Really fun to listen to! You're channeling Robbie Steinhardt. Great stuff! Makes me want to collaborate with you again. It's been too long! :)

The devil went down to Georgia via Vienna and Dublin. Very cool!

Oh ya, that rocks, I just turned up the volume, head phones on.

Title:
Storm Comin’ In

Produced, composed and performed:
Norman Freund, 25-Apr-2021

Artwork:
Norman Freund (Location, Port Hills, New Zealand)

Description:
An afternoon’s improvisation as a storm was approaching from the South.

The main backing riff, was initially having fun with a four part harmonisation, where each harmonisation part was introduced as a live improvisation rather than statically figuring out the chords. I liked the harmonisation, so continued to improvise leads on top with differing instruments. Before I knew it, a new improvised composition was born. A mixture of “Sound Scape” Jazz.

Produced with Ableton Live release 10 Standard.

Storm Comin' In

Title:
Atonal Cyclops

Dates:
23-Jul-2021 (inception), 15-Aug-2021 (finalised), 23-Aug-2021 (released)

Artist:
Composition, performance, production and artwork by Norman Freund

Description:
A mix of Jazz, Atonal harmonies and sound samples from unexpected places.

After listening to some atonal Jazz improvisations from Christian Howes, inspired me to write by own atonal composition. Perhaps the art of picking out random notes that sound interesting, well that is how it started out. Some more inspiration came from a lecture from Rick Beato on tone clusters. A collection of atonal melodic ideas, atonal cluster chords and some fast paced arpeggios was then the beginning of this composition. The percussion section then followed. Most of the melodic and chordal sections were played with a church organ inspired instrument, I just imagined my self playing a massive church organ where the walls and floors shook as the chords were stacked up. The second instrument I learnt was an organ, heavily influenced by the works of Baroque composer J.S. Bach.

The bass line was then added, a synthesised bass characterised by the use of portamento. At times the melodic content came from the bass, other times a back drop.

In the mean time, a friend of mine passed on a sound sample of their electric tooth brush, tucked away for a music challenge to see what I could make of it musically. The buzzing sound was interspersed with rattles, and by chance without pitch modification offered a good introduction sound, which was later used as a melodic instrument through pitch shifting, various sound filtering and reverb effects.

My electric violin was sitting on my desk, beckoning to be played, so I tried out some melodic ideas, improvising on top. This was a combination of rhythmic chop and echoing out the sentiment of the bass line and developing it further. The violin offered a smooth warm contrast to powerful church organ sound.

The Stigma synthesiser from Full Bucket was also used in the atonal arpeggios, a sharp contrast to the church organ sound.

I have been toying with the idea of taking the percussion section’s rhythm and apply this directly to a melodic instrument section. Without a change in the rhythm, I applied this to melodic instruments but added melodic content. This then fades out with the purely percussion section taking over. The instrument use for this introduction was the sound sampled and pitch shifted of a hollow pipe being hit.

So yes, samples from perhaps strange places, a hollow steel pipe and a tooth brush.

Instruments:
* CurtainRodKnock, VST, sampled by Norman Freund
* Church Organ (Captive Cathedral, Ableton Live, Houston Singletary), VST
* Percussion (64 Pads Dub Techno Kite, Ableton Live), VST
* Synth. Bass (Anxious Woofer, Ableton Live, Houston Singletary)
* Tooth Brush, VST, sound sample recorded  by T. Schuster, VST instrument creation by N. Freund
* Electric Violin, NS Design 4 String Wave

Atonal Cyclops

Written by Freddy King, performed and recorded by many blues artists.
One of my bucket list to play songs.
Recorded at home on Logic Pro. UAD Marshall 1962 Blues Breaker amp. Played on my 1972 Les Paul Custom.
Guitar and keyboards - Brian Greenway
Bass Guitar - Lloyd Dallaire
Drums - Superior Drummer3
Mixed on Izotope Ozone by Brian Greenway

Out of the Blues - Hide Away (CLA Ozone Master B of H Good Mix 3) 

Hide Away

Darren DeWolfe, violins
Kevin White, all guitars and drum programming

This is a new mix of an old song originally recorded in 2004-2005. Kevin first came up with the arrangement, then I added the melody.  

This was the first time I used an effect other than delay, reverb and chorus with my violin.  The flanger was Kevin's idea, and while I was uncertain about it at the time, over the years I've grown to love manipulating tone!  Sometimes it's hard moving past what is traditional and familiar.

That String You Do (2022 mix)

A fun , original song that captures the care free days of young love. Written by myself and my wife Carla, back in 2010.

Summer Love

Title: Bird Talk

Dates:
27-Jun-2023 (inception), 29-Jun-2023 (finalised), 05-Jul-2023 (released)

Artists:
Music composed, performed, produced by Norman Freund
Artwork by Norman Freund

BandCamp Purchase:
https://normanfreund.bandcamp.com/track/bird-talk

Description:
Whilst on a morning walk in Christchurch New Zealand park, the sounds of a running stream, birds chirping, the occasional water bird flying over-head and the sound of rustling leaves underfoot, were recorded. These were then imported into Granulator II (Granular synthesiser by Robert Henke) and the experiments began. Over the next couple of days I began to refine the work, until on the evening of 28-Jun-2023 the clips were solidified into the Ableton Live arrangement view, ready for final mixing levels. 

