Category: Audio

February 1st, 2011
 
Another late call time and another late wrap.  I left set almost at midnight.  Halfway through the day there was a little scare.
 
My co-worker Todd sent me an email telling me that one of our clients at Disney wanted me to cut a promo for the Walt Disney Company and it had to be done by Friday morning.  This was very bad news to me since last Tuesday, I spent the night at my office editing a different so-called “fire-drill”.
 
It’s a blessing and a curse.  On the one hand it’s nice to know that I’m wanted as an editor but on the other it’s quite frustrating when you don’t get to see your family for a long time.  Later that night, I received an email saying that they canceled the job.  I was so relieved to hear it.
 
As I drove home I tried to figure out what kind of creative project I had the energy for.  I thought about this really inspiring project that Jared of Uprlip did recently where he froze a contact mic in ice and then recorded the melting process.  That got me thinking about the concept of underwater recording.  The contact mics I own have a plastic-dipped coating on them so they are completely waterproof.  Suddenly, I knew what my creative project was going to be.
 
When I got home I collected up the supplies for my experiment, June’s bucket from the backyard, a watering can, a glass full of pea gravel, and a straw.
 
I started by recording the sound of the bucket filling up with water, then I plopped some pea gravel into the bucket, then I poured the entire cup in.  I stirred it with a spoon.  I tried striking some of my DIY glockenspiel bars underwater with the spoon.  It didn’t work so well but I found I was able to get something interesting by striking the glock bar while dropping it into the water.
 
I grabbed the straw and recorded the sound of bubbles.  As I was recording I began to think that the bucket, being plastic, perhaps wasn’t the best resonate body for my experiments.
 
I remembered that wobbly sound you can get by striking a can of coke and shaking it.  I searched my car for an opened can of diet coke, usually not a very hard thing to find.
 
I dipped in the contact mic into the can and struck it with a spoon whilst shaking it back and forth.  These were some of the best sounds.
 
Press play below to hear what it all sounded like.
 
Enjoy!

January 27th, 2011
 
My iphone woke me up at my office at 5am and I slowly made my way into my edit bay.  I finished my edit as quickly as possible.  By 8am I relayed the cut over to the client and went back to sleep on the sofa.  At 9am, I received some notes on the cut.  I got off the sofa and addressed the notes and relayed the new cut.  The rest of my day was pretty much this repeated.
 
I felt pretty horrible from the food poisoning that I got last night.  I felt nauseous and physically tired.  I found out later, once I got home that I had a fever as well.  I had a meeting over at Disney for the muppets at 3pm so I had to wait around for that.  I made myself throw up just before going to the meeting.  I was in a sad state of affairs to say the least.
 
I was relieved to get home.  I ate some food, finally and lied on the sofa while Jenny watched TV.  I couldn’t imagine doing something creative so I decided it was due time to do another modular patch.  It’s funny because one of the last times I made a patch on the modular on Day 199 I was sick as well.
 
The patch started as a simple bass sound through a WASP filter.  I worked in the rotating clock divider and the regular clock divider and began adding higher pitch melodies.  Both melodies are semi-random created using a couple sample and hold modules each being fed a different LFO.
 
When I recorded the patch, I started by fading in the bass sound, then I added clock divided panning to it, then I faded in the two other oscillators and adjusted the amount of pitch modulation.  The rotating clock divider was controlling the rhythm of the two higher pitches as well as the rhythm with which the pitches would change.  During the recording I played with where the patch cables would connect on this modules, changing up the rhythm here and there.  Finally, I played around with the a highpass filter I had connected to one of the higher pitches.
 
After I finished recording I went to bed.  The next day, I edited it down to a more listenable level.  I recorded for about 15-20 minutes but I cut it down to about 8 and half.
 
Anyways, hope you enjoy.
 

January 23rd, 2011
 
Sunday on set was pretty slow.  Almost arduously slow but at least it wasn’t a late night.
 
I went home determined to finish my track.
 
Tonight was better than last night.  It was good to step away and come back to the song.  I didn’t hate it as much this time.  The tempo is very slow and I think this could have been effecting my feelings on the track.  It has a very bolero feel to it.
 
I mostly focused on mixing but I did add a few more samples, including the classic one from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly which I think sounds great.  I also added some of the tape sounds I got from my experiments on Day 320 / Wow & Flutter.  Lastly, I added plugin effects and automated some parameters.
 
In the end, I think the track turned out all right.  I still don’t know if it turned out better than my original version on Day 302 but this time I thought there were some good moments that weren’t there before.
 
Feel free to have a listen below.  And definitely check out everyone else’s tracks and download the full album here.
 
Nevertheless, please enjoy!
 

