Last track of 2017, here's a kind of funky thing that came together gradually over the week: drum rack from various sources, couple of Analog synths, Ableton's Electric, guitar (Res-O-Glas) and Bastl Kastle synth. Three convolution reverbs, delay, and full-chain master.

Title from the use of tellurium (element 52) in phase change memory chips.

This one's a simple in-the-box housey piece. Inspiration was reading about one insufferable wealthy blowhard or other who put out a promo video in which he pronounced "discotheque" with four syllables. This kind of gave me the idea of doing a sample-fest of it, but apparently he didn't pronounce it exactly the way I'd thought, so I instead went with a simple synth line that had the kind of cadence I'd envisioned, over a disco-y kind of house rhythm. It fell together rather quickly, which is good, because this has been a busy week.

909 drum rack, hand claps, four tracks of Ableton's Analog. Convo reverb and delay. Not a lot of fancy stuff. Title comes from PA's Route 51, which wasn't far from where I grew up.

Merry Christmas/happy holidays/happy solstice/happy Eggnog Riot anniversary, or whatever you're celebrating!

Mostly in-the-box, plus bass. Drum rack of 909, hand clap samples, Tension/Clav and Electric/Rhodes, Epiphone bass. Lots of roll-off on bass below 87Hz to get out of the way of the kick. Three sends--two convolution reverbs and one filter delay.

Title comes from the 50 Gates of Wisdom/Impurity of the Kabbalah.

Description soon--basically drum racks of backwards 660 sounds, a drum rack of synth, Collision, and output from a Max/MSP patch.

This week I bought an old DOD 545 Wah Filter pedal (the beige one), otherwise known as the Bill Laswell pedal, and built up a little groove in anticipation. Initially I used Korg Minipops samples (thanks, Chris!) but there was a bit-depth grit around them that didn't seem to fit with this particular track, so I ended up replacing it with a drum rack of Analog synths. To supplement the kick, I added 606 kick in one track, and then some DR-660 percussion samples (thanks again to Chris! I remember my old DR-660 fondly; traded it for an MXR EQ...). I added a track of vibes, some of Analog, some Operator...but took them all out in favor of two tracks of Live's Electric plugin. Then I tracked bass through the DOD, and it was enormously low--so much so that I decided the kick should occupy a higher frequency range, and spent time fiddling to get a kind of balance. Saturday night I tracked guitar (Epi Moderne, through Vox Wah and Reuss RF-01, but also just through Vox Wah), and put a rough arrangement together. Some further fiddling, and here we are. (Sends: two convo reverbs, one amp spring and one room, and a delay. Full-chain master on the master channel.)

Title from the Kola Superdeep Borehole, for obvious reasons.

Working on some guitar stuff for something else, I did this week's track all-in-the-box, inspired by a friend sharing a bunch of single-hit drum sounds, mostly from unusual and odd drum machines. This one uses some sounds from a Blofeld, along with handclap samples and a bunch of Ableton Analog and Operator synths. Sends are two convolution reverbs and one set of simple delays.

Title from it being week 47, which is the atomic number of silver.

Another very busy week, but I found a few minutes here and there to play with more vocoded drums (tabla) and some other percussive synth, as well as a drum rack of sampled traps...but it wasn't really coming together until I realized it could work in 5/4. Bass clarified it a bit, though some of the MIDI voices (tabla, Operator organ, Operator percussion with Brushed Bell and Rubber presets) were tricky to time. I added some Electric piano at the last minute, and some automation to the sends: two convo reverbs, and one of bandpass Auto Filter (LFO set to random) into Simple Delay.

Title from the slippery feeling of the 5/4.

(tech notes soon)

A return to guitar (Res-O-Glas) and bass (Epi), here's a drifty kind of track, named in part after the 44th department of France.

I started with a Drumulator part, much faster, and slowed it waaaay down, I added hand drum and hand claps, some Operator bass (which I took out) and organ lines, along with grand piano in Simpler...and based on a dream I had, I went back and split the two drum lines, adding a vocoder chain to each one--Analog on the Drumulator and Operator on the hand drum. Grand piano sounded too...grand-piano-y, so I used auto-filter to reduce bandwidth and sent it to sends only. Guitar got some auto-filter, as did the Drumulator kick (to bring out the peak).

Sends are two convolution reverbs and one LFO auto-filter into Simpler. Full-chain master on the 2-bus.

Another busy week, including a show using one of my Max/MSP patches, so here's a little dark ambient track making use of the same patch and similar improvisational methods. (The original input is just a sine wave, going through ring mods, pitch shifters, and delays, all of which have some level of randomization.) As a slightly different approach, I also put on a drum rack of Analog-synthesized drums. Bit of convolution reverb, delay, and Full Chain Master as well...and you have this steady-state kind of thing. My younger son suggested the title, because it sounded to him like something malfunctioning. (It does!)

Busy week involving travel, so here's a little all-in-the-box groove.

Busy week, so here's some Ableton Electric into two convolution reverbs plus chained delay, and several tracks of Moog guitar through the Reuss RF-01 Repeater Fuzz and Vox Wah.

