More on this 413th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Objective Thankfulness / The Assignment: Highlight one piece of musical equipment for which you are particularly grateful:

https://disquiet.com/0413/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

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

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this track is by julochka, and is used (image cropped, text added) via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/jS32DD

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

Disquiet Junto Project 0413: Objective Thankfulness

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

vcv rack  open source virtual modular synthesizer .
the creator Andrew Belt has made accessible to all this beautiful software, a true example of musical democracy, was born a wave of creativity
A worldwide thank you to Andrew, to all the plugin developers for this gift. 
release date  28 _11_2019
More on this 413th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Objective Thankfulness / The Assignment: Highlight one piece of musical equipment for which you are particularly grateful:

https://disquiet.com/0413/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

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

Border(disquiet0413)

At the end of 2018, I bought an Empress Reverb box.  It was $449.  I have used it constantly throughout 2019.  I can't imagine ever getting rid of it.

Why the Empress Reverb?  There are no menus.  I can't stand menus.  This thing, you just turn a knob and then you turn some other knobs.  Then listen.  It just makes everything more beautiful.  Even something like "reverse", which I have almost never used in a DAW because it's so obvious and cheesy, transforms the audio spectacularly with the right combination of the various knobs.

"Process Opaque" is a recent creation, released under my alter ego Ambient Matyk.  I don't know what setting this was.  I don't keep notes.

I've been kicking around the idea of buying the Empress Echosystem (also $449) and using the two together.  I might wait to buy that in mid-2020.  No hurry.  I'm having too much fun with the Reverb for now.

For more music and stuff, visit:  https://www.markrushton.com

More on this 413th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Objective Thankfulness / The Assignment: Highlight one piece of musical equipment for which you are particularly grateful:

https://disquiet.com/0413/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Process Opaque (disquiet0413)

The instrument I chose as thankful for is my Fender acoustic guitar. Not exactly the most expensive guitar I've owned, but I get a lot of enjoyment playing it.
The piece is something I've been playing for years and never had a title for. Never recorded it before, it has just been something to play. I recorded with a combination of the guitar's pickup, an SM57 and an Aston Origin --- a mic I really like the sound of, even though it slightly picks up a radio station. (and no, it is not the mic cable or interface. Ugh.) Then a little eq on each track, and Ozone 8 on the master bus.

More on this 413th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Objective Thankfulness / The Assignment: Highlight one piece of musical equipment for which you are particularly grateful:

https://disquiet.com/0413/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

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

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this track is by julochka, and is used (image cropped, text added) via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/jS32DD

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

Untitled [disquiet0413]

"If We Must Die" written and recited by Claude McKay.

Dub remix by Paul Reiners.

More on this 413th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Objective Thankfulness / The Assignment: Highlight one piece of musical equipment for which you are particularly grateful:

https://disquiet.com/0413/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

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

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

If We Must Die (Version)- disquiet0413

Vega lap steel -> Boss compressor -> volume pedal -> TC Electronics delay -> Alesis reverb. Thanks to Greg Wells who gave me the Vega lap steel so many years ago! It opened up new sonic worlds to me.

More on this 413th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Objective Thankfulness / The Assignment: Highlight one piece of musical equipment for which you are particularly grateful:

https://disquiet.com/0413/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

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

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this track is by julochka, and is used (image cropped, text added) via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/jS32DD

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

disquiet0413 objective thankfulness

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 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