The track idea started with the chimes sample - I made two copies of it.
one goes through ChromeOxide and a bandpass EQ
the other goes through ChowTapeModel
this sample is 12 bars long, so much of the character of the piece came from deciding what to do in the 4 bars after it finished to make a full 16 bar loop.
Next I added the drums
each drum is a mix of an actual drum sample from the aforementioned SonicCouture kit plus one of the various percussive sounds I've recorded
then came the clothes dryer - there are 6 layers, each passed through
this plugin to give the lazy swing rhythm
To give ambience, I added a recording of a thunderstorm from my house - I sampled the same storm back in SWC020, one of the few things I still like about that track.
Also, I layered in paulstretched segments of an orchestral piece I performed in, soaked in Valhalla SuperMassive
Then came a bunch of instruments to fill the space
egg shaker
electric piano via Surge
the ukulele, treated with reverse delay from SonicDelaySphere and soaked in Surge Reverb2
and then I came up with the "sunrise" section on a particularly late night
my awful plastic recorder, smeared using an abstract convolution reverb
6 tracks of my normal singing through lots of Cocoa Delay and Supermassive
13 tracks of me overtone singing quantized to Just Intonation chords using MAutoPitch, with octaves added using ReaPitch
a free cymatics bird sample, separated via ReaCoMa to separate out the background noise - i then copied, time stretched, pitched, and panned the individual bird sounds for a more dense dawn chorus effect. and if that wasn't enough, I added 5 different delays, each in different frequency bands, to add even more variety.
about this time I realized I wanted a melody/hook, so I brought out the melodica and recorded the main lick. This was process through Protoverb, ChromeOxide, Cocoa Delay, Full Bucket Brigade Delay, and Tesselode Flutterbird to get that distant lo-fi sound.
last thing to add was a little bass, from MSoundFactory, run through Ignite Amps NRR-1
add some intense sidechaining, lots of parameter tweaking, and mixing, then
run everything through LimiterNo6 to get the right loudness balance, monitoring with SPAN and MLoudnessAnalyzer