January 18th, 2011
 
I got home from work around 6am and fell asleep until 2pm.  I spent whatever time I had before I had to go off to set again with Jenny and June.  It was another overnight shoot on a blocked off street in Hollywood.  It was a busy night for me too.  I kept reminding myself, I need to do something creative before the day is over.
 
Before I knew it my cell phone read 5am, almost wrap time.  I wrapped my crew at 5:30 and realized I needed to do something quick.
 
I couldn’t have cut it closer.  I have many times on previous days started a creative project well after midnight and still counted it as my creative thing for the previous day but this time I was minutes away from sunrise without anything accomplished.  I decided that the apropos thing to do in this situation was to actually document the sunrise.
 
Since I was in Hollywood I decided to drive up to the lookout point on Mulholland Dr.  It’s a beautiful spot to look down on the city lights.  I set my camera on the curb and pointed it out towards the skyline.  I don’t have an intervalometer for doing time lapse but I do have a remote control for my shutter so I grabbed it.  I set the camera to do 1 second exposures and set the mode to continuous.  This way I could simply hold down the button on my remote and the camera would continue snapping pictures at one image a second.
 
I sat there for almost an hour holding that button down.  It was kind of a nice way to start a new day.  I rarely get to see the sun rise and looking down over Los Angeles as commuters start their days and I end mine was cathartic.
 
The music in the video below is from an artist called Automatic Thoughts.  The song is called “Ohm Sweet home” and it’s from an EP he did called “Keep Right”.  You can download it for free, here.
 

January 16th, 2011
 
I got to stay home today!  It was nice.  I picked up Jenny from the airport in the morning and we had a wonderful day playing and napping together.
 
I decided to invite some friends over for an evening in the studio.  It’s been awhile since the last time.  Tonight my focus was to test out a new monome app called Mash.
 
Mash is an amazingly full featured live looping app.  Seriously, the designer, Stevie Ray Sean did an epic job creating this.  Although the focus of the app is live looping the program can do so much more.  It’s got a built in Ableton-style clip launcher.  It’s got a multi-channel mixer, each with built in lowpass filter and VST effect support.  Every control is accessible through the monome but you really have to have some practice with the software to exploit all of these capabilities.
 
While the features go on and on the basic functionality is so easy to use.  Plugging in an instrument and looping it is really simple.  Once you’ve recorded a loop you can then mash on the buttons and create new rhythms with it.  Pattern recorders also allow you to record your button presses, solidifying the new rhythm as the base pattern for more live loops.  Awesome!
 
With the right preparations this app could be super sweet for live performances.
 
This evening my pals Jeff and Reuban came by to play some instruments for me while I manned the monome and recorded their riffs.
 
We attempted to do a guitar/omnichord track for the video cameras but unfortunately it was already pretty late and our energy level was slowing a bit.  It became clear to me, as we were filming, that it was going to be too much editing work for me to make a good video out of it.
 
What I do have for you to listen to, though, is a little button-mashing I played on the monome with a group of the samples we recorded live into Mash.  We started by looping the bass guitar and then we pulled and switched over to electric.  The beat is a canned loop that we threw in for fun.
 
The best feature of this app is that the first loop that you record, whatever it is, sets the tempo for all of the rest.  It was great because when I dragged that canned beat into Mash it was instantly set to match the rest of the loops.  Mash is now going to be the app of choice for future jam nights.
 
Enjoy!

January 9th, 2011
 
Up early again to make it to set on time.  We’re filming at Universal Studios now and it’s funny to see the tours pass by.  People riding the tram snap pictures of me as if I might be somebody of importance.  It was another crazy day of running around on set.
 
At the end of the day I was beat.  I left the set at 8pm but I had to go by my office to meet up with my friends Steve and David.  Steve recently finished a wonderfully inspiring documentary on improvisational musicians and David produced it.  They got the film accepted into a film festival in Montreal and they needed to do an output of it to tape.
 
We had some technical difficulties and the final output didn’t begin until nearly 1am.  I decided I’d better just spend the night at the office rather than drive 40 miles home at 3am just to have to wake up early to get to set.
 
While the film was outputting I worked on my creative thing until it was time to pass out.  I opened up my song for the latest Monome Community Remix project.  On Day 302 I had really great results using this new monome app called Grainslide.  I felt really good about the song I’d produced on that day so I wanted to jump from there as a continuation point.
 
I decided it was time to create some kind of beat that could possibly complement it.  It was not easy and I don’t even think I really accomplished it.  Because of the un-quantized nature of my original track I found it tough to create a beat that sat well with it.  It needs to be almost more textural than straight kick and snare.
 
I’m unsure of which film the sample I used is from but its basically just the sound of someone running around causing a bit of a ruckus.  I pulled little hits here and there and created a drum rack of it in Ableton.
 
Unfortunately, I must now refrain from letting you hear the song as it progresses because I think it is beginning to have an identity and I don’t want to spoil the reveal before the deadline of January 21st.
 
