new podcast theme. Roll the theme.
Hello, my name is Steve Pritty. I'm a musician, composer and performer from London, and welcome to my podcast, Steve Pritty on the Origin of the Pieces.
This is the show that helps you to hear, understand and enjoy music in new ways.
Hello Musically Curious People. It's lovely to be back in your ears again. And I said it would be two weeks, and here we are.
Two weeks for once. I'm actually good to my word. And yeah, hopefully lots more regular stuff from here on out.
Got so many interesting interviews all kind of lurking on my hard drive. I've got a few tracks I've made for the genre Tombola and lots more. So now I've just got to hack them into shape and get them into your ears and eyes.
Because once again, a reminder that I am on video as well. Hello, if you're watching on video, you can watch it on Spotify. You can watch it on YouTube.
And of course, I'll be clipping up bits and bobs of the show and putting on my social media at Steve Pretty. Yeah, so it's worth watching for some bits, especially when I'm digging around. And in this episode, I'm going to be digging around with some software on my phone so you can see what I'm doing with that if you're interested.
And the last episode, the visuals were quite interesting because I was talking to Richard Sabin from the Natural History Museum. Love talking to Richard. He's just one of my favourite people who I've met in the last few years.
Just absolutely passionate about his work as he's the head curator of mammals at the Natural History Museum and an international whale expert. He was so fascinating to chat to. We talked about whale song.
We talked about how sound is transmitted under the sea, the differences in transmission through water versus air, all sorts of fascinating stuff about how sound works, how animals communicate using sound, how music works underwater, how our brains, our human brains perceive sound underwater in a different way from on land, all sorts of stuff. So, do go back and check out episode 31. And in that episode as well, speaking of the visuals, I dug into how to tune the sea, the white noise of the sea, that kind of shh, how to tune that into a scale.
And in fact, I even played a tune on that using the sea. So go back and check that out and let me know what you think. Once again, as always, thanks for all the lovely feedback.
Do review the show, you know, spread the word, give me some nice reviews. It really, really helps out. But today, we've got all sorts of fun goodies coming up.
Launching this new section called Clip n Mix, which I've mentioned a couple of times over the last few months. This is essentially where I take a little recording and ultimately it would be lovely if you would like to send in some recordings of your own. Little, ideally video snippet, but little sound snippet is fine as well.
It can be of anything. It can be of any interesting noise, doesn't need to be inherently musical, as we'll find out today, but anything it could be you tinkering around on a piano in a station. We have pianos in stations in this country, in the UK.
So it might be that, or it might be your kid hitting a xylophone or a weird, squeaky gate, whatever it might be, and I'm gonna try and do something interesting and musical with it, and today is no exception. So to start off today's episode, I'm gonna take us back to the summer where I was on holiday with my family. We were down in Dorset, in a lovely spot, and there was this incredible sounding fire pit where we were camping.
And so before we get onto the main interview today, the main interview is with an incredible flamenco dancer. We're talking, we're revisiting the genre tombola finally about Tonás, so that's coming up in a bit. But before we go there, I'm gonna head over to Dorset back in the summer where we had this fire pit.
This is me and my son with a fire pit and a phone ready to try and make some music with it. Sting now. So we are camping on our family holiday and we got here and there's this amazing fire pit.
And we, one of the first things we did even before we lit a fire was, you hit it with a stick, didn't you? This is my son. And just hit it with a stick, a second, just gently.
This amazing noise that goes on and on and on. And we had lots of different types of sounds out of it. So what I thought I would do is use this for a clip and mix section of the podcast, this new section that we're just starting off.
And I'm going to use an app. I'm going to try and do the whole thing on my phone. I'm going to use an app called Ableton Note, which you can download for free on your phone if anyone wants to try this sort of thing.
And I'm going to, here we are, let's just get a new set going. And then we're going to do some different recordings. So the first thing I'm going to do is we're going to record this into what's called a sampler.
And then we're going to record this and we're going to turn this into an instrument. And then over the next couple of days, I'm going to make a little track out of these different things. So here's firstly we're going to record just a nice long hit.
So let's try it. Ready?
And if I do it from under like there, then it will make a different noise.
Yeah. So we'll try just over to start with. Try just a hit.
Okay, so that's nice, and this is how it sounds.
