Industrial improv track based roughly off of the improv live performance I did this afternoon at the local Modular Synth meetup. (Hint: The live performance, which I didn't record, was better).
Done in Eurorack modular, featuring mostly Basimilus Iteritas Alter, Cursus Iteritas, DubJr Mk2, and Cat.
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.
Sunday, October 15. I started by making a patch on the modular. I want to get some S&H action going now that I read through the Intellijel Noise Tools manual.
14:20 - 16:50. I really lazy-produced this track and lazy-composed it. It's pretty noodly but kind of has this avant-garde feel to it.
Sunday, August 20, 15:00-17:21 Modular + Guitar Jam.
First 30m was setting up the studio and getting some initial tuning and patches in for the modular synthesizers, and fiddling around with some initial melodies that might be okay.
I kind of wanted this to be done, I didn't particularly like the end result too much. The mood changes too much and I wasn't sure I wanted to go back and fix it all.
Gravity Well
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Into the wormhole. Hold on tight.
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I had some nice sounds that reminded me of space. I have also been watching a lot of Star Trek from the 90s. A few things though that I didn't spend enough time on was getting the melody sound right (too much echoing bleeding into the call-response tracks) and trying to fix a few conflicting sections where there's too much going on and muddiness. Maybe I can work on this next week.
The track is mostly hardware but has a lot of software effects.
Leads are from Nord Rack 2x, pads Alesis A6 Andromeda, the arp from Oberheim Xpander. Drums are MASCHINE, the ominous pad is Massive, the noises are from Stutter Edit. Lots of other SFX and mixing in software.
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Technique log:
Sun, Jan 29. 15:05 - 18:05. What's the composition technique this week? More secondary dominant chords and varying basslines.
I thought the song last week had some interesting tonal qualities to it, but it took a long time to create so I'd like to practice my speed this week.
Verse:
Em Bm C D
Em Gm Dm Am Em Gm Bm B/D (tension section)
Bassline melodics:
Em Dm Am B
The secondary dominant chords are in the counter section, though the whole track overall is pretty simple.
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Total time: 3h
Visting new worlds and finding new joy.
A song about cheer and adventure and fun. Made with mostly software synths, but has some flavors of Nord Lead and Future Retro 777.
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Sun, Jan 22. 13:00 - 15:00. Today, I'm exploring different harmonic constructions. I am not going to specifically label what I plan to use today, but things that I discovered were a thing this week include:
* Secondary dominant chords. So you might have a ii chord in your song, you can use the relative 5th of the ii chord as a V/ii chord. So a V/V chord in C maj is D major as D major is 5 scale degrees above G major (which is 5 above C major).
I got this from a book on composition I got a long while back but now I'm exploring how it's actually used in music.
Here's a stackexchange article:
http://music.stackexchange.com/questions/22057/what-is-a-secondary-dominant-chord
The other thing for me to work on is transitions, as that was some feedback I got from the previous song I posted last week.
In this short theme, two of the secondary dominants are D major to G major and C major to F major.
Verse has a bunch of weird stuff going on in it but it has a neat effect.
The chorus is a standard iv-IV-V-I but there's some bass movement.
I didn't work very hard on the sound effects or mixing though today.
Total time: 2h