What you can listen to is a snippet of the beat that I created.  It’s not much but it’s where I ended up before passing out on a sofa.
 

January 2nd, 2011

 

 

My last day before the end of my christmas break.  It was nice to be home but tomorrow it’s back to work and January is looking like it’s going to be a crazy month.

 

 

This evening I decided to continue working with the samples from the latest MCRP.  I have been experimenting quite a bit with them lately.  I’m trying to move myself into arrangement mode.  On the last MCRP I experimented a bit too much and moved into arrangement mode much too late.  I was left with too much material to sift through and too little time to get through it all.  I’m going to try to not make that mistake this time around.

 

 

Anyways, a friend and fellow monome user Jared just recently released his new monome app called Grainslide.  I tested an early version of the app on Day 213 and he has since made adjustments and released it to the community.  It’s a simple but effective concept.  His layout design is unique to most other monome apps which I think is great.  It’s not a quick sample cutting app although you could play it that way.  It’s a layering tool really.

 

 

You have four sample banks each loaded with sounds or noises that complement each other.  You can use the on-screen interface to select portions of the audio files to loop.  Each sound file can be transposed up or down independently but all of them can also be transposed globally.  This is cool when you find a nice combo with the independent settings and then throw in some global shifting and you have the undercurrents to a song.

 

 

Finally, in the center of the monome are some sliders that add delay to each of the sounds.  This as an area he hopes to add paging functionality so that you could select between a number of effects.

 

 

The controls are one thing but the way it sounds is another.  When it transposes the audio file it also speeds it up or slows it down.  This would normally be something undesirable when your used to working in a program like Ableton where you have the ability to transpose files and still keep the rhythm on beat.   But for this app, it’s what gives the sound its unique character.  If you’ve chosen your samples wisely you will come out with beautiful harmonies.

 

 

For my experiment, I took the sample from Close Encounters that I used on Day 298 and the sample from Babel that I played with on Day 295 and messed around with them in Grainslide.  I recorded multiple takes into Ableton.  After that, for blog purposes, I simply separated each take that I recorded and dragged them to a different track so that all would play at the same time.  You’d imagine it would sound awfully muddy (and it does a little) but at times it sounds amazingly beautiful.

 

 

Finally, Jared is a kindred spirit because he is around the same age and he’s a monome user and he also has a daughter around the same age but also because he has been doing a creative thing-a-day as well.  He and I have been encouraging each other throughout the year with comments.  He had some troubles along the way, including a major server crash, that had derailed him from the daily schedule for a while, but he has recently renewed himself to do a daily thing.  He’s a much better musician than I am and also an amazing illustrator. So, please check out his blog as well.  It is at http://uprlip.com/and you can also find it on my links page.

 

 

Enjoy!

December 29th, 2010

 

 

Today was rainy all day.  We stayed in for most of it except at one point June and I put on some rain gear and played in the rain.  We sent leaves down the gutters together.  It was pretty awesome.

 

 

I spent the rest of the day hanging with June and rendering shots from yesterday through my After Effects Slitscan composition to collect up for posting.

 

 

I decided to continue work on my song for the most recent Monome Community Remix project.  I’ve been experimenting with the samples lately.  On Day 292 I created a sort of fugue with the famous clip from the film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” where the humans communicate with the aliens at the end.  Tonight, I decided to work more with that same sample.

 

 

I separated each on the music notes from the movie clip to separate midi notes on the keyboard using Ableton’s Sampler and then I used the monome application Boiiing on it.  Boiiing is a simple and effective application.  Click here to see a video showing how it works.

 

 

I recorded my little jam with Boiiing and cut it down to my favorite bits.  There’s a rhythm in there that I like best and think will be the springboard for my next session with this song.

 

 

Enjoy!

 

I actually had quite a bit of free time today and my plan was to work on some of my longer term projects like the telescope conversion but instead I looked at my garage and decided to devote most of the day to cleaning it out.  I could have gone to my parents garage, which is what I usually do when I’m constructing something, but I wanted my own garage to be a place that invites me to work in.  A frustrating reminder of this is this bandsaw I bought quite a while ago  that’s still not set up.  Anyways, I was pretty distracted by the garage all day and I didn’t get to work on the creative project that I wanted to.

 

 

In the evening we had Jenny’s sister and her husband over for dinner and a board game.  We played until about 11:30pm and after they left I decided I might as well put some work into my track for the latest MCRP.  The samples in this one are all from movies and there are some real good clips in there.  One clip in particular is from the film Babel.  It’s a score cue that is almost too good.

 

 

Anyways, I went through all the musical samples and experimented with which ones worked well with each other.  Eventually, I created a few loops from various samples and brought them into MLR.

