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Farming (Study)

I was interested in a certain concept on the piano: it starts with the left hand playing an octave plus the fifth (E-B-E) while the right hand plays the same pattern on the related major (G-D-G). Then a little chord progression happens with the left and right hands following each other with the same pattern.

After recording the piano part, I decided to play around in Reaper. The original piano is being sent to an effects track where it gets shifted up an octave (ReaPitch), then looped using AngstroLooper set to full-wet (5) on a 3-measure loop, with feedback at 8, and Damp at 8. That echo is then set to a second effects track where the same effects are added again for an extra octave and another round of looping. The last thing I added was an instance of Shortcircuit VSTi, using a small snippet of the same piano part set to a forward loop with crossfade, and used a midi track to play the root and fifth as a kind of drone that comes in the second half of the track.

For the video, I used FFMPEG to slice up an old Internet Archive video of farming footage (https://archive.org/details/FarmTractorFootage), ran it through some degradation steps (splitting and offsetting the RGB components, setting the pixel format to rgb8 and back up to rgb24, etc.), and used a graphic of a Super 8 frame to make the edges look a little retro.

I think it kinda does something interesting.