So we've got a nice sound recording there, yeah? There we go, lovely sounds. So that's what, so we're gonna make some tunes out of that.
And now what we're gonna do is make some drum hits out of it as well. Cause we're gonna make a whole track only using this sound. We're gonna use that as a snare drum.
Bass drum could be tricky.
We're going to turn that down, so pitch that down, so let's try it like this.
Okay, we're getting some good sounds there. Ready?
Dramatic, let's see how that sounds. Okay, I think I can turn that into a bass line. Good, are we good?
Shall I make a track with that in the next few days while we're on holiday? And we can turn this fire pit into an instrument. That'd be fun, wouldn't it?
All right, thanks very much for your help. Sting now. Now a reminder that you can watch along if you're interested in seeing how we sampled that fire pit, and also frankly, seeing how my son lost interest by the end of that process.
Then you can check out the video on YouTube or Spotify, and yeah, see what you think. Also in that video is a screen recording of my phone, so you can follow through and see how I'm using the app. If you've not used an app like that before, if you've not played around with a musical app on your phone or your iPad or whatever, then that's probably a good little introduction to do so.
So watch on YouTube, watch on Spotify and you can follow through and look at how we record such a thing and whether you might want to do the same thing. Once again, if you've got any interesting sounds that come up in your day-to-day life, do send them to podcast at stevepretty.com or on social media at stevepretty on Instagram or similar. I'm working on a system where you'll be able to upload these things more easily, but for the moment it's just email or social media.
So I hope that's all right and hopefully that new system will be up very soon. But before I make a track with those samples that I've just made on my phone, which I'm going to do that at the end of the episode, but before that I am talking to the brilliant Josie Sinnadurai for the genre tombola section. So for those of you who are new to the show, the genre tombola is where I take the complete list of around 1,300 music genres on Wikipedia, and I feed them into a random list picker, and that picks a random genre for me.
And it was probably about a year ago that that came up with Tonás. And it took me a long time to find someone to be able to talk to about it, but I did manage to find a brilliant person to talk to about it, and that is Josie Sinnadurai. She is a flamenco dancer.
I'll leave her to tell you more about her background and how she came to embrace the world of flamenco, but it's a fascinating genre that I found really, really interesting, and I'm sure you will too. So very belatedly, here's me talking to Josie Sinnadurai back at the World Music Conference Womex in 2024. Sting now!
My name is Josie Sinnadurai, and I am a flamenco dancer. I live in Seville in the south of Spain. I'm originally from the UK.
You might be able to tell that from my accent, but I do now live full time in Seville, and I work full time as a flamenco dancer.
It's been a bit of a sort of running thing on the podcast that this genre was chosen for me by the genre sambola, and I try and do it in the next episode, or at least the episode after that, but it just keeps getting pushed back and pushed back. Part of that is because of time, but also part of it is because trying to find someone to talk to Tonás about has been remarkably difficult so when we got chatting and I said, can you point me in the right direction if someone talks to you about Tonás, you said, I'm a flamenco dancer and I live in Spain, so thank you so much for talking to me. We were just talking just now and you said, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you said, I'm not an expert in Tonás, and that's basically what everyone has said to me.
But can you give me a bit of an overview of what Tonás is and how that differs from what your day-to-day experience of flamenco is?
Sure. When we talk about different styles in flamenco, the main thing that characterizes a style is the singing. So a lot of the time, if we were to look at the dancing by itself or the guitar by itself, we wouldn't necessarily be able to specifically say exactly which style that is.
We will be able to put it into a group of styles within flamenco, but not exactly. And it's the singing that makes it really clear the exact style that we're talking about. And Tonás is the epitome of the example of this, because Tonás is actually a style that is only sung without accompaniment.
So there's no guitar at all. It's called cantea palo seco, which means essentially a cappella, like an unaccompanied style of flamenco. Tonás is a group.
There are like five or six different styles within this group that are all called Tonás. It's a very old style of flamenco. I mean, a lot of styles within flamenco are very old, but Tonás, yeah, it's fairly old.
It's from mainly kind of the center of Andalusia. So Andalusia, again, is at the south of Spain, which is the province where flamenco comes from. And Tonás come from Seville and like Cadiz, those areas in the center of Andalusia.