 

 

It has been a long time since I’ve pulled my monome out and it was nice to use it again.  I played around with the loops on my monome and recorded the results.  Then I brought the recording into Ableton and cut it down to a listenable length.

 

 

The samples I used were from the films Babel, Badlands and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  The Babel sample is so good that it is the foundation for the rest of the samples.

 

 

I don’t know how this jam session will influence my final track for this MCRP.  I may not use any of this in my final.  I love the Babel sample but I think it could over-shadow whatever identity my track could potentially have.  Either way, it was good to play with the monome again.

 

Enjoy!

 

Today was Jenny’s birthday.  It was a beautiful day.  I took the day off from work and the rain had subsided.  We went out for a leisurely breakfast and then dropped off June and caught the film “True Grit”.   What a great film!  And it’s been so long since I’ve been to the theater.    It gave me one of those really great feelings of satisfaction that I so rarely get with films these days.

 

 

Todays post came quite late at the end of the night after Jenny was already in bed.  The latest Monome Community Remix Project is underway and I decided I might as well start early since my track record for completing songs on time hasn’t been so great lately.  The theme this time is movies so all of the samples come from movies.

 

 

I didn’t pull out the monome at all.  I spent most of the time just getting to know the samples and then experimenting with them a little bit in Ableton.  One of those experiments is today’s post.

 

 

The well-known clip from Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the humans communicate with the aliens with an ARP2600 synthesizer was included in the batch.  The most interesting idea that came to mind for this sample was to create a sort of fugue with it.

 

 

The analogy I have always used to describe what a fugue is, is the classic “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” one, where one person begins singing the song and then the next person begins singing at the second bar.  The next person a bar later and the next person a bar later until eventually all the parts are being sung at once by some person or another.

 

 

I took the close encounters sample and duplicated it eight times and then triggered them each in sequence.  It began to sound quite muddy so I changed it up a little by transposing some of the samples.  Instances 1 and 2 are original pitch, 3 & 4 are transposed up a 5th, 5 & 6 are original pitch and 7 & 8 are transposed up an octave.  I slowed the tempo down quite a bit and played around with the speed with which would I triggered them in sequence.

 

 

Once I found a consistency I liked I recorded it all down to a single track.  Then I duplicated that track and triggered the two of them in sequence.

 

 

The results were a never ending loop.  Although, the recording below is only about 2 1/2 minutes.

 

 

It’s still a little muddy at points but I think it ultimately sounded pretty cool.

 

Enjoy!

 

On the monome forums, there is a user by the name of PirxthePilot, otherwise known as Modulogeek (check out his music, it’s some of my favorite stuff out of the monome community).

 

 

He started a thread proposing the idea of remixing christmas songs for a monome christmas compilation.  A bunch of people have jumped on board and begun claiming songs.   On the 15th of this month everyone will reveal their final tracks.

 

 

Tonight I decided to work on my song a bit.  I claimed “The Christmas Song” by Nat King Cole.  The song has no beat and also has a very open rhythm to it.  My main idea for the remix was to vocode the voice of Nat King Cole and support it with some synth pads.  I plan on using my gameboy mixed with some larger, more lush analog modular lines.  I don’t even know if it will ultimately have any beat to it.

 

 

Of course tonight I didn’t add any of that.  This evening I basically just turned Nat into a robot.  It took quite awhile to dial in the vocoder sound.  I used Ableton Lives vocoder and I’m not entirely impressed with it.  I think I might have to ultimately record myself saying the lyrics instead of Nat himself because he’s mixed with the music and that’s ruining the vocoder.

 

 

After I finished Robo-tizing Nat I added the rest of the song in.  I created two tracks with heavy EQ’ing/Reverb/Delay to fill in all the silence.  Next, I added another track of the song with all the highs and mids cut leaving only the bass tones.  Then I added a bunch of sample rate reduction to make it all sound kind of digital and aliased.  The track below is the results of my experiments.

 

 

This song is certainly nowhere near what the final track will sound like. It’s actually quite hard to get through the whole thing.  It’s vocoder christmas music. It doesn’t get better the closer you are to the end.

 

This friday was another pretty mellow day on the set.

 

 

Afterwards, at home I was feeling a little un-creative.  Once Jenny was off to bed I didn’t have much of a spark to be adventurous.  Even a patch on the modular felt a little too complex for me.

 

 

Fortunately, I devised a plan that would simplify my goal in front of the modular.  I decided I’d just go in there with the idea of creating a simple beat.  That’s all.  Patch in a kick drum, patch in a snare, patch in some hi-hats and there you go.

 

 

Well, I’m glad I decided to simplify because through the process of creation the avenues of complexity were less of a bother.  Opportunities arise as you patch and by the end you’ve created something better than you expected.  That’s how this evening went.

