This is a playlist with each of my submissions to the disquiet junto, a weekly electronic music writing prompt at http://disquiet.com/

Disquiet Junto Compositions

The writing prompt at https://disquiet.com/2019/11/21/disquiet-junto-project-0412-one-chord-wonder/ tickled my interest; and I've been listening to "(no pussyfooting)" a lot lately so thought of a little tribute to that record over my favorite chord, "F/G" (or F, A, C over a G pedal) which I use all the time before I resolve.

The track was made in two parts. The core synthesis were three configurations of (mostly) surge-for-rack in VCV Rack (using a few plugins from other packs). Then render that out and drop it into logic and play a guitar over it.

Rack patch here : https://patchstorage.com/disquiet412-backing-tracks/

One Chord (disquiet0412)

Disquiet 0413 is all about thankfulness for a bit of equipment. I am thankful for the c++-14 compiler.

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0413-objective-thankfulness/27266

and

https://github.com/baconpaul/disquiet0413

Thankful for C++-14 (disquiet0413)

Disquiet 0414 https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0414-mod-cons/

This week, the exercise was to make music for a device, including one which hasn’t been invented, and suggested a jetpack. Well jetpack got me thinking about a future with commercial teleportation. On the one hand, your body is ripped atom from atom and beamed across the ether in some combination of energy and information which you hope arrives; on the other hand you don’t have to go to LaGuardia any more. 

But of course there would be teleportation stations. And they would have bars. And that got me thinking, you are the jazz trio in the back of a teleportation bar 70 years from now, it’s the end of the night, you’ve had a drink or two, and you try out something original. With that idea in mind I turned to the piano, jotted down a theme over some chords, and then ran logic with the metronome off and improvised a bit of music based on that sort of e-flat to sort of d to sort of g minor sort of progression I had drafted. 

Technical details: I used the Arturia Piano V2 plugin, the bass was me playing on my Hagstrom into the Logic Pro bass amps, and the drums are the garritan jazz orchestra brush set. Everything played live basically, with piano first than me following the others. Couple of teensy edits and voila. “Last Call at the Teleportation Station (disquiet0414)”

Last Call at the Teleportation Station (disquiet0414)

Disquiet 0415 https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0415-seasonal-metal/

This week, it was suggested we explore the sonic properties of tinsel. 

Funnily, there’s no parts of the holiday music canon which feature tinsel prominently. Had we been asked to think about chestnuts, snow, bells, reindeer, or more recently, you, last or even more recently LA, there might have been a cover in me. But I went to lyrics.com and looked and yup, there’s no tinsel songs.

But there are a lot of lyrics which contain the word tinsel. So I scraped the first and third page of the lyrics.com search for tinsel, extracted just the lines that were lyrics, jammed them together, fed them into the mac speech synthesizer with voice “Fiona” as a tribute to my collaborators with whom we have made Christmas music in a Scottish style, and thought “lets go”. And then I had two false starts. One of them I accidentally re-wrote another song, and another I accidentally wrote something I couldn’t execute and didn’t like. 

But third time is a charm and in the end it clicked. Take the turnaround from a favorite Christmas song and record it differently on piano and bass, grab the generated wav file into python and do some silence detection kinda crappily (code all in my GitHub) and use that to generate midi which tracks the turnaround I was going to play, pull that midi into logic and do some modeling with the Surge FM and Vocoder stuff, and voila, music emerges. 

This week’s bit is called “Patience My Tinsel Angel (disquiet0415)”. I hope you enjoy it and have a wonderful holiday!

Patience My Tinsel Angel (disquiet0415)

Disquiet 0416 https://llllllll.co/t/disquier-junto-project-0416-time-laps/27823

This week's prompt was almost algorithmic (improvise; reverse; improvise; merge; reverse; improvise; print). And I found myself in a hectic holiday season with a reduced set of gear (an electric guitar, digital piano and laptop). And I thought to myself that the trick here will be leaving enough space in the mix as you reverse and print and reverse and print to leave you with enough room for those layers.

And of course time matters too. A steady pad backwards is just a steady pad. An attack will sound like a swell. 

And finally, I wanted to make something with some motion. 

