A relatively short song this week, I streamed and ended up doing more talking and less composing, but I was able together. It's probably more of an intro than a complete song, but it's still like a minute and a half long or so.
A noisy drone ambient set with lots of distortion and wall of sound. Performed live on the Eurorack. This was streamed, you can check it out when the VOD comes out at https://twitch.tv/emeraldarcaa/
Warning: long-ish (7 minutes)
I haven't done "traditional" music in a while, I might go back to that next week.
I performed live for Modular On The Spot at a Community Center on August 28. Great audience, had a decent crowd size, and I received a number of compliments on the set afterward.
Edit: I managed to get the file uploaded. The set is about 20 minutes long, so be aware that it's rather long for a Weekly Music submission.
Original text:
I am rather busy tomorrow so I do not know if I can extract audio by tomorrow, so I'm going to post the video below as a placeholder and hopefully get back to editing it by deadline tomorrow.
The show itself starts around 8m 30s in and it runs for about 15m. (tomorrow when I'm less tired I'll try to get audio and a timestamp)
Done in hardware, started off as an attempt to learn Metropolix to make more melodic stuff and ended up with extremely atonal and ambient crazy sounds that are chaotic and muffled!
This was streamed. https://twitch.tv/emeraldarcana/
Ambient music on the Eurorack modular, though in practice this might actually be more drone than ambient. Recorded live, took two takes and about 1h 30m total.
Streamed live here https://twitch.tv/emeraldarcana/ With respect to streaming, it was actually a pretty good day since I got a pretty big raid (of about 24 people).
Sorry for "cheating" three weeks in a row by uploading One Hour Compo songs. I've had some busy weekends (seminars, traveling) and haven't really devoted a lot of Me time to music lately.
The theme was a creepy, misty forest (https://compo.thasauce.net/files/materials/OHC576_OHC_576_1.jpg) so I decided to create something that resembled a creepy 80s synthesizer movie soundtrack. In this song, I used the Alesis Andromeda A6 and the Nord Rack 2x for all of the sounds (I didn't have my Analog 4 in the same room at the time, too bad!), along with effects from VSTs (Eventide Quadravox, Valhalla Shimmer, SoundToys EchoBoy, SoundToys Devil-Loc Deluxe, SoundToys Radiator, iZotope Neutron 2) on individual tracks, and iZotope Ozone Elements 8 on the master track.
Next week, I think I will dig deeper with musical expression.
Dec 31, 15:25 - 16:05. After an idea that sounded too EDM/progressive for my tastes (but honestly did have some musical merit), I decided that I'd bust out the modular instead and goof off.
This is different from what I've done before on the modular. The pitches and rhythms are generative (mostly). One thing that I'd consider doing differently is having the drums on a control - being able to better control individual parts is pretty important and this patch didn't really allow that.
It's partly generative, but not fully - I did do a lot of knob turning to change pitches, parts, rhythms, and so forth.
I wanted to make a generative patch on the modular so I could set it up and let it play while kids answer the door.
What I realized pretty quickly is that I don't have enough modulation options in my modular to quite get the effect I wanted. I still hope that the result is sufficiently spooky or haunting without annoying the hell out of us at home.
Sun, Oct 29.
I'd like to make a generative Halloween patch so I can play it when kids end up ringing the doorbell.
Ambient modular improv.
Sunday, October 22, 11:00-11:50ish
Today might be busy, so I figured I'd record a "quick" improv track just in case I don't make it back to the music later this afternoon.
This is done with my modular and Arpeggionome, an iPad app. The modules doing the heavy lifting here are the E352 Cloud Terrarium and the Dixie II+ through Polaris FIlter and Noise Tools doing the S&H filter effects.
No post-processing except for some compression/limiting through Neutron.
I forgot to turn on the initial time, but I think it's been about 50 minutes or so. I tried about three takes (and some repatching) before I was happy with the result. There are still some changes that I would make if I kept at it - some of the high notes are too sudden and better gating would have helped maintain a background drone.
I forgot to time this one, but it's a fun live jam anyway so kind of low effort. Maybe 30-40 minutes?
This is a two-synth jam: Oberheim XPander and Kilpatrick Phenol.
I set up the XPander to play a loop of chords in the background. The Phenol was played live using self-triggering mechanisms (no keyboard). There's actually a fair amount going on for not that many synths.
No software effects except for limiting/EQ on the master track.
Warning: some high frequencies.
The mystic waters.
Meta comment: A great way to NOT get inspired to do music is to find some kind of problem with the setup, spend 30 minutes tearing down cables and interfaces to find it, only to realize that you pressed the wrong button on the front of the interface that turned off ADAT routing.
Then you spend an hour plugging everything back in again.
12:40 - 14:45: Patching for sounds and trying to do arps on Carbon…
Apparently the Carbon doesn't do arps on hold, which is a nuisance. I am getting a little annoyed with the fact that I've been trying to figure problems out instead of making music, so I think I'm just going to crank something out in the software sequencer.
Total time: 2h 5m. Not very happy with the process, though the end result isn't bad. I wanted to do work with arps but I didn't get a good chance to due to failures of hardware so I went back to old habits. Will need to figure out how to mess with more effects next week.
){kind=link}