This is a piece put together to showcase the Pittsburgh Modular Chain Reactor LFO module. In all cases the Chain Reactor was allow to run rampant and wreak havoc on the filters while tracking. Glitchy, hairy, droney craziness. 

Shift And React

The recent article* on the 30th anniversary of the Spacemen 3 Northampton gig had me in an S3 kind of mode, and this week's track started with seven tracks of Moog Guitar through the Reuss RF-01 Repeater Fuzz.  I quickly put down seven tracks of drones/pulses at different hard tremolo speeds, and the interaction reminded me of Steve Reich's early process music.  That could have been enough, but the next night I put down three tracks of Res-O-Glas guitar, this time through the EHX LPB2ube to dirty them up, and a soft tremolo with Live's Frequency Shifter set to a very low-frequency ring modulator.  Finally, I tracked bass, finger plucking pedal tones while going through the RF-01 again, without fuzz, at several different speeds. 

Drums were the hardest to get right, since I tracked the initial pulses without any set tempo, but I came up with some that had a kind of groove--though (as sometimes happens), the real 1-beat should have been where I put the 4.  Easy enough to compensate for in Live, but it made some of the edits a bit strange. 

Three return channels, all reverbs: one wooden-room-like (drums and Res-O), one a large room (Moog/RF-01), and one concert hall (some of the Moog tracks). Typical compression/limiting on the 2-mix...and it's a dense one.

One pass-through was eight minutes long, so this one--at just under five--is edited down enough to work...but one could listen to the first part for quite a long time. (Or maybe that's just me.)

* https://medium.com/@noodlepie/a-side-are-your-dreams-at-night-1985-sizes-too-big-e122596968a0

Space Process

in the Distance

No music, just electronic environments thrown down in one afternoon... Experimenting with the #synthesistechnology mods i just got, including "Morphing Terrarium" and "Resampling Mini Delay". All sounds come from the Morphing Terrarium, being pushed around aggressively by the #pittsburghmodular "chain reactor" and the ST "Dual Mophing LFO." Also features the new PGH MOD #verbtronic.

chatter in the steel forest

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

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

Forward

Last weekly track of 2015.  This one began with a little arpeggio in my mind, and it runs throughout the piece.  Initially I heard it against something a lot faster and drum-breaky, but for tracking I went with something slower, and that ended up feeling more right.  I tracked a few lines of guitar that worked well together (the two themes, some ornamentation, and a chordal part) and then set everything aside for the rest of the week until Saturday, when I tracked more guitar parts (wah + fuzz, some clean), bass, and a few variations on drums and keys. 

The drum line is Impulse with single hit samples of a kit hit with brushes (except for the crash and toms), going through the Saturator (tweaked Hot Tubes preset).  Electric and Operator are the piano and organ instruments, with four channels of guitar (Res-O-Glas, some direct into the A/D, some through Vox wah, and some through Reuss RF-01).  Most guitar channels got a pass through the Auto-Filter with pronounced drive, and bass was the trusty Epiphone, dry. 

The title comes from the feeling of forward progress--this piece seems slow, but inexorable, and I expect to keep doing these weekly tracks in one place (here?) or another (if weeklybeats.com comes back) starting this week for 2016.

Final stats: 54 tracks (weeks 25 and 33 had alternate versions), five hours and thirteen minutes of music.  Shortest: Week 38 (Cascade) at 4:07; longest: week 25 (Sustain, Long Version) at 15:56.  720MB in 320kbps MP3 form, and a working directory over 10GB (though I have FLAC-encoded some of the final mixes). 


Forward

my first improvised clip with the first finished Ronin MorningStar guitar, with its brand-new StrataFoil pickups..... 

Shift And React

terraamb