Title:
Crazy

Dates:
09-Feb-2021 (inception), 02-Apr-20021 (finalised), 03-Apr-2021 (released)

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

BandCamp Purchase:
https://normanfreund.bandcamp.com/track/crazy

Description:
A Jazz Rock Fusion. As usual for me the path to the final music work was a twist path of inspiration and influence. It started with inspiration of the Octavia octaver pedal used by Jimmy Hendrix and some of the fuzz pedals used in that era.

I was keen to experiment with fuzz effects in Ableton Live, did not find any, however I had a certain vibe in mind and set out to create a new instrument to create what I had imagined. The sounds started out as simple saw tooth waves out of tune with each other plus some phaser effects in Module Air synthesiser of Full Bucket. This was then feed into the Ableton Live Saturator effect using the Waveshaper, then some delay and finally reverb using Native Instruments Raum. Only certain notes sounded right, so I sampled them and let Ableton Live pitch stretch them across the keyboard. A new bass instrument was born, experiments with various riffs began. This formed the seed of this composition.

The first percussion kit was added using one of the standard sets from Ableton Live, which was later extended to a total of three kits, one of which a custom cymbals/crashes for a bit of pepper and salt.

The original intension was for the lead to be played by an electric guitar and an electric violin. My core skills are on the keyboard, so the initial violin parts were done based upon samples of dry violin tones sampled from my NS Design Wave 4 String Violin, then sound shaping through effects and amp sims in Ableton Live. Electric guitar leads used the Ableton Live “Guitar-Dual Amped Heavy”. Synth bass instruments were then added from the Ableton Live library. Special effects came from none other than a piece of long PVC pipe, block one end and bounce your palm on the open end, then pitch shift applied to a keyboard.

By the time I reached the end of the production, with my son providing useful feed back of the various revisions along the way, I released with the extended range of a keyboard and the possibility of polyphony, the electric guitar and electric violin parts, strayed well from what could be played by a single musician — a whole electric string section plus effects pedals would be needed to play this live. So I decided to leave this as the synthesiser edition, where Ableton Live + keyboard was the instrument.

Crazy

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

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

One of my rare attempts to sing on my own recording, this song is about those feelings of nostalgia and bemusement you get when something(or someone) previously important to you re-presents itself after a long gap, and how you try to make sense of it from within your current situation while continuing to look toward the future. I posted an instrumental version of this some time ago, but only now do I feel ready to share this.

The 25 Year Gap

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.

The 25 Year Gap

Darren DeWolfe

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