We've had one flamenco genre on before, which was soleil, which we talked about, but I kind of got diverted quite a lot in that episode. I was talking to Nitin Sauny, great musician, and we ended up talking a lot about some of the Indian influences that came into flamenco and that kind of thing, as well as soleil. We're talking about flamenco and guitar styles, but I haven't really talked about vocal styles in flamenco.
Can you just describe the singing style associated, particularly with Tonás, but also with, I guess, flamenco in general, how it evolved?
Sure. I mean, flamenco as a genre is kind of a mixture of many different cultures and musical styles, which have passed through Andalusia at some point in history. In a previous episode, yes, there is some influence which we think came from India, which comes from the Roma people, the Roma Gypsy traveler people who left the north of India and then traveled across the world until they ended up in Spain.
There's also Moorish Arabic influence from the north of Africa because Spain was part of a Moorish caliphate for, I think, 600 years. There's Sephardic Jewish influence. There is Central African influence from the slave trade.
There's also Latin American influence from when Spain invaded Latin America. Of course, there's Spanish folklore, all mixed together and that's all what makes flamenco. The singing itself in general, to a lot of people, it sounds quite similar to an Arabic call to prayer.
It's a very different sound from what we're used to hearing in Europe. Because in Europe, we're quite accustomed to classical music in particular, or to folk music of a very different kind. If we think of British folk music, Scottish music, Irish music, very, very different ways of singing and of counting music.
But flamenco has this much more kind of Eastern feel to it, in general. So a lot of the time the singing can sound a lot like wailing, or like these kind of very emotional cries, which is, as I say, very characteristic of flamenco.
Well, Tonás is the descendant from a style called Romance, which is kind of these sort of ballads, these really, really long epic poems that were sung throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. And what happened in Andalusia is that evolved over many, many years and became what we now call Tonás. I guess you would characterize the singing itself in that usually it's quite tragic and dramatic.
Usually the kind of the literary content of a Tonás is quite sad. It can talk about death or loss or religious themes. So that also kind of influences the sound of the voice, I would say, because there's definitely a kind of tragic, sad tone to the sound of the voice in a Tonás.
Yeah, that's really, really brilliant summary. Thank you. And as you mentioned there, it's one of the oldest styles of flamenco, right?
So am I right in thinking it's something that a lot of other styles of flamenco evolved out of?
Yes, a lot of styles kind of evolved alongside each other as well. So modern day versions of Tonás would be styles such as a martinete is a modern day type of Tonás, a debla is a modern day type of Tonás, carceleras, and then in terms of maybe things that might be more danced, there's a style called Seguirías. And it's kind of disputed whether Seguirías evolved from Tonás or Tonás evolved from Seguirías.
But because this is all folklore and none of it was ever written down, it's very hard to find the definitive answer about which style influenced which. But yes, certainly there is a kind of a group of styles, Tonás, Seguirías and the other ones that I mentioned, that have kind of evolved together.
The title of the show is Origin of the Pieces, as in of course like Darwinian evolution. It's interesting, I keep thinking how many commonalities there are with evolution in the natural world, because often it's not as simple as this evolved first, then this came. It's like these things co-evolved and then they merged into a different thing, and then that merged into a different thing.
So there's a lot of commonalities there, I think, when we think of music and what you're talking about, about all these different influences coming in, it seems really audible once you really listen to Fridenko as an outsider, at least, you can hear all these different traditions mixing together. That's often the case in moments of great innovation in music. I think I spent some time in New Orleans earlier this year, and there is another classic example where you, again, you've got all these different influences coming in for various different reasons, it's often to do with international politics and trade and all the rest of it, and often for really dark reasons like the slave trade, as you mentioned.
But all of these influences coming together, and then I just find it endlessly fascinating that people then take those and find new forms of expression by learning from one another and then changing it and adapting. I guess my question is a bit simplistic, is if it came first, as you say, I'm sure you're right, these things may be co-evolved. The subject of the vocals, the lyrics and things in Tonás, is it got a broad theme?
In general, I would say they are quite serious.
The stuff I've listened to seems very, very serious and very sort of tragic. At least again, I don't understand the lyrics, but I get the sense of the melodies.
Yeah, there is a School of Thought which says that Tonás were particularly cultivated by the Sephardic Jewish people and the Gitanos. So that's what we call the Roma people in Spain. We call them Gitanos.