 

 

I set the rotating clock divider as the heart of the rhythm.  As I recorded my beat I tried to switch up small variations such as muting a single drum or adjusting the decay of the snare.  When I felt I recorded all of the variations I would switch patch cables on either the rotating clock divider or the envelope generators creating new beats.

 

 

I enjoyed the way the beat was transforming.  I brought it into Ableton and cut it down to the best of the best.  You can play the results below.

 

 

Enjoy!

This is monday but feels more like wednesday due to the film shoot.  I got off set around 7pm and hit wonderful hour and a half long traffic home.

 

 

Funny thing about this creative thing was that I spent most of the night putting together the video for Day 266 / Runners & Chasers but I didn’t want to post it as my creative thing.  So, I opened up Arturia’s Moog Modular V and made a quickie patch.

 

 

Moog Modular V is a software emulator of the classic Moog Modular synthesizer.  Before I had any kind of physical or tangible analog synth in front of me, I had this.  It’s a pretty great alternative for those interested in learning the methods of patch-making.  It sounds sweet too.  It’s a very realistic emulator of that analog warmth that everyone hopes for.

 

 

I basically created a quick patch using three oscillators going through a multi-mode filter with the pitch being controlled by the sequencer on top.  I recorded the sequence multiple times on multiple tracks in Ableton.  I over-dubbed the sequence at higher pitches and different rates and recorded that to another track.  Then I just messed around with a bunch of stuff, changed the sequence, adjusted the envelopes, added delay, added a some bode frequency shifting.

 

 

Ultimately I recorded myself playing all of these loops in sequence and then cut it down to a more listenable running time.  Lastly, I sequenced a simple beat using drum samples I’d created a long time ago using my real modular.

 

 

I hope you enjoy.  You can play the results below.  Just a simple synth tune.

 

Last night was one of those nights.  Jenny and I watched the season finale to Project Runway and afterwards had a long discussion that turned for the worst and ended with both of us feeling a little hurt.  Nevertheless, Jenny and I have a rule to never allow each other go to bed upset and we kept to that rule last night.  I’m a very lucky man.

 

 

But alas, having to then lift my energy up to do something creative is a bit of a challenge.  I thought maybe I could do something amorphous with charcoal, perhaps harnessing my mood.  Instead, I felt aimless.  So, I decided to take refuge in front of the modular.

 

 

No real inspiration for the patches.  Just kind of randomly experimenting.  I started by messing around with some cross-modulation.  Then I pulled the cables and played around with the A137 Wave Multiplier, that one turned out the best.  Finally, I finished off the night with a half patch.  Just messing around with a clicky-slow saw wave through a lowpass filter, creating some watery drops.

 

 

 

Last night was awesome.  I left work at 7pm to hit the usual friday night 2-hour traffic.  As the clock ticked by, I kept thinking about the lost time.  This evening was the deadline for submitting your final song for the Monome Community Remix Project.

 

 

Not only was I going home tonight with no arrangement work done on my track whatsoever, I was also moderating this MCRP so I had to get everyones tracks organized, uploaded and labeled.  I didn’t have high hopes to have anything all that amazing by submission time.

 

 

It’s interesting though, that whenever your under pressure to get something done great things tend to happen.  I don’t think it necessarily inspires great work or anything.  I think it just removes deliberation from the process and forces you to do, do, do.  Eventually a structure comes into view and you can finally begin deciding on what stays and what gets duplicated.

 

 

My song is constructed out of the material I created on Days 218, 221, and 224.  The way I arranged it so quickly was by pressing the big red record button at the top of the screen and then clicking around within each instruments midi track.  Once I had created at least two 4 bar basslines that I liked I basically duped it over and over again, throwing in a little random here or there.  Then I repeated this process for all the instruments I’d previously created.

 

 

I didn’t get my track in by midnight but I also didn’t work much later than 2am before calling it a night.  In the end I’m pretty happy with the results even though it does get a little cacophonous here and there.  I think I may need to add a few breaks.

 

 

It’s awesome to hear how everyone used the samples so differently.  If you’re interested in downloading the sample pack that each of the songs below are made from click here

 

 

Enjoy!

 

 

 

Last night I continued working on my song for the Monome Community Remix Project.  I was feeling pretty frustrated for most of the night because I was still just sifting through my material and pulling loops from it.

 

 

At a certain point I had to just give up and start arranging the song except I didn’t feel like any of the stuff I pulled over the last couple of days were really all that good for an opening.  I felt like I should start with some kind of bass sample.  That’s when I pulled out the monome.

 

 

I loaded up a monome app called Press Cafe.  I had some luck on previous songs using this particular app for basslines.  Well, this evening I was reminded just how powerful it is.

 

 

The application is another impressive creation from the artist known as Stretta.  His line of applications are some of the most original and amazing of all the monome apps.  It’s kinda complicated to explain how it works but there’s no better way than seeing it for yourself.  Watch this video of Stretta demonstrating Press Cafe.