All tracks were done with just the Granulator II granular synthesiser. This formed six tracks with names reminiscent of the sounds they finally produced:
1. "Bird" (16.1 Hz sample length), 
2: "Hollow" (8.91 Hz sample length),
3: Warble 1 (44.9 Hz sample length) + Band Pass Filter (with LFO driven filter frequency),
4: Warble 2 (2.18 Hz sample length) + Corpus Resonator + Reverb,
5: Warble 3, Perc 1 (10.3 Hz sample length) + reverb and
6: "Clav" (43.4 Hz sample length, sounded a bit like a Clavichord).

Having grown up on the East coastal town of Wollongong, Australia as a young lad, the sounds produced reminded me of the bird song from Carrawongs, Magpies and the Wonga Pigeons, echoing through the mix of wet sclerophyll forests and rainforests there. The fast paced percussion section gives the impressions of running through the forest. Mind you, the bird songs that were used for this composition came from New Zealand and were much smaller in size (and hence much higher in pitch), than the Australian Carrawongs, Magpies and Wonga Pigeons; that is where the Granular synthesiser came in, to re-pitch, alter the timbre and re-imagine the sounds in a musical way.

References:
[1] Granulator II, Robert Henke, https://www.roberthenke.com/technology/granulator.html

Bird Talk

Title:
One At A Time

Dates:
13-Feb-2024 (inception), 27-Feb-2024 (finalised), 27-Feb-2024 (released)

Artists:
Music composed, performed, produced by Norman Freund
Artwork by Norman Freund

BandCamp Purchase:
https://normanfreund.bandcamp.com/track/one-at-a-time

Description:

At the heart of this composition is a just intonation scale using some of the octave reduced otonal harmonic
series, then filling in the rest of the notes in an equal temperament style to have an unequally spaced twelve note
scale.

The first section consists of slow moving chords, transitioning from one chord to the next by changing only one note at a time. It serves to immerse the listener into this microtonal system.

The second section introduces a fast paced melodic content using the same custom tuning.

The third section changes the instrument for the chordal part to a smooth string section.

The fourth section re-introduces the harsh synthesiser of the first section but now takes on the melodic role, with the smooth string section taking on the harmony role. 

The fifth section brings in alterations of the human voice (my voice) through various synthesis algorithms via the Some Laboratory, The Pipe. Since the human voice was used, the tuning was improvised based upon what was heard from the synthesiser's strict scale tuning.

Buy One At A Time

One At A Time

Title:
	No Return

Dates:
16-Mar-2024 (inception), 29-Mar-2024 (finalised), 31-Mar-2024 (released)

Artists:
Music composed, performed, produced by Norman Freund
Artwork by Norman Freund

BandCamp Purchase (and more detail on tuning):
https://normanfreund.bandcamp.com/track/no-return

Description:
Inspired by a 41 note just intonation (JI) video from the Lumatone people, thought I would construct my own 41 JI scale. Whilst trying out the scale, I liked what I heard and started composing and recording, this formed the backing track to give the feel of the piece. Could not resist to add in the main melodic and textural parts using the Soma Laboratory Pipe.

The 41 JI scale was formed by taking combinations of primes, 3, 5, 7, 11 and 13 as the numerator for the frequency ratio, then octave reducing by powers of 2. These were sorted by the least number of prime numerator combinations, (one prime the least ("pure interval"), six primes the most (complex interval)), then allocating to the nearest 41 EDO note. These primes only appeared on the numerator. So this forms a an unequal scale of 41 notes based upon just intonation.

This 41 JI was then mapped onto an Ableton Push2 midi keyboard, an 8x8 note pad. The step spacing in the horizontal direction was 7 (approximately a tone) and 1 step ( in the vertical direction. This resulted in the diatonic (white notes) to appear as a Bosanquet like shape,
forming a stair case note pattern.

A custom mapping Max for Live (M4L) device was used for the one to two dimensional keyboard mapping (NOF_Midi_NotePitchLookup_Rel08), and the Ableton Live Microtuner for the microtuning using a scala file of:

41JIFromPrimes1To13UpTo6Combinators
41
65/64
135135/131072
135/128
273/256
35/32
9009/8192
9/8
585/512
297/256
19305/16384
77/64
39/32
5/4
1287/1024
165/128
21/16
1365/1024
693/512
11/8
45/32
91/64
1485/1024
189/128
3/2
195/128
99/64
6435/4096
819/512
13/8
27027/16384
27/16
55/32
7/4
455/256
231/128
117/64
15/8
3861/2048
495/256
63/32
2/1

It was then a case of finding notes in the 41JI that suited my mood at the time and the instrument used. The 41 JI was played through tracks 1 and 2, using the Ableton Live "Poly 60 Saw" with some customisations, one of them being my M4L Device, the NOF_AENV, an audio enveloper to apply an amplitude envelope to the incoming audio, where the envelopes were a combinations of sine and pulse waves of independent frequencies and wet|dry mixes.

