The first time I heard Rackwick Bay by Phamie Gow I heard things in my head that I wanted to hear in the piece. This is not to say in any way that the original performance isn’t perfect, just that I could imagine a version of the song that was more expansive and cosmic.

Fast forward seven years or more; I recently heard about OpenDAW and thought I’d play around. I’m sure that as a dabbler what I’ve produced is sacrilegious, as well as maybe being a little distortive on the old speakers, but it was fun to learn.

To make the “beeps”, the process was to take the original then run it through an online MP3->MIDI converter and run that as a midi synth (with all its conversion idiosyncrasies), with effects to remove the upper frequencies and some other little tweaks. The randomness along with the mistakes of the midi conversion makes me smile.

To make the “room”, I took a copy of the original track and ran it through tape, reverb, waveshaper and more (Dattoro) reverb. I do love some reverb.

I then got exceptionally frustrated with OpenDAW’s interface and documentation (there’s some kind of automation tool in there to control the output mix somewhere but it sure ain’t in the interface that I’m seeing). Thankfully there was an alternate way to control the mix using the Werkstatt code tool. A little help from Gemini to translate my desire to bring the room effects in from bar 35 and the beeps a bit after that got me there.

With thanks and adoration to Phamie Gow and the makers of OpenDAW.