I’m making a soundfont out of my bathroom.
That’s the whole post. That’s the bit.
Except it’s real and it’s happening. It’s called Apocalypse in a Folder (working title. Runners-up were Toilet Demon Pack and Final Flush, and honestly all three are true). A full percussion kit, built from hits I record around my place with my mic, plus a lot of bathroom ambient noise I’m going to mine for weird sounds like some kind of deranged audio prospector.
This started, as all my best ideas do, by accident. I accidentally recorded a fan in Bandlab while making a bootleg soundfont of questionable quality out of Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky”, and instead of deleting it like a sane person I thought: what if it was a whole kit?
My best recordings have always been made in bathrooms, you can thank the acoustics and my unending audacity for that. I sing in the shower and the shower sings back. So the bulk of this kit is getting born in there.
The plan: a HUGE all-percussion soundfont. For melodic stuff I like stretching a sample across ranges, but this percussive nightmare gets the royal treatment. Every hit, every clank, every unholy bathroom resonance will get its own sample.
And because I can’t leave well enough alone, I also plan to make an earth-shattering bass soundfont from bathroom vocal takes. That low hum I do in the shower that wakes up my gut, stretched, chopped, pitched down to Hell and filtered to shit is going in the folder too. Will it be good? Unclear. Will it be fun? You bet your ass it will be. Will you get to play with it? If enough of you want it, it goes out as a freebie to the gorgeous people on my newsletter list. Tell me you want it. Peer pressure works on me and I CAN, in fact, be bought. (Subscribe below if you want in. I’ll send you a track I don’t remember recording to say thanks, no questions asked 💛)
— Allēna
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