So this week I turned on the metronome to 5/4 160bpm and kinda played that electric guitar a bit like a bass, but a bit not, and then reversed it and layered on a piano played a bit like a piano but a bit like a clav, and turned it around, and that reverse piano sound just made me happy. I think second or third take on most everything and I left some of the slop in there. And finally I mentally time traveled back to the late 70s, whipped up an interesting bright synth lead on surge, played a little theme, and this week’s tiny item ends up complete:  “In Time With Space (disquet0416)”

In Time With Space (disquiet0416)

Disquiet 0418 https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0418-ice-nine/28144

The prompt this week was simple. “Record ice in a glass and do something”. But the thing I’m really enjoying about the disquiet exercise is what that ends up actually evolving into.

So this week I took two glasses (a whiskey tumbler and a Christmas decorative glass) filled one with ice and started pouring the ice back and forth in front of a mic. And then I sort of played an EP over it and kinda liked that, then something clicked, but the ice wasn’t right, but aha, the ice is kind of a shaker. So I recorded it again. Then modified the EP. And then had to fix the ice. And then play the ice again. And once that was in place, I added the small lead and bass and a light pad, some mastering and voila. Not that exciting a process.

Except, if you are reading carefully, I had to do 4 takes of the ice.

And so here we are “Four Takes to Nail the Ice (disquiet0418)”

Four Takes to Nail the Ice (disquiet0418)

Disquiet 0419: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0419-dischoir/

I don’t really use samplers. I mean, I use big sample libraries sure. But I’ve not loaded samples into something labeled a sampler in decades. And so the exercise was somewhat freeing, because I decided to keep not loading samples into something labeled a sampler. 

So I wrote a bunch of python code which (basically) figured out the fundamental frequency of every 512 sample block of almost every one of the dischoirs (a few really non-pitched ones I excluded). This gave me a complete frequency map where I could pull the samples i wanted by frequency, pick them at random, etc. I did a bit of analytics and rubber banding to make some re-tuned copies to fill in some holes in the frequency space too. The code is all available in my GitHub, although it’s an iPython notebook and as such, a bit of mess. But it makes music!

But In effect, it’s an instrument. When you “play” c4 for some time period, I randomly hunt through the set of samples on a 512-sample block level to find a sample which is roughly 261.63hz, then expand around it to make a long enough sample, then send that out to the stream. Sometimes the frequency detection is wrong; sometimes the note drifts during duration. So it goes!

The bit of music I intended to make was the first prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier, and I actually worked that out and it sounded pretty good. I ended up intersecting with that music several times this week. I won’t bore you with that here, but if that sort of thing interests you I have a tinyletter at tinyletter.com/baconpaul

But then I heard the sad news that Neil Peart had died. That changed plan some late on Friday night.

And so i like to share with you “The Well Tempered Dys-Qyr-Z (disquiet0419)”

The Well Tempered Dys-Qyr-Z (disquiet0419)

Disquiet 0420: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0420-luna-tick/28536

A busy weekend ahead meant I decided to spend Friday morning experimenting with music inspired by the phases of the moon. I thought of a few things when I read the prompt. The one I committed to, somewhat obviously, revolved around phases of the moon form a pyramid of light intensity over the month, so do the same with sound over 2 minutes.

And we are getting ready to ship Surge 1.6.5 - probably early Feb - with lots of cool new stuff. As we get close to the finish line on the release I like to use my dev version to make music to find accidental bugs, so lots of surge here. Notably the pulsing guitar sound is my electric guitar into stock logic distortion pedal run into an S&H modulated set of filters mixed with a sin blip. The other instruments are all Surge or Pianotec also. 

To say that the idea to push the guitar through a synth’s S&H modulated filter was original would also be missing another moon related part of the week. Along with I bet a lot of the rest of you, I watched a lot of ARP 2600 retrospectives. That guitar-into-filter trick just invites Keith Moon to enter my track around 0:55. But he doesn’t, of course. (Also: How is it that the disquiet junto has me thinking about classic rock so much! Odd!)

And so, with that as a background, I hope you enjoy “Pyramids, Lunar (disquet0420)”

Pyramids, Lunar (disquet0420)

Disquiet 0422: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0422-chapter-cascade/28907

The challenge, to make very short collections of noises, in a relatively prescribed A/B pattern, immediately clicked in my head with an idea. I would write 3 very short pieces of music, two a pattern and one a loop. Then I would “play” the loop with the patterns radically sped up being each note of the loop. 

So some constraints. For the fastest rendition of the patterns to work, they could not have repeating notes. So one pattern is a sort of opposing pair of melodies and another is three rising chords. The loop has one repeated theme of 7 notes and another of 5, so the item ends up 140 “notes” long.

