Okta 2: Back to the Skies

[Heraclitus Akimbo]

Announcing the second edition of the Okta collaborative ambient project.

To review: the first album is here.

We had okay fun doing this! We raised a bit of money through bandcamp sales which was donated to the ILF hosting fund!

It happened via a two-step process. First, people created sounds and submitted them; then people assembled their tracks with sounds that other people had made.

Are we good with that? Other ideas/ways of doing things can be discussed.

Proposed timeline:
*two weeks to sign up/agree on the ground rules
*six weeks to produce shareable source tracks
*six weeks to create a track from the submitted sounds

That means with time for fussin' and tusslin', mixin' and masterin' album release would be at the start of September.

Proposed tech/time constraints:
All source tracks should be at 24 bit 48k resolution / under ten minutes.

If you want to get involved:
*post in this thread saying so or DM me. I will DM everyone to confirm.

[Heraclitus Akimbo]

Super important reminder: The Sesame Street rule very much applies here... don't worry if you're not good enough for anyone else to hear. If you can produce and record sounds and you're into the vibe you are fully qualified to be involved. Lurkers who worry they're not adequately ILF cool are welcome — if this is a way in for you to engage with this community then it's all good.

[Heraclitus Akimbo]

Also of possible use to someone: this set of free-to-use orchestral instrument samples crossed my feeds today. (Yes, the samples are in MP3. It's free, don't complain.)

[coldbrightsunlight]

I am iiiin.

Only comment is that the ten minute limit... May still be too long?

Maybe it's just me but I found it a slog listening through everything last time. It was all good! There was just so much of it and I felt obliged to at least skim through every track.

Happy to work with whatever people like though

[Paul_C]

I'm in.

Happy to sign up to whatever the majority agrees to.

[moid]

I'm in! I'm sure my son will be too (he's asleep; I'll tell him in the morning) Thanks for suggesting this. Timeframe is cool with us.

[spacelordmother]

I’m in too.

For those of us (ahem) that didn’t participate in the first round — is there a theme? How many samples? Any other tidbits?

Thanks for organizing!

[Dowi]

I'm sooooooooooooooooo IN

@spacelordmother here's the thread of the first round viewtopic.php?f=150&t=61956

i'm gonna quote here the original post for easier reference:

Hey, let's try something!

I was reading a news story about cloud cover (there's been lots here) and it passingly mentioned that cloud cover is measured in Oktas. So I looked that up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okta) and the little "band name" bell rang in my head. I almost posted it to the band names thread, but then I realized: I wanted that band name for myself... evocative of cloudy skies, it just sounds great for an ambient project. I dug around to see if anyone had taken this (there's a German rock band named Okta Logue, but nothing else that immediately popped up), so I immediately created a bandcamp page (https://okta.bandcamp.com/). But I don't really need a band name for that right now.

So what if I shared it?

I'm proposing a collaborative project, open to anyone here who wants to get in on it and share the general vibe, which is ambient, drone-y music. I don't have many other stipulations than rhythmic elements should be absent (or strongly minimized) and the guiding aesthetic principle is a cloudy sky.

The idea that comes to my mind is that the collaboration would be a twofold process:
1) everyone contributes a number of sounds/stems ranging from 1 to the total number of collaborators
2) everyone then gets to create a track, drawing from the bank of the submitted sounds. (I think it would be cool to have some mixers get some sounds exclusively, but also to maybe have some re-occur in different tracks? This is open to discussion.)

Submitted sounds should be free of ego attachments, as the mixer should feel free to manipulate the sounds as they see fit.

Completed tracks will be posted as an album to bandcamp with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).

Regarding the number of samples i guess we can stick to previous rules, so:

1) everyone contributes a number of sounds/stems ranging from 1 to the total number of collaborators

One more thing i noticed the last time is that it was way easier to assemble the simpler samples, so maybe that's a useful note IMO: since we're supposed to compose something with this stems, don't upload tracks that are already halfway complete, but try to keep you stems not too complex for easier manipulation.

[coldbrightsunlight]

Yeah. I prefer people to submit short and simple samples as those are the most fun to work with. But again, do what you want and if I don't like a sample I won't use it.

[spacelordmother]

Thanks!

[Heraclitus Akimbo]

In so far:
Heraclitus Akimbo
coldbrightsunlight
Paul_C
moid
spacelordmother
Dowi

I'm totally cool with aiming for shorter source samples. If you like it, you can always loop it!

[MrNovember]

I am absolutely in! Loved doing this last time around. Also, I definitely support shorter and simpler samples. It's much easier to layer sounds that aren't already complex

[Heraclitus Akimbo]

I am absolutely in! Loved doing this last time around. Also, I definitely support shorter and simpler samples. It's much easier to layer sounds that aren't already complex

Right on!

[ognoy]

I'm in!

[aedes]

Can i join, add samples, and then flake again?