By those two cultures, there's a little bit of history of Spain. So after the Catholic kings and queens retook Spain and formed kind of a Catholic state, the Moorish people, the Sephardic Jewish people and the Gitanos people who were living there were forced to either leave the country or convert to Christianity or be put to death. And it is believed that Tonás were particularly kind of preserved and cultivated by Gitanos and Sephardic Jewish communities after this kind of Catholic reconquista.
Re-conquest, I guess.
Yes. So after the Spanish reconquista, these people were having to live in fear and in hiding and practice Catholicism to the outside world, but actually try and maintain their own culture behind closed doors, which is one of the reasons why the themes of Tonás are quite often quite sad, because it was cultivated by two groups of particularly oppressed people during that time.
Right. It was perhaps used as a sort of cathartic release, because that's what it sounds like. It sounds like someone's really sort of bearing their soul and their anguish when I've been listening to it.
I mean, I think that's what we find a lot in Flamenco in general, because it's a folk art and it was especially conserved by, as with many folk arts, it was especially conserved by the poorer members of society or by the outcasts or by the people living and hiding. So a lot of the time, the themes can be quite dramatic and quite serious because they're talking about the hardships of the lives of people who were struggling in Andalusia.
Just pivoting to your, I guess, specialty as a dancer, I think you might be the first dancer I've actually spoken to in the show, which is a bit shameful. Is there a direct connection with dance and Tonás? Or did the dance thing kind of evolve separately once guitars and castanets got involved?
No, dance and guitar and singing, they've all always evolved together. Although, as I mentioned earlier, styles are usually classified by the singing and not by the dancing. But Tonás, actually, there's kind of a specific point in history when the first ever Tonás was danced.
And that was by a dancer called Antonio El Bailarín. I don't remember the exact date, but it was in the 1950s. And he choreographed a dance to Martinete, to one of these styles of Tonás.
And it's a beautiful scenery because he's dancing in this gorge outside with incredible cliffs and amazing visuals behind him. And then he's dancing this very kind of serious, percussive Tonás in front of the camera. But when we would usually find a Tonás in dancing, would be maybe at the beginning of a dance, because it's not accompanied by a guitar.
Doing a kind of a whole dance of Tonás, that would be a lot of work for the dancer and the singer. But you might find a Tonás at the beginning as a kind of introduction to another style. So you might maybe do like the first three or four minutes of the dance, you would choose a verse of a Tonás, and then you would go on to something else.
That makes sense. Just from the listening that I've done, it's the singing, the beat is quite loose, right? So it's pulled around a lot to my ear.
So in other words, when you're dancing to that, is it more of a kind of free-flowing thing than a strict rhythmic cycle?
Yeah, I would say so. I mean, there are certain moments when you do need to be more strict with the rhythm, especially if dance is involved. But if you've been listening to recordings, I don't know, have you been listening to just singing without dance?
Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, that's what I've found in my musical travels.
So then, yes, the singer can be a lot more free because they're not having to stick to a timing for a dancer. Yeah, I would say like Tonás in general, it's one of the styles in flamenco where the timing is quite loose. There are certain styles where the timing is really strict.
And if you go off that, it's kind of like a cardinal sin in flamenco. And then there are other styles where the nature of the music is to stretch out the beat. But you always kind of stretch it out and then come back to it in the end.
You never lose your sense of timing entirely.
Broadening out to flamenco more generally, what was it that attracted you to listening to flamenco and then wanting to dance flamenco?
I mean, I don't remember when I started doing flamenco because I started when I was three.
Wow, that's crazy.
Yeah, so I don't remember this moment, but I've been told by my parents that I was taken to see a flamenco show when I was three years old and I loved it and so they then sent me a lot of classes. I guess there must have just been some kind of instinctual enjoyment and love of flamenco that drew me to it. Actually, I later went on to train as a contemporary dancer when I was 18, and then I went back to flamenco in my early 20s.
There was something about flamenco that kind of drew me back to it. I think the kind of freedom to just dance and not have to analyze or come up with a philosophical meaning to create something, because flamenco is just about raw expression. Sometimes it doesn't even have a story or a narrative to it, but what it does have is a huge amount of emotion.
