Instead of leaving you all with a farewell to 2021, I'm thinking ahead to 2022 because I have a project to crank out.

I have a live show to prepare for on January 29, so I started sketching out the set with Track 1. What I need? A transition to track 2 :D

Composed on a Eurorack modular synth (7u 104hp; the rack hasn't changed in a few months) and a Minibrute 2s.

Here's some more liner notes:

Key: F major
BPM: 116.7

• Minibrute 2s with drone patch (A-01) transition to A-02
• Eurorack Metropolix Cyan-5 sequence 1 with skips on 2-8, opening up over time
• Drum channels A-B-D muted, opening up over time
• What I want to do is create sequence A-03 for a variation in the acid bass section
• Also want to create more sequences for the drums and to figure out what knob I can turn to turn this from an acid bass song in F major to something in D minor that is darker and a little more foreboding.

A quick Minibrute 2s Acid Jam that I did while I was streaming without a lot of preparation or planning. I need to learn how to save and restore sequences and then actually take advantage of them! Maybe I'll use the sequences in an upcoming live show...

A live improv techno song with Eurorack doing percussion (and growls, and some weird melodic stuff) and Future Retro 777 doing the bass. I was doing this while smoking ribs outside. Loop-based, but hopefully simple and fun.

I streamed this. You can check it out, https://twitch.tv/emeraldarcana/

This one is preparation for a Eurorack Set that I'm going to play live for Modular On The Spot in the city next week Saturday. The set is about 25m long so this song is also pretty long. Sorry about that.

This one is a live performance.

I also streamed this performance (actually, streamed a couple of practice runs).

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).

I created this song as a live stream on Deluge, Eurorack, and Meeblip. Here's the live stream channel: https://www.twitch.tv/emeraldarcana It's under "creating music in real time with hardware".

I got kind of tired so I didn't really sit to polish this one up, but after doing listening I probably would change a few things like adjusting levels a bit more. I was getting into gainstaging problems where the gear was overloading the VCA and the unity mixer was clipping hard. I might have to pay more attention to that later on. Other than that it's a long live jam done in real time.

I got this note from a buddy of mine a few weeks ago:

"Hey,

Just dropping a line about Soy Un Navidad. The only rules are to poorly translate into Spanish and have text-to-speech do vocals. Oh, and send the Spanish lyrics, so I can attach them to the album. Outside of that, feel free to do just about anything that comes to mind. If you have any questions or anything, feel free to reach out."

Liner notes:

I did this track live (after many takes) on my hardware synths. (It kind of felt like hard mode)

• Vocals: Octatrack. I roughly sliced them up and “arranged” them.
• Chords: Some synth on my Deluge
• Organ (Eurorack): Mutable Instruments Braids through a delay and a Spring Reverb and a Polaris filter
• Bass (Euroack): Intellijel Plonk
• Drums (Eurorack): An analog sine wave + Basimilus Iteritas Alter

It’s in the key of F major.

Lyrics:

O Come All Ye Faithful

Oh ven, todos ustedes fieles
Alegre y triunfante
Oh, ven, o vienes a Belén
Ven y miralo
Nacido el Rey de los Ángeles!
Oh ven, adoremoslo
Oh ven, adoremoslo
Oh ven, adoremoslo
Cristo el señor

Canta, coros de ángeles
Canta en exultación
Canten, todos ustedes ciudadanos del cielo arriba!
Gloria a Dios
Toda la gloria en lo más alto
Oh ven, adoremoslo
Oh ven, adoremoslo
Oh ven, adoremoslo
Cristo el señor

Chill-out house I guess. Recorded live, as usual. Going to bring this one to the local modular meetup.

Used the modular with Deluge on partial sequencing and chord duty.

I'm cheating this week, it was my partner's birthday so I didn't really spend extra time making music.

This song was a live song on my modular with my Octatrack, my TR-8s (as has been usual for the past 3-4 weeks or so), and the Nintendo Switch. I actually changed up the patching a tiny bit to patch in a distorted input of "Corneria - Star Fox" from the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate playlist. You can barely hear it but it's there in the background and this song uses the same BPM and key. I suppose it's almost like a remix if it actually sounded anything like the original.

More practicing with live loops and Eurorack modular that I created earlier this week. More breakbeat-style tracks.

Few things I learned:

• I need more Octatrack scenes
• Tetrapad vibrato is worth exploring
• Octatrack patterns always seem to get messed up, and I have to pay attention to them
• I don't have enough attention span yet to also play with the TR-8s's motion recording and effects blocks. Need to practice.
• Having a verse-chorus structure will be nice one day, but maybe I should get the EDM->rise->drop->break structure down first. I usually construct the loops in OHC, so if I can get that down to 1 hr of time then I know that I got it practiced.

