From Live Stream to Album: Creating Time Friction

We wondered what it would be like to turn a completely improvised live stream into a track for our album. In this behind-the-scenes video, I walk through how we created “Time Friction” for our album Friction from the initial Twitch session to the final mix.

The Friction Concept

Our album Friction is a unique project where we took one simple chord progression and rewrote it 14 different ways in different styles and moods. The progression is for the songs: A minor, G, A minor, and an augmented A (A♭). Each song on the album has its own personality, but they’re all built from that same foundation.

For “Time Friction”, we wanted to create something moody and jazzy, something like for a movie soundtrack.

The Live Stream Session

We did a full Twitch live stream where Rob, our drummer, and I worked on the song in real-time. I played the bass line on my keyboard while Rob came up with a guitar line on the spot. The funny part? Rob accidentally tuned his guitar to B♭ instead of A, when I asked him about it he just said, “It’s alright.”

Another thing, during the recording, a tuning fork that was sitting on top of Rob’s amp fell off and hit the microphone. We kept it in the final recording.

This was early on in our live streaming days, so the video setup was pretty basic, just a hard split screen with two cameras, and Rob wasn’t even centered in the frame.

After we finished the guitar and bass parts (all recorded to a click track on the stream), Rob switched to drums and played a percussive accompaniment to what we’d just recorded. All improvised, all still on the live stream.

Adding Eric’s Piano

Once I had the bass, guitar, and drums arranged and mixed in Ardour, I realized the song needed something more. After practice one night, I asked Eric, our keyboard/guitar player, to get behind the piano and just come up with something jazzy and sparse, without telling him I was going to actually use it for the album.

I don’t think he had actually ever heard the track before and was literally making it up as I played it back. I almost didn’t get video of him doing his part, Rob had to remind me to start recording video halfway through!

The Tools We Used

As always, we used only open-source tools for this entire project:

Ubuntu Studio - Our operating system
Ardour - For recording and mixing all the audio
KdenLive - For editing and creating the video

Video Editing Challenges

Editing the video in KdenLive I tried to put all of this together. Since we had that split screen from the original live stream, I was able to use it to my advantage when adding in the drum footage and Eric’s piano parts. I created multiple split screens and had to use the “Transform tool” for Eric’s video footage since I had recorded him by holding my phone instead of using a tripod like the live stream video.

Every time the camera moved, I had to adjust the transform settings to keep Eric in the shot. It was tedious, but it worked out in the end.

The Result

“Time Friction” is now on our album Friction, and we really were happy with the end result.

You can watch the music video for Time Friction here, which features all the footage from those live recording sessions.

Listen to Friction

We regularly share behind-the-scenes content, live streams, and music videos. If you’re interested in seeing how we create music using open-source tools, subscribe to Lorenzo’s Music on YouTube!