And you just go for it and you just do the best possible dance you can on that day in the moment. And that way of performing, I love it. I love just being allowed to dance and not always have to kind of justify what I'm doing with some kind of great meaning behind it other than expressing what I want to express emotionally in that moment.
That's really interesting because what's going to be my next question actually was about how much of it is pre-arranged moves. And I mean, it's a question I get asked a lot as a jazz musician or as an improvising musician. Oh, you know, you're just making everything up and to which the answer depends on the gig.
It depends on what the set up is. But often you're working within a fairly controlled structure and the freedom is within that structure. It's not, you know, it's not just, yeah, do it, do it the hell you want, which I think is people don't always understand that.
Is that kind of analogous to what you do in terms of there are certain moves or certain particular ways of interpreting the music physically that you then kind of assemble as part of a language or are you free to come up with your own physical language or how does it work?
Yeah, I mean, I I would say it's really similar to jazz. I'm not a jazz artist myself, but I always hear people saying that the way in which we improvise in flamenco is similar to jazz in terms of there is a very specific structure, but within that structure, you're free to do whatever you want. In any flamenco style, there's like there are markers where you kind of know that, OK, now now we need to do some kind of communication in order to figure out what's coming next.
So in a dance, for example, there are various sections where even though I'm the dancer, so I'm kind of the soloist in inverted commas. There are moments when I have to follow the singer and the singer can make choices for how long or how short they want certain sections to be, but all kind of within reason. So when I'm talking about maybe adding a bar or two, I'm not talking about making the thing three times longer than its original version.
Then there are other sections within a dance where the dancer will be in charge, and that's usually any footwork section, then the musicians will be following the dancer. And usually the best thing to do in a footwork section, which is called an Escobilla, would be to maybe do the first two bars of a really, really recognizable footwork pattern, so that everyone knows where we are, everyone knows what speed we're going, everyone knows what it is that's coming next. And then as soon as you've done those first two bars, you can do whatever you want.
And then the ending as well, when you get to the ending of that particular section to however long your kind of closing bit is going to be to start and finish that quite clearly. So, you know, usually it's good to like finish on the beat instead of finishing on an off beat. But yeah, so there is a huge amount of freedom, but with certain moments when you need to be very, very clear, especially if you're starting or finishing a section, because otherwise you can end up with people not starting and finishing together.
And then that is quite messy.
It's interesting to hear is kind of analogous to jazz in that there's no, you're not necessarily following a preordained choreography to to achieve. Oh, no, no, no. A collaboration, a collaboration between you and the other musicians.
Right, right.
Yeah. Before I do a dance, we don't rehearse. I have an idea in my head of the steps that I want to do, but I also need to be prepared to adapt them.
So I don't go on stage and completely make everything up on the spot. But the improvisation is in the communication and in the making sure that we understand what's going on.
And that's where the magic happens, right? That's why I'm very drawn to styles of music where you can see that something spontaneous and in the moment is happening right in front of you. And of course, you can capture that to a degree on film or on record, but there's something really magical about those live experiences.
Jazz gets a lot of stick and quite rightly so sometimes. A lot of those styles where you can see that human interaction through abstraction, through abstract music, is something that I'm really drawn to and find sort of endlessly fascinating and dancing a bit the same. I mean, I like, I've seen some ballet and I've seen various, you know, classical forms of dance and contemporary dance and stuff.
And there's lots of that that I really like, but I think a lot of stuff like that can leave me a little bit cold because I think, oh, wow, they really danced that immaculately. But it doesn't really kind of fill me with emotion and passion in the way that the little bit of flamenco I have seen, it gives me that same feeling as I get when I'm watching a really interesting, dynamic jazz gig or another gig where there's a lot of interaction and spontaneity going on. I'm going to ask you one question, if you don't mind, which is something I ask all my guests pretty much.
You're the first dance show I've asked this to, and that is, what is the point of music?
Oh. Firstly, I don't know whether it needs to have a point or not. Music is something that we can see is part of humans' ways of expressing themselves because if we look at any ancient culture, no matter how isolated it is, music is nearly always present as are many forms of expression.
We find like painting, which again potentially doesn't have a point to it other than expressing something or preserving something. We find music and we find dance. Those are three things that we find in nearly all communities and all civilizations that we come across.