 

 

 

Suddenly I went from meandering through clips to suddenly creating awesome rhythmic lines.  And it worked magic on more than just bass samples.  Take, for example, a sample that monome user Antiphon submitted of the opening to the lone ranger.  The sample consists of an announcer, the opening musical theme, some gunshots and then the announcer again.  Even though only one part of the sample contains music the results after using Press Cafe were surprisingly musical.

 

 

Below you can play the original sample and then the results after performing them with Press Cafe.

 

 

Also, I want to mention that Stretta recently released an all analog modular synth album, A Funneled Stone.  It is a musical masterpiece in my opinion.  It stands with the kind of music you might hear from Wendy Carlos or Isao Tomita.  Also, knowing what it takes to produce this kind of music with a modular synthesizer makes it all the more impressive.  It’s only available as a free digital download with the small condition that you tweet about it.  He also just started a kickstarter program to get a limited release on vinyl.  So, If you feel passionate about it please donate to the cause as well because this album really belongs on vinyl.

 

The weekend weather has been overcast and gloomy.  Saturday consisted of watching June until the early afternoon.  Jenny took over around two so that I could go and work on my Harmonograph table before dinner.  It was going to be my creative thing for the day except it turned out to be more like multiple visits to the hardware store rather than any real visible progress.

 

 

So, instead I worked further on my song for the Monome Community Remix Project.  I finally got to a place where I see a bit of direction.  Even though I feel like I’m still in the “creating raw material” phase I think the stuff I’m creating is finally leading somewhere.

 

 

I can’t really share with you too much because there is a strict rule not to reveal your track before the song submission deadline which is this Friday night.  Although, I will share with you an audio file of some beats I created using xor.

 

 

It’s funny.  So far xor is the only app that I’ve used to create my current musical fodder.  I don’t think it beats more intuitional approaches to making beats and it can feel a little over-quantized at times.  Although, it definitely offers you the chance to play with many different combinations quickly on the fly.

 

 

Click play below to hear a small sampling of the beats I created using xor. I added a couple plug-ins to it. Audio Damage’s Replicant for the random micro-slices and Native Instruments Guitar Rig for the cabinet sound.

What a day!  It has been very busy lately.  I had to wait until the end of the work day to post. I almost missed this one as well.  Last night Jenny came home from her pottery class and went straight to bed.  I went in to tuck her in and fell asleep until around 12:30 in the morning.  I forgot that I had set-up my computer to work on my Monome Community Remix song.  So, I very bleary-eyed connected up my monome and loaded up xor.
 
Xor is the application I introduced to myself on Day 218.  I have been thinking about it ever since.  I think it’s a really interesting application for rearranging the order of a sample.  Or for this project rearranging the musical notes in a sample.
 
I will describe the samples I used by the monome user that uploaded them because they are both stringed instruments although they sound quite different from each other (I think one might be a mandolin).  Basically, I took a sample and assigned each note that they played on they’re guitar or mandolin and assigned it to one of eight keys on the midi keyboard.  Then I loaded up xor and assigned each of the eight rows to each of those separate notes.
 
Then I played.
 
Xor is quite a fun app to create rhythmic combinations that I would not be able to think of.  All I have to do is experiment with the buttons on the monome and make sure I record everything.  The results is quite a cool rhythmic re-organization of the notes played in the original sample.
Below in the music player you can start by playing the original sample and then wait or click to the next track to hear how xor re-organized it.
 
Enjoy
 

If you read yesterdays post you’d know that I didn’t have much time to come up with something to do for my creative project last night.  As the clock ticks by many options go out the door because of their complexity and amount of effort involved.  This evenings creative thing was virtually effortless, thankfully.
 
I received an email yesterday from Jared Smith.  He is a friend and a fellow creativity blogger.  You can check out his site, uprlip.com either on my links page or just click on the web address.  Also, check out his music here and check out this awesome video he made of him demonstrating his drum-trigger to midi setup that he ultimately performed at the in/out fest.
 
Anyways, his email was regarding a monome application that he has been developing lately currently named GrainSlide.  He had wanted to know if I could give it a test run and get back to him with any notes.  I was super excited to see what he was working on.  It’s a very unique application.
 
I don’t want to give too much away out of respect for his personal unveiling and release of the application but at it’s core is four samplers which offer individual speed-shifting as well as global speed-shifting, plus individual delays.
 
Well, with the right sample selection in this app you can do absolutely no wrong.  It sounds absolutely beautiful.  I enjoyed playing with a sample selection that he provided for a while.  Then I loaded in my trusty music-box samples from Day 110.  The results were awesome!
 