And then I had to execute it.  About half the disquiets have me writing some custom code, and I did so here, writing some python to take a performed version of each theme as midi, and radically speed it up. And once I was in code, I could do things, like speed it up a bit less as time went on; and offset the themes at the start and phase them towards not being offset at the end; and some other tricks. It’s all on my GitHub if you want. 

And then take the midi files into Logic, set up some Pianotec and some reverbs and delays and stuff, and voila.

In some ways I really like this, and I think it was super successful, especially as I let it open up. But in other ways it sounds exactly like the sort of mechanical formal toneless music that makes people not like “modern” music. I hope you enjoy listening and making your own decision, and I’m glad to share “3 Ideas; 5040 Notes (disquiet 0422)”

3 Ideas; 5040 Notes (disquiet 0422)

Disquiet 0423: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0423-hold-noise

Luckily, here in modernity, our zooms, our hangouts, our skypes, and our facetimes have chosen to do away with the tradition of hold music. But iproviders of yore made a choice to foist music upon us, and in my experience seemed to pick either a (presumably low license cost) uninspired recording of some baroque music or a bit of music somewhere between smooth jazz and bad fusion. And in the spirit of the second, I approached this week’s prompt.

But also, this week we shipped Surge 1.6.5. If you are a Surge user you should totally upgrade. Loads of new stuff, all detailed in the changelog. One of the big changes is we now have a complete SCL/KBM tuning implementation. I spent quite a bit of time writing and testing this with the rest of the surge team, but I hadn’t used it to make music in anger. So I chose an 18 note even division of the octave scale and went for it. I picked this scale because it makes diminished arpeggios on a standard keyboard equivalent to a whole tone scale. And what is more smooth jazz/bad fusion than a whole tone scale? But all those other notes are hanging out there too… The bit uses the Logic Pro built in drum samples and three virtual instruments with a solid retuning implementation (Surge, dexed and Pianotec).  

And of course, our intrepid hold-music musicians, getting more adventurous as the call goes on, moving further from their whole tone roots, meet the fate of all hold music. If you listen to the end, you’ll find out what that is, if you can make it that far. If you can, I hope you enjoy listening to “The 3:30 is Running a Few Minutes Late (disquiet0423)”

The 3:30 is Running a Few Minutes Late (disquiet0423)

Disquiet 0425: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0425-crop-score/29584

Finally, scientists unpacked the signal in Crop Circles, and amazingly they found encoded audio. The sounds were released Feb 21, 2076. Is it noise? It it speech? Is it an alarm? No-one knows, but the entire world is listening, rapt, to the strange and mysterious sound - a thrum and an unsettled whistle - trying to understand what it is that we have received. In the bar at the teleportation station which we last visited in disquiet0414, the night band sits silent, trying with everyone else to garner a glimpse of meaning. And then the pianist realizes the sound is an invitation to cooperate, a lead from a song that we have to write together across space and time. That some alien, deep in the past, was looking to sit in on the session and make music, and sent us that message as a pile of compressed wheat fields. So turn to the keys - pluck out a hint of a sympathetic melody. As the rest of the group joins in, the bar looks on, thinking:  “No. No, that’s probably not what the signal means. But let’s listen and order another cocktail anyway.”

This week is my 11th disquiet. As I’ve done with several others, I wrote some code and some music. This time I used python to extract 2 dimensional signals from the wikipedia image, turned slices of those signals into one dimensional signals, turned those one dimensional signals into midi cc, and pulled about 2 minutes of lots of midi control into Logic. I made a feedback-y Surge patch controlled by the CC, and then played along on piano. Nicely, as I was playing, I realized I was returning to the sound palette of disquiet0414, and so I wrote the above little micro-story in my head. And voila.

With that, I hope you enjoy “Space Sits In on The Last Number (disquiet0425)”

Space Sits In on The Last Number (disquiet0425)

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0439-hybrid-self/32979

The prompt: Think of two musicians who you admire with different styles. Hybridize. Your choice if you want to disclose who they are.

You know who they are.

Alice at the Gates (disquiet0439)

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0440-tuning-in/

A simple challenge: make music with an alternative tuning. Enjoy.

Untitled, with Resolution (disquiet0440)

Multi-this-that-and-the-other including composer; 1/3 of @NerdBaitBand / www.nerdbaitband.com