I think it's part of human beings' ways of expressing things that they can't necessarily put into words and ways of sharing and ways of preserving, ways of remembering. Yeah, I guess that's what I think music means to people.
Beautifully put. Thanks so much. Where can people find your stuff or come and see you, if they're in Spain or if you're shopping?
I put everything on my Instagram page. So my Instagram page is Josie, J-O-S-I-E, underscore, so like the low line, Sinnadurai, S-I-N-N-A. Or I do have a new Flamenco website as well.
There we go. Good plug. Nice.
Which is www.josielaurelflamenco.com.
If anyone's in Seville and they do want to find out if I'm performing, then feel free to send me a DM and I usually reply.
Amazing. Well, if you're in Seville, yeah, go and check Josie out. Thanks so much.
That was really fascinating.
Thank you.
And my huge thanks once again to Josie for that fascinating insight into Tonás. I really, really enjoyed learning about that. And you may notice that I did not make a track.
Again, if you're new to the show, I sometimes for the genre tombola, we'll try and make a piece of music in that style. But I thought me not speaking Spanish and trying to do a piece of unaccompanied flamenco song in Spanish might be a terrible idea for everyone concerned, even by the standards of some of the overly ambitious things that I do with the genre of tombola sometimes. So no track for that one this time.
But instead I'm going to move over and do a track with those samples I recorded. So here I am in the studio trying to turn those samples from the fire pit in the campsite into something vaguely musical. Here we go.
Sting now.
So I'm back in the studio in London and I've got my Ableton Note app that I recorded those little samples of the fire pit on. I did do a little bit of work when I was on holiday with the family while the kids were splashing around in the sea. I was sat on the beach like a lunatic trying to make silly noises out of a fire pit.
So I've done a little bit of preemptive work, but I'm now going to give myself about 10, 15 minutes to try and see if I can come up with something vaguely musical with those sounds. So if we go in and start with the drums, as all good electronic music tends to start with the drums, particularly the kick drum, right? The low drum that really powers a lot of dance music in particular.
So that's what I had made from the sample, and that's by transposing it down. So that's the original sample, but then I've taken the decay down. In other words, when I press the sample, it doesn't have much of a tail, it doesn't hang over very much.
So that's that. And then I'm taking the pitch way down, down 20 semitones. So quite a long way.
And we've got a little kick drum out of that sound. Now snare drum is the next most important thing. So let's get these sounds right to start with.
So that's what we're going to make the snare out of. And then I'm going to take that back down and think. So that's nice, it's got a nice impact to it.
But again, the decay, in other words, how long the sound is once you play it, was much too long. So that's not a bad little start, I think, for kick and snare. So we've got the kick and snare sorted, which is great.
Now, what we need to do is get some cymbals going. So we haven't got time to mess around too much. We're just going to go with pretty much kick, snare and two types of cymbals.
So cymbal is quite easy because cymbal is obviously a big bit of metal on a drum kit. It doesn't have a pitch normally, so it's got lots of what are called overtones, lots of vibrating air at all different frequencies, which is what this fire pit was so nice at. So that's quite nice, but again, it's a bit long.
So if we make that, we were looking for the hi-hat, which is again, very important, particularly in sort of hip hop based music, like trap and so on. We want to emphasize the top bit of that. So here's our kick, here's our snare.
We can call it whatever we like because we don't need to design a traditional drum kit. We can make our own fire pit drum kit as we wish. I really like that.
It's got a really nice metallic ring to it. So why don't we get some musical ideas going, get some ideas generated. So if I play this in and I do it roughly here, I go...
I'm doing this just with the speakers on my phone. So ultimately, of course, this might sound very different on headphones. Hopefully we'll hear a bit more of the bass.
Okay, great. So we've got a kick drum going. Nothing very exciting, but it's a good start.
And a little snare drum in there as well. So if anything, that cymbal is a little bit loud, so we might try and turn that down a little bit.
Now, let's get some rhythms going. So here's the basic groove we've got. Now we're gonna give this final piece, and I've just taken some of it.
So that was nice, but a bit splashy, splashy crappy, and we wanna take a little bit of that higher end off and get it going like that. So, don't forget, every sound you're hearing is entirely made from that fire pit. Now, I'm gonna go in and see if I can make an instrument, a melodic instrument or a bass instrument, from that same pit.
So, here's the sample.