Below you can play the sound file that I created from that particular test.  The only complaint I have with the sound is the amount of clicking you hear in the track.   I’m not sure what’s causing it in the app but I have mentioned it to Jared as one of my notes.
 

Well, unfortunately I’m as sick as a dog.  This cough has been really hanging on.  I took the day off today and I really feel like crap.  It took quite a mental pep talk to get me out of bed to post this creative thing.

 

 

Last night I pretty much took it easy on myself and went into the studio with the goal of doing a patch that was slooooooowwwww.  I wanted every modulation to be as slow as can be.  It took a while to get somewhere but eventually it started sounding pretty nice.

 

 

The track is 15 minutes long and very atmospheric.  You may enjoy playing it in the background while you work on something.  Or I find it sounds quite nice to play some great talk simultaneously.  I listened to Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche speak to it.  It was all very peaceful.

 

 

I’m pretty happy with the performance.  It moves slowly but changes over time quite a bit.  I’ve provided a couple of free downloads of the track below in case you just want to listen to it on your drive home.  It is a long one so perhaps it might be best for you to play it later.

 

 

The title of this post is a play on words.  “The Path is the Goal” is the title of a book by Trungpa Rinpoche and its also a concept that exemplifies what appeals to me about analogue synthesis.  A modular synthesizer is like taking every knob, every internal menu setting, every parameter that you can find on a keyboard synthesizer and making each one into a separate module.  In order to add something as simple as portamento, it might take any number of patch cables and a certain amount of patience to get it where you like it.  On a keyboard all you do is flip a switch and turn a knob.  With Analogue Synthesis the path truly is the goal.  Listening to every change along the way.

 

 

For All You Synth Nerds, Here’s the Basic Breakdown:  The first oscillators ADSR is being triggered with a medium decay through the BBD and the Tip Top delay effect.  It’s pitch is slowly rising and falling through a quantizer which keeps it in tune.  OSC’s 2 and 3 are tuned to a 5th and are being sequenced by a clock divider + mixer with some heavy portamento via the dual slew limiter.  They are also going through their own Lowpass filter which is being modulated very slow.  Finally, I added white noise through a slowly modulated lowpass filter to bring in that very soothing sound of the ocean.  The pan on every channel is being very slowly modulated as well.

 

 

To download the Aiff version which is 150MBs click here or if you prefer the smaller MP3 coming in at 34MBs feel free to click here.

 

 

Or of course you could just play it right now.  Enjoy

Sorry to be posting this one so late.  I still have yet to do my creative thing for today but I’m at work and it looks like it’s going to be a long one tonight.  On the plus side, the piece I’m working on at the moment is going to be playing on the big screen at Grauman’s Chinese this Tuesday.  I won’t be able to see it because its meant for executives but that’s cool.  I’m actually doing wire removal which is a first for me.  It’s challenging and pretty cool.  ANYWAYS…

 

 

Yesterday was wonderful day.  I was playing with June for most of the day but by the end of it, I was exhausted.  I really had to work up the energy to go out and do something.  I was looking over the blog and I realized that I hadn’t taken the contact mics out for a long time.  Day 034 was the last time.  So, since its not such a complicated project I decided to lazily record some noises.

 

 

I am not that satisfied with the outcome.  I was surprised too because I thought Jenny and I had chosen a good group of things to record.  I think it was a mixture of mic issues as well as execution.  I was hearing this beating hiss in everything I recorded and I had a premonition it was noise from my digital field recorder.  Contact Mics have a tendency to record quite loudly even the lightest touch across the cable.  The other problem was that I think I selected perhaps the wrong areas on the objects to record.  Oh well.

 

 

I removed as much of the hiss as I could in the computer and I juiced up the sounds a bit in Ableton.  Nothing crazy, just a bit of panning and EQ.  Anyways, press play on the three audio players below in any order and enjoy the creak-scape.

 

Last night I thought maybe Jeff and Chris might come over for a jam session.  Unfortunately, they both had things to do in the morning so it wasn’t in the cards.

 

 

I decided to keep with the mood and opened up an old jam that we did a long time ago.  Jeff’s banjo was our main instrument.  After we recorded the bass guitar and chris’s Iphone we took jeff’s banjo riffs and chopped them into samples.  Then we took those samples and played them in a monome app called Boiing.  By tbe end of the night we had a ton of great material to play with.

 

 

So, last night my creative thing was taking all of that material and arranging it into an actual song.  I added some drums and a few effects here and there but not too much.  The bass line and the banjo were so nice together that adding a bunch of effects would’ve muddied it up.  The perfect garnishment to the banjo line is the chopped up monome-ized banjo riffs.  It’s my favorite part actually.

 
I have to also add that Jeff did an amazing job coming up with some catchy lines in this. He was on his game for sure.
 

 

Enjoy!