The remaining tracks three to nine were all sourced from the Soma The Pipe instrument. The Pipe algorithms used where Orpheus, Drum and Harcho, where my voice was the input. At times my didgeridoo playing was miced by a Sure Green Bullet, through an L.R. Baggs Para Acoustic D.I. (pre-amp), then to The Pipe, using the echo and pulse algorithms. The last track, took digital samples of The Pipe and feed it into a drum rack to play it rhythmically, plus a touch of grain delay.

The Orpheus mode of The Pipe lets the audio input exit two tun-able resonators, the tuning sets the fundamental frequency. The spectral plot of this mode shows peaks as a harmonic series, so when the voice is fed into The Pipe in Orpheus mode, a JI scale is heard.

The didgeridoo is capable of some tuning from the player, but is more relaxed for the player to adopt to it's natural frequency and overtones, so the backing tracks playing the 41 JI scale, needed a key transpose for the didgeridoo part. Hey, it's all improvised played, not a strictly planned composition, so I had to go with the flow.

Buy "No Return"

No Return

Title:
Power Pipe

Dates:
14-Apr-2024 (inception), 17-Apr-2024 (finalised), 18-Apr-2024 (released)

Artists:
Music composed, performed, produced by Norman Freund
Artwork by Norman Freund

BandCamp Purchase:
https://normanfreund.bandcamp.com/track/Power-Pipe

Description:
Some inspiration from the "Microtonal Music and Tuning Theory" facebook group, a post on a guitar with 24 frets (Ref. [1]), 12 in the usual 12EDO places, then the remaining in-between tuned to harmonics. So I messed around with my acoustic and electric guitar and did some calculations trying to reverse engineer what harmonics were used, didn't use any of it, but did get me in the right mood for some electric guitar noodling. Will revisit this 24 hybrid tuning another day.

So, back to Power Pipe. Tuned the strings with heavy distortion on and by ear, so effectively tuned JI (E-A as 4:3, A-D as 4:3, D-G as 4:3, G-B as 5:4, B to E1 as 4:3). Found a nice scale to noodle on and this became the scale used for Power Pipe. As it turned out, the scale was in the key of C# in Locrian mode, but by the time I improvised with this tuning in my Live session, ended up as the Phrygian mode.

Here is the scale I used, normalised to start with C natural (and as defined in the scala file):
0:200c
1:300c
2:500c
3:698c
4:798c
5:998c
6:1198c
7:1396c
8:1496c
9:1696c
10:1894c
11:1994c
12:2194c
13:2380c
14:2580c
15:2680c
16:2880c
17:3080c

with each line defined as
ii:xxc

where
ii = step number
xx = number of cents, rounded to zero digits right of the decimal point

The scale definition is:
GuitarWizzard
17
100.00000000
300.00000000
498.04499913
598.04499913
798.04499913
998.04499913
1196.08999827
1296.08999827
1496.08999827
1694.13499740
1794.13499740
1994.13499740
2180.44871127
2380.44871127
2480.44871127
2680.44871127
2880.44871127

Because this tuning did not include all of the semi-tones, the standard piano mapping put notes in strange places, but forced me to look in new places for inspiration. I used a a synthesiser with heavy distortion, setting the mood (thanks Jon Catler, Ref. [1] for the inspiration).

I then added some percussion using the Push2.

Then out came the Soma Pipe, all done with inputs from my voice, using mostly the Filtera and Orpheus modes, with the intro section done using the Harcho mode. The tuning used with the Pipe was all improvised, using the backing tracks already recorded as inspiration and guidance. The Pipe tracks served dual roles, harmonic and percussion. As usual, the Orpheus mode was a bit of a mystery tour, exploring what frequencies to set the two resonant filters too.

The introduction section, bar 1, used the Harcho mode of the Pipe, then disguised the sounds of what was to follow in the main section with Robert Henke's Granulator II granular synthesiser, my custom reverb Max for Live device (feed back and delays), the Live Spectral Time device effect and finally a sweeping high pass filter.

References:
[1] "Jon Catler, 12-Tone Ultra Plus Guitar demo, Part I, 5/15/01", Youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2eukIoSsKM.

Power Pipe

Frost* - The Dividing Line

I play traditional classical violin in orchestras and other ensembles in my region, teaching private lessons on the side when not tending to my day job as a high school Music and English teacher.  Privately, I have long been interested in experimenting with musical styles outside of the "classical" vein, since "creating" music is often more gratifying than "re-creating" music.  Having spent my life listening to popular music styles in tandem with classical and not having learned to play a "traditional" pop/rock instrument like guitar or drums, I go with what I know.  Occasionally I even try singing.  Fortunately I have friends and family who are willing to collaborate from time-to-time.

That String You Do (2022 mix)

Darren DeWolfe

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Norman Freund

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