Sounds to bring the natural world into your compositions

Susie Ibarra is a composer and percussionist. She creates live and immersive music exploring rhythm, indigenous practices, and interaction with cities and the natural world. Whether she’s working on full compositions or broken out one-shots, loops, and fx, Susie’s music is engulfed in organic sounds drawn from her past experiences and travels. Each sound tells a unique story of a specific place and time but the true magic appears when woven together into a composition.

Susie said, “Loops might feel more organic and lend themselves naturally to drumming and percussion playing. Yet playing these relatively short make it like a musical study, phrase, motif, or gesture while in the motion of rhythm.”

For this Ableton template, we recorded an array of percussion loops featuring cymbals, brushes, gongs, and toms, as well as bell, kick, snare, brush, and other one-shots. We hope these various instruments and effects inspire you to design an otherworldy percussion environment for your next composition.

This session was recorded at Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn, NY with engineer Eli Crews who has worked with heavy-hitters such as tUnE-yArDs, Questlove, The Julie Ruin, Yoko Ono, Lorde, Yo La Tengo, Laurie Anderson, Son Lux, and many more. Susie played on a Yamaha Maple Custom Absolute kit, as well as various Southeast Asian percussion instruments. Microphones used included the Melodium 42B Ribbon Mic and Flea FET47 for the room, Schoeps CMC6 overheads, Blue Mouse and Sennheiser 421 on the kick drum, two vintage AKG 224s on the snare and hi-hat, and two Beyerdynamic Ribbons on the rack and floor toms. All recorded through a vintage Neve Console.