 

Even some of our closest friends have no idea how musically talented my wife Jenny is.  When I first met her she was studying to be an opera singer.  She went to the Conservatory of Music in San Francisco and studied voice there for a couple of years.  Nowadays, if you ask her to sing she’d blush it away forget that you asked.  I’m trying to change that now that we have June.  I think it’s important that June know the kind of voice Jenny can produce at a moments notice.

 

Anyways, her voice is just one of her musical talents.  While we were cleaning out her sewing room I came across this sheet music.  It’s a composition that Jenny wrote for Piano and Clarinet.  I photocopied it and tucked it away for a future creative project.  Tonight I decided to finally start that project up.

 

I went through and deciphered the piano part and recreated it with midi notes in Ableton Live.  Man, it was not easy.  This is no simple piece of music.  You now how most songs, as original as they may be, have some sort of repetition to them.  Well, this one doesn’t really.  Each bar has something new and a little different to it.  So reading it and translating it to midi was a real challenge.

 

The song is called “Niobid”.  It relates to the children of Niobe in greek mythology but I don’t really know the story so well.  I will have to question Jenny about it.  It really is a beautiful piece though.  This is only the piano part.  I will be adding the clarinet next.  I did the best that I could to give the midi notes some life by adjusting their velocity and position.

 

I hope you enjoy.

Ok, so I have to admit that I did most of my work on this song on Sunday rather than Saturday.  On saturday night I was working more on Processing and learning how to do some more advanced concepts and I realized that I was not going to have anything to show for on the blog.

 

 

It’s funny.  This blog has been extremely helpful when it comes to thinking creatively, and I’ve done more creative projects in half a year than I’ve done in just about my whole life.  But where this blog actually hinders me is in learning things on a long term basis.  I could never practice guitar for this blog.  Sure, I could do it for one night and consider it a creative thing but I can’t as well post guitar practice every night.

 

 

So, late saturday night I made a patch on the modular.  I started with a technique called “Cross-Modulation”.  Cross-Modulation is hard to explain.  I plan on doing a video demonstrating cross-modulation more in depth in the future.  For now I will describe the basics.  Basically, OSC1 and OSC2 are sent to the speakers.  OSC1 is modulating OSC2, and get this, OSC2 is also modulating OSC1.  Huh?  Yeah, it can hurt your brain a little when you try to picture what is going on.  In a sense each oscillator is sort of battling each other for control and actually, that’s just what it sounds like.

 

 

Cross-modulation can scream but it can create beautiful sounds as well.  For this patch, I found a sweet spot and then sequenced the Pulse width of OSC2 with a make-shift sequencer using a mixer and a clock divider.  I sent both OSC’s through their own Lowpass filter.  I sent the Ringmod out through another lowpass and into input three on the mixer.  Finally, I sent my last remaining Oscillater, OSC3, and sent it through a lowpass gate, the BBD analog delay and into input 4 of the mixer.  I created another makeshift sequencer using the rotating clock divider and a mixer and sent it through the quantizer into the CV of OSC3, which created the high pitched scales.

 

 

Finally, on Sunday, I patched Volta into it and recorded a performance.  I changed up the sequences and recorded a second performance.  I added my drumbeat in Ableton.  The drumbeat comes from my creative project on Day 104.  And Finally, I went through and cut the performances down into a single five minute song. This doesn’t count as my creative thing for Sunday. I’ll be posting that one tomorrow.
 
I hope you will enjoy!

 

 

Watch out, this one is a little noisy.

Sorry for posting this one late.  Jeff came over for a usual Saturday night jam and we recorded until about 1am.  I couldn’t get around to sifting the material and performing the clips until sometime on Sunday.  Sunday I was busy doing family stuff until about 7 or 8 in the evening.  Never the less I’m not counting the arrangement I did Sunday night as my creative thing for that day.  I did another processing sketch for that.
 
Anyways, back to what I did Saturday.  Jeff and Wendy got back from a three week vacation to Peru about a month ago.  Jeff brought back a grip of cool peruvian instruments.  We have been planning on recording these instruments since he brought them back.  Last night we finally did.
 
The instruments from Peru that we recorded included a large goat hoof shaker, a seed pod shaker, a mini rainstick shaker, a toy xylophone and a little 12 string guitar called a Charango.  The goat hoof and seed pod shakers both had very interesting waterfall sounds.  The xylophone, although not peruvian, was picked up in peru and sounds amazing for being a child’s toy instrument.  The charango was definitely the star of the night.
 
Jeff played most of the instrumentations while I recorded, selected and looped.  The next day I mixed the tracks and performed the loops on the fly to create the 3 & 1/2  minute track you can play below.  One final thing to note, for the first time in jam night history everything that ended up in the final product was physically recorded that night.  Normally, we start with canned drums and those drums usually stay in the final piece but tonight we actually recorded the drums live.
 
I hope you enjoy.