Title from the lustrous quality of niobium, element 41.

Week 40 of the year, here's a return to real bass and multi-track arrangement. Drum rack of Ableton Analog instruments for synth drums, tabla single-hits, another hand drum single-hit Impulse instrument, one for hand claps, two different instances of the Ableton Electric instrument, Ableton's Operator on the Plastic Vibraphone preset, and real bass. Sends are two convolution reverbs and a delay; there's some inline auto-filter here and there, along with EQ8 and Cabinet on the bass. Varying degrees of sends, some of which are automated. Full-chain master on the two-bus.

Title comes from the heat-resistant properties of zirconium (atomic number 40).

Yet another busy week...but it should lighten up after this. Here's a quick improv with the Max/MSP patch, with guitar as the input. There's a bit of convolution reverb on the output. Noise at the beginning comes from the variable bit-depth and sample-rate deduction, and while I wanted that out...it's just kind of part of it now.

Another even busier week, so here's another quick improv with the sine-waves-and-random-processing Max/MSP patch. There's some convolution reverb using an impulse from a Swedish reactor, some EQ8 to roll off above 8K (because it's peaky up there), and full-chain master. Title comes from the n=3 magic hexagon, which sums to 38.

This started with a little drum pattern I was hearing in my head, and which I thought I'd (once again) have in a drum rack of Analog instruments. (I tweaked the kick from last week, and it's sounding a little closer to what I want.) I added another channel of Analog ("Canadian Boards" preset) for a warbly little melody fragment, and put down some Simpler with a Mellotron single-note sample to accompany it. This seemed to suggest a kind of 80s-technology aesthetic, so I also put in a Simpler instrument with a Fairlight sample (the "Swanee" airy pipe), and for extra percussion, a Drum Rack of PAiA drum machine single-hit samples.

Saturday night, I tracked bass (Epi P-J straight into the board, Cabinet plugin and reverb send to give it air, some EQ-8 to roll off sub-100Hz), some guitar (Epi Moderne through Reuss Repeater Fuzz and Vox Wah straight to the board). While I tracked some melodic lines, I ended up relying more on dissonant harmonics and fragments than full lines. For a final x-factor, I tracked some noisy Bastl Kastle.

With the bass, I'd thought to keep up the 80s theme and flange it, and then took that out...but brought it back as an automation that I bring in every so many bars. Sends were just a room-sized Convolution reverb (Auto-filter in front to roll off bass and reduce boominess) and a simple delay.

Title comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations

Super-busy week and weekend. But here's a minimal track: just drum rack of Analog for synth drums, ring-modulated tabla, electric bass (Epi P-J into the board, cabinet plugin, reverb send, and rolling off -6 dB below 100Hz, mostly one track but an occasional other voice) and sparse Analog into a reverb send. Sends: two convo reverbs and one delay. Full-chain master on the 2.

Title from the frequency shift plugin on the ring modulated tabla.

A piece that went through a number of iterations before I found the vibe of a kind of house track. There's a lot of percussion: single-hits on 909, hand drum, tabla, hand claps, some Ableton Collision instruments (marimba and metal plate), Operator for bass, and the sampled Behr stringed instrument from Uganda. Not a lot of inline processing but lots of automation to different sends--two convolution reverbs, a simple delay, and a filter delay. It's long...but that was the vibe.

Title from the fact that quantum dots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot) are sometimes made with selenium, which has the atomic number 34.

I wanted to try a different approach to things this week, and built up a track with some layers of evolving/developing/heavily processed sounds. There's a simple kit of Analog-synth drum hits (this also goes through parallel vocoder processing), Ableton's Light and Shadow Operator synth preset, Collision with the gong preset (going through the filter taps effect), Collision with the Pitch Pad preset, bass (parallel processed with different Auto-Filters: one a low pass only, and one low and high to give a band from 100Hz to 1KHz), and Kastle synth. There are three send channels: two convolution reverbs, and one Max Spectral Delay; there's a lot of send automation as well as auto-pan on almost everything.

Title from the fact that the Triangulum galaxy is M33.

(Track art: By Alexander Meleg - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31...)

This one developed along one direction and changed course a few times before veering into somewhat psychedelic space funkbot territory. I started with tablas and 909 samples, and put them through a vocoder, gate, and reverse reverb, which made them more accents than primary rhythm. I added the usual dry funk kit, but instead of auto-filtering the kick, I just punched up its level significantly--as a result, I think it conflicted less with the bass than it often does. As an x-factor, I added LFO to adjust the bit level of Redux randomly, which pumped the cymbals in a pleasingly weird way.

I tracked a bunch of soft synths and then took them out, finally returning to one soft synth. I tracked bass (through EQ8 to pull down sub-100Hz and side chain with the kick) and guitar (Reuss RF-01 fuzz, Vox Wah, and Auto-Pan with a square-wave tremolo in time), and Bastl Kastle modular synth for flavor.

I used three different convolution reverbs, one cascaded set of delays, and filter delay with LFO auto-filter in front.

Title from the use of the Kastle.