That's the sample. Interesting. So, it's really got an interesting long tail there.
Really just having a play around and see what works.
So, I've got that sound I like. But, that is going to feel quite static. And even though it kind of evolves, it's really long and interesting tail to it.
But that's, it might be nice to be able to even change that as it's playing. So, what we can do is do something called automation, where we change the sound over time, right? It sounds like this.
And then, as I play it, that's where it's going. And I can change some of these effects.
Now, I'm gonna go back to the drums. It's all right, it does sound a little bit on the static side or a little bit on, like, you know, machinie can be good, but I think we can make it less machinie. Let's get some, again, some delay.
So this is gonna bounce the drums around a bit. So that's kind of crazy with the drums, but. If we take, take it down a little bit.
This is without.
It's all right. And what I'm also gonna do is add a little bit of reverb to that snare drum. Snare drum and reverb are a very good pair.
There we go. So this is sending it into an imaginary space, if you like, as if this pretend snare drum made from the fire pit was being played in a big hall somewhere. You don't want it on the kick drum because that will muddy things up and create problems with the sound.
So, but that's a bit more like it. Play this again.
So it's slightly dominating, we're gonna turn that track down a little bit. It's quite cool.
I think we recorded another sample for this. Okay, let's just see what we can do with the sound as it is. Because I've already done a little bit of work to that on the beach in Dorset.
For this more melodic instrument, which has got a little bit more of a kind of pitched sound rather than all of these crazy waveforms overlapping with the rest of the thing that we've got here. And I'm gonna use what's called an arpeggiator for this. This is all, again, in the Ableton Note app.
What it does is basically bounce between several notes. So I'm gonna play a couple of notes. If I just play one note, it just keeps repeating that.
Bit boring. If I play...
Several notes, it gets a slightly more interesting pattern going. And it randomly balances between all of them. This is a very, very common technique in a lot of electronic music.
And it's a technique actually I've used in my own composition, using not something like an arpeggiator, but then re-scoring it for a live ensemble. So it's a fun thing to do that I recommend people give a go if you're interested in such things. So, let's get the track going and see what we can come up with.
Take the decay down.
We're also just going to decrease the volume of the sound a bit.
And then we've just got to arrange it, and that means we've got these different clips, so you can see these different clips, and we're going to try and play them in different orders. So I'm going to stop all of them, and then it's just come up with a little bit of an arrangement, so this is again just something we've done in a few minutes. It's not going to change the world, but it's kind of interesting, and don't forget that every single sound you're hearing has come from that fire pit that I recorded with my son.
Okay, so that's, we get that going, set up a little loop, and then what we might do is we might add this sound.
And then we might bring in a little bit of the arpeggiated melody line.
Alright, and then what we're gonna do is drop out of the drums and just leave the arpeggios.
And then bring in the more complicated drums.
All right, and then on the next cycle, what I'm gonna do is take both of those out and just leave our nice, long, rolling sound that we made in the middle. Here we go.
So, I'm gonna put this set up on my Patreon. If you wanna have a play around with some of these sounds, you can download all of the sounds. If you use Ableton or if you can wanna get this free app on your phone, they don't pay me to say this or anything, I just think it's great that you can do this all just on a phone these days, you don't even need a laptop or iPad or whatever.
And then, what is good about this, if you are interested in producing music of your own, is that you can then take this and then take it into Ableton on a computer and have a play around more fully there. So let me know what you think, but you can download all these sounds by signing up to Patreon. It's on the website originofthepieces.com or patreon.com/originofthepieces.
And you can sign up for free or for one pound or five pounds a month or any amount you like. But yeah, meanwhile, this is just a reminder to send me some samples in for me to have a play around like this. So if you take a little video, maybe your cat makes a strange noise, maybe you've got like a squeaky pig or something.
And we can have a go by doing stuff like this. Sometimes I might do things, you know, using a computer, running it through some of the toys I've got in here. Or sometimes I might just take your recording and maybe play along on trumpet or on keyboard or whatever it might be.
So it's just, the idea is just to really think about sound as a playful thing. Be playful with it, listen out. I'm talking about like listening in new ways, training your ears to think like a musician, to hear like a musician.
That's all it is really. It's just re-contextualizing the sounds you're already hearing. So like when I first heard that in the fire pit, I thought that is a really interesting sound.