A live House-style jam with a few loops. It's about 7 minutes long. Mixing isn't perfect, there were a few loud parts that I didn't get to fix. A bit of compression post-recording to boost levels.

Done with 5 loops on the Octatrack, a bunch of drum parts on TR-8s, and some sequences on the Eurorack. I made the loops earlier this week for One Hour Compo, but that performance wasn't that good so I did it again.

I did my first live set in front of an audience. I prepared this for about two weeks and performed it last night (July 20, 2019) in front of an audience of about 10-15 attendees. Overall I got a lot of compliments afterward and even though I know I had mistakes during the set, no one seemed to notice.

I took the recording from a combination of an iPhone recording and a recording that was connected to the mixer because the recording on the mixer missed the introduction. I amplified and compressed the clean recording a little bit to increase the levels a little bit, but it's still a bit on the quiet side.

The total set is about 22 minutes long, so it's a bit on the long side for a WeeklyMusic submission. I hope that some of you check this out. Enjoy!

Unfortunately this weekend was pretty busy, and though I had some time on Friday I didn't have the foresight to record stuff for Weekly Music even though I actually put together stuff so I just recorded at like 11 PM at night.

I'm doing a live set on July 20th so I'm starting to prepare some material. Here's a live practice of sections 1 and 2. I have ideas for sections 3 and 4 and then still need to write section 5.

I performed this live in front of an audience of maybe 25 at the New England Winter Synthesizer Festival on March 2. I forgot my recorder so the quality sucks, my partner recorded it on the phone instead. There was a little bit of an attention issue (room setup was non-optimal) so there's a lot of chatter and background noise so sorry about that.

Performed live on a Eurorack synthesizer - it's a 7u 104hp system with a lot of Cursus Iteritas, Dixie II+, E352 Cloud Terrarium, Plonk, Basimilus Iteritas Alter, Stillson Hammer MkII, Steppy, Morgasmatron.

A kind of Eurythmics-inspired track that doesn't have quite the same catchy synth lead. I think I need to keep working on this a bit more, you might hear a re-recording next week.

Done live in Eurorack.

Punk rock originally done for One Hour Compo (http://compo.thasauce.net/rounds/view/OHC540). I did a first pass of vocals and guitar parts in the hour. I worked on the song minimally, re-recording the guitar parts for variety, doing more mixing, and other various touch-ups. I did NOT re-record the vocal parts (my partner was playing video games in the same room with me!) so I've essentially spent less than an hour warming up and doing vocals for this song. By the way, I haven't exactly been practicing guitar or vocals.

There was this girl, she thought she was smart
She knew because they told her so
But when she had to head to the world
She struggled, she toiled, it hurt

She thought she was ready she thought she was smart
Failure sliced her heart
When she couldn’t do it, not anymore
Her will and her dreams were gone

She went on blind
She toiled on broken
And she heard no cry
She tried and she tried

Tides of madness Tides of joy
Rushing water swept her away
Carried her dreams back where they came
In solitude she got away

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.

Sun, Apr. 23: 13:00 - 15:10. An attempt at a jam.

I'm trying to make more interesting jams. I heard a few things from some other synth guys recently, like:

- They like to use multiple short phrases (8 or even 4 steps)

- Different time steps

- Cut off steps every once in a while

- Use reset a lot

I figure that I can try out some of these techniques in a live jam and see how it goes. A lot of the techniques they mentioned apply to a Eurorack format but I should be able to do a lot even without it.

Total time: 2h 10m

Hey StreakClub Weekly people, nice to see some familiar faces around here.

Every week, I am aiming to find some kind of composition or songwriting technique that I can work on during the week. I might not necessarily get an awesome completed song out of it, but I think what I want more than anything is some more breadth and some way to break out of my current no-thought songwriting habits.

This might mark me doing some remixes or covers of previous songs, as well as creative remixes if they illustrate a composition technique that I want to be able to illustrate. At the end of this series I hope to be able to work on and emphasize interesting songwriting techniques within my genre of electronic dance music/ambient music.

Sunday, Jan 8, 14:00-16:00. I think I started about half an hour ago, but I didn't record my starting time.

This week's composition technique is to use some kind of basic figured bass. I'm not doing an awesome job at it right now, but given a chord progression, it's okay for me to not just repeat the tonic of the chord as the bass note.

For this chord progression, I have the classic:

I V vi IV progression (G Dm Em C).

The bass pattern repeats but it's an 8-bar, 16-step pattern with root notes of:

G D B G G F# E E

The verses are standard tonic bass notes for now.

As usual this is performed live.

I didn't spend a lot of thought into the composition itself, focusing mostly on varying the bass, and as a result this isn't very interesting… may have to try this again to actually make a good result out of it…

Time: 2h