Weekly Beats 2015

Here's an unexpected one.  Early in the week, I was playing with some Bonham-influenced rhythms, trying to understand exactly how much behind-the-beat would work for "heaviness." Then I added the Ableton Analog instrument preset Spacious Choir, which totally had that Gary Numan "Cars" string pad sound, so I added some 808 for 80s-ness, added some parts that didn't lead anywhere, and then...wasn't sure what to do with it. At the end of the week, I took a different approach for the trap kit, with offset closed hat that suggested something a bit more funky, so I threw out the initial drum patterns, pulled back the Numan, and put down some basslines that had some funk to them, so also put down three tracks of wah guitar, with and without Reuss RF-01 fuzz.  And...damn--it was a disco funk party.  Took a while to edit down, and finished up by quarter to midnight.  So now...it's party time. 

Party Of One

This week's piece started mid-week, with an odd little drum pattern I heard in my head that turned out to be in 7 when I sketched it out with TR-606 single-hits.  I didn't want to lose the unsettled, prime quality of it, so as I played with a number of other complementary rhythms (in Visco, K3M, and trap kit voices), I tended toward other prime numbers (3 and 5), but some power-of-2 rhythms showed up in there as well.  I wrote and discarded a number of other voices, but kept the four percussion voices, a couple synth voices (square wave trem bass and smeary lead), and also ended up playing real guitar and bass for this.  They didn't sound right in context, though, so I ended up mangling them with inline processing: Live's Resonator on the bass, and Max For Live's Granular-to-go on the guitar.  The end result has a lot of 7s and 5s in it, which is fitting for semiprime week 35. 

Semiprime

Lots and lots of tracks with this one: 15 (temporarily 16), and a lot of percussion: eight tracks of it.  This one started with a drone in the Max For Live multi-oscillator saw drone synth I whipped up, at 82, 76, and 41 Hz, inspired by something I'd been reading on radio frequencies used by submarines.  I started adding percussion voices (808, K3m, VDRM, assorted percussion over four tracks, and hand claps), and threw in some electric piano.  Three tracks of guitar (Res-O through Reuss RF-01 and Vox Wah, clean into Vox Wah, and just into Reuss), one of bass (Epiphone into the board), and finally Bleep Labs Nebulophone for the wildcard factor, probably inspired by the new Allen Ravenstine collection (it's good! Check it out: http://www.hearpen.com/hr182.html).  This one took a while to edit--I'd recorded a lot, and some just didn't work.  What remains seems to, though.  The title was an associative leap from the spinning sound of some of the Nebulophone parts. And a lot of the sound input involved electromagnetic energy. 

Magnetic Moment

Having begun the week with a left-index-finger injury (healing, kind of alarming at the time, though), I figured guitar playing would be out for a while, so I concentrated on building another drone synth in Max/MSP, this one containing variable waveforms and variable-waveform modulators.  I used eight channels of that, and mid-week added some drums (still feeling the cowbell from last week), took a detour into electric piano, grand piano samples, organ, and melodic synth (ripped all those out), added back drum machines (808, K3M, trap kit, hand claps), and ended up adding some Bleep Labs Nebulophone to pad things out. Does it work? Kind of.  The title comes from some of the Nebulophone sounds reminding me of an underground rave in a particle accelerator tunnel. 

Beam Pipe

This week's track is my first chance to play guitar after sectioning up a flap of left index finger, and also a different approach than usual: rather than coming up with little phrases and loops, I improvised a full-length guitar line to a click in an open tuning (a modified version of Fahey's C tuning, all dropped a step except for the fifth string, so Bb G Bb F Bb D).  Instead of mining it for loops, I left that stand and improvised bass along with it for the length of the track (that was a strain on the fingertip), and then worked backward and added a simple drum line and an organ line.  It needed some other stuff, so I also added a little piano line and some additional 808 percussion, and finally a filtered fuzz guitar line.  

The initial clean guitar is Univox Effie straight into the D/A, while the bass is the usual Epiphone on P-pickup.  Fuzz guitar is the Res-O through the ever-present Reuss Repeater Fuzz and Vox Wah (stationary, for an approximation of that Robert Fripp 70s tone, just not played as well). The end result?  More melodic than I usually get, which seems like an indulgence, but there you have it.  Title comes from the wound healing cascade, part of the physical healing process.  It's nice to have a finger again. 

Cascade

Here's one that kind of fought me.  Beginning without a real direction, I put a number of drum beats together, thinking I'd go fast (180+ bpm) and abstract (bit-crushing down to 3 bits), and it seemed promising, but I got tired of listening to the harsh high frequencies, even with them rolled off somewhat above 2K. I tried slowing things down (20 bpm and multiples) and it got a bit more interesting, but still didn't really go anywhere. 

Several more passes added voices--several drum machines (brushes kit--bit-reduced to 8--a line of 808, K3M, 606, hand claps, miscellaneous percussion) a grinding Operator line (removed), some electric pianos (promising), an organ (Operator), and finally a couple bass lines at 140 bpm...which didn't invite any other parts or structure until I brought the tempo down to 96.  Then a few more passes on bass--two basslines again, keeping a few of the 140s, just time-stretched and tweaked--and Res-O-Glas guitar (Reuss Repeater + Vox Wah) brought it into focus. 

Even so, a run-through of 7 or 8 minutes wasn't compelling until I really cut away at the structure.  What we have here is the product of severe editing.  Sends: Drum Room reverb, simple delay, filter delay (emphasizing the highs, like an old tape with filter), Beat Repeat (an edited version of the Fill In The Blanks preset), and Buffer Shuffler (kind of feels like time to take a break from it).

The title is from an early name for (of course) Area 51, a place which doesn't tend to give up its secrets, much like this piece. 

Photo: "Groom Lake and Papoose Lake" by Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA - 2010_08_06_rno-phx-bos_071 Uploaded by PDTillman. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Groom_Lake_and_Papoose_Lake.jpg#/media/File:Groom_Lake_and_Papoose_Lake.jpg

Site II

Musician, composer, programmer, vertebrate

Site II

onezero