I've got to record that in some way. I just did it on my phone. I didn't bring any fancy mics out or anything like that.
You can see if you watch the video of this episode on YouTube, you can see it's just me and my son with my phone recording it there and then in the campsite. Any little interesting sounds you hear in your day-to-day life, send them in, send them in. I'm working on a system for you to submit them more easily, but otherwise, meanwhile, you can send me snippets on Instagram, which is at Steve Pretty, or if you want to email, you can email podcastatstevepretty.com, podcastatstevepretty.com, or there's contact forms and what have you on my website.
I kind of like that. Maybe I'll do something more with that. The thing from my point of view as a composer and someone who plays around with sound a lot is by doing stuff like this, you never know, that might be the last time I ever think about this track or look at this track or those recordings, but there might just come a thing where I get asked to compose a tune for someone or a thing for TV or whatever where I think, I've got just the sounds for that.
And maybe I don't use this exact track, but maybe some of those ideas that I had there might make it into a future composition. So that's why this is work, work. So again, it's just having fun and playing around, really.
So send me your sounds and on with the show. Sting now. So there we are, a bit of fire pit music there for you.
I hope you enjoyed that bit of a kind of crunchy strange track. But again, I think there's some really interesting textures in there that I might repurpose for some other projects down the line. And more than anything else, it's just fun, right?
You know, music, we call it playing music for a reason. And I think often that playing should be something that we all do more of. Even if you don't have musical training, there are these free apps, there's all of these incredible tools these days to just play around with sounds, to hear an interesting sound, think that sounds lovely, that sounds interesting, that sounds weird.
Now, just with the phone that most of us carry in our pocket all the time, you can get a recording of that and you can have a play around with the different sonic qualities of it, do something rhythmic with it, do something melodic with it, and see what happens, if for no other reason, then it's an interesting thing to do. We all play around with photos on our phones all the time, videos, we're all taking photos and videos, but we're not doing quite the same with with sound, and I think we can do a lot of really, really interesting stuff with sound, so I really encourage you to do that, and if you do, once again, please do send me those recordings, podcast at Steve Pretty or social media at Steve Pretty, and I will have a go at doing something musical with them, maybe I'll do an acoustic duet with them one week, and then, I don't know, process them a bit like that another week, or remix them into a piece of drum and bass the week after. Who knows, but do get those samples sent in.
Meanwhile, thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed the episode this week. Loads more stuff to come, so please do subscribe.
Please do send over recommendations to your friends to listen and subscribe. There's some live shows coming up. I've got two very exciting live shows that I'm doing at Wilton's Music Hall on the 24th of January.
And they're both on the 24th of January because I'm doing my standard evening show with some incredible guests that I'm going to be announcing very soon. Really, really excited about that. So all sorts of musical fun and experimentation there.
But for the first time ever, I am doing a family show, a kid show in the afternoon. So if you've got kids from anything from about the age of five, younger kids are welcome too, but it's really aimed at sort of five and up. And we're going to be exploring a lot of the same things that we explore in the podcast that you're listening to now, that you're watching now and the evening show, but more aimed at families and a bit more accessible for, I guess, younger kids.
So yeah, 24th of January is on sale in the Wilton's website right now. And there's a link in the show notes. So head over there and get your tickets.
I'm also on the road with Chris Lintott a little bit over the coming weeks. I mentioned it last week. Off the top of my head, I think we've got 20th of November, I think it is, which is in, I believe, Corsham.
And then the 27th of November is in Cambridge, at the junction in Cambridge. Come and see me and Chris Lintott and our Universe of Music show about the commonalities between music and astronomy and how those things kind of cross over, how they're both methods of trying to understand our place in the Universe and make some sense of it. I do it through Silly Noises, Chris does it through Advanced Science, but we're really trying to do the same thing.
And we've really, I love doing that show, and we had a really lovely show for our End of the Universe special at Jamboree last week. So thanks to those of you who came down for that show. It was really fun and really looking forward to those live gigs.
Meanwhile, the theme song is by myself, Angelique Kidjo and Hackney Collery Band. You can get it from our album, Collaborations, Volume 1, if you like the sound of that. There's loads of more great stuff on that record too.
But stay music and curious, and I'll see you in a couple of weeks. Bye.