As per usual, I conducted a jam session that took several hours, during which I experimented with a vast amount of sounds, settings and samples, and recorded the stereo result in Audacity. In a posts-production step within Audacity, I extracted the best parts from that jam session in order to create this track. As always, I only used basic audio editing techniques like simple crossfades. Only a touch of soft limiting was applied, no elaborate approaches like mastering were used whatsoever. Thus, the result is raw and highly dynamic in nature, so put on your favourite headphones and turn up that volume knob, because the Loudness War is for losers!

This particular jam session is dedicated to the sometimes longsome and somewhat tedious process of creating (electronic) music. I was inspired by the Youtube video "Music Software & Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius" by Tantacrul, who took a detailed look at the design of the popular music notation application Sibelius (youtu.be/dKx1wnXClcI). It is a very entertaining video and being a computer scientist and a hobbyist musician, I could very much comprehend and sympathise with his demonstration in particular, and the usage of flawed tools for music production in general. It is this very video that inspired me to create these two tracks in the first place, since Tantacruls chant "Something something - Sibelius crashed" was so rhythmic and captivating; so I ended up using his voice as a couple of samples. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to capture his voice in the right rhythmic way during the jam session, so I added it in post-production. 

Additionally, I used a sample from the Youtube video "Moog Subsequent 37 - jam no.1 in C-minor" by  ollilaboratories (https://youtu.be/bUMwSp86a9c) which I indeed was able to capture in the right way during the jam session, albeit after several attempts.  

One particularly interesting aspect of this track's sound for me is amplitude modulation in conjunction with filter modulation. I fed the output of the Mordax DATA (using the oscillator mode) through one of the inputs of the Make Noise LxD, which is a low-pass gate. Then, I fed the sine output of the Doepfer A-147 into LxD's CV input and wiggled the A-147's frequency knob. This resulted in an interesting interaction with the Arturia MicroBrute's tone. Also, ollilaboratories's amazing playing of the Moog Subsequent 37 (which I high passed in order to not interact too much with the already quite bassy sound and not to let the result become all too muddy) contributed to the peculiar timbre.  

Since I had so much audio material to work with, I decided to split this one into two parts. I hope you'll enjoy this homage to the labrious endeavours through the intricate realm of music making and the multilayered challenges we as aspiring musicians can encounter. Please bear in mind that this track doesn't reflect my ability to create live music on the fly in one go, like many great artists can do. As most of my tracks, this one is free for download. If you use it in one of your projects, let me know what you can come up with and give Mrs. Audio Boy a shout-out!

Beat Thang And Sibelius Crashed, Part II [Jam session sections: RAW2020 - 5]

Mrs. Audio Boy is a proud member of Project:Music (@projectmusicsounds) and MintFam (@mintfam), and is a German-based project, which creates experimental electronic music by the process of conducting jam sessions, improvising during these sessions, recording them, and then using best parts from those sessions to create so called "Jam session sections" (manually, no AI whatsoever). These are generally raw sound clips that are mostly left unprocessed apart from using a simple cross-fade in order to tie two or more clips together. Only very rarely some simple effects like filters, compressors or noise reduction are applied. 

In doing so, the special one-of-a-kind moment is pursued; thus, the created sound is highly inimitable and unreproducible. Most of the tracks can be downloaded. If you use them, please give a shout-out to Mrs. Audio Boy!

MAB logo by @maxim-lichtenwald, check him out!