Last week's piece required quite a bit of arrangement, so to get myself back on track for this week, I opted to improvise with pedal steel and my eight-delay Max/MSP patch. A few weeks ago, I added FFT pitch shift to the patch, and 50% blend of one-fifth down is very satisfying. So there's a lot of that here

The signal chain going in is pedal steel > Balls Effects KWB (a fuzz/boost), Vox Wah, and Moyo passive volume. Inside the patch, there's the FFT, a VST of AudioThing Reels, the delay lines, a send to a VST of AudioThing Motor, auto-pan, and convolution reverb (Huddersfield Town Hall) on the output.

The eight delay lines were set to different lengths, but they were related by calculating 12-part increments from a base of 15.5 seconds.

To keep things from becoming too austere, I added yet another convolution reverb (Fort Worden Cistern) in Live, and put Full Chain multi-band eq/compression on the output.

The title comes from 83 being a safe prime.

This past week brought unfortunate family news. To be as easy on myself as possible, this week's track is an improvisation with pedal steel guitar and my eight-delay Max/MSP patch. There's a Moyo volume pedal to take the attack off, Waves Factory Cassette for a bit of character, and a convolution reverb for space. The reference delay time is 19300ms, and the individual delays are based on divisions of 21 of that amount. Each delay is a different value.

This is essentially real-time, though I did tweak levels after the fact, and shortened the end fade.

The title is from Euler's idoneal numbers, also called suitable numbers, of which there are 65. (And I hope that this is a suitable tribute to those we've lost this week..)

A very busy week, including beginning prep for my upcoming performance in Chicago, so I've had my head in Max/MSP (particularly developing performance interfaces I can use on the iPad with Cycling74's Mira). So it was fairly natural to do some improvs with the input shifter patch, and this is one of them. Max/MSP -> file, Ableton Live for tweaking levels and compression, and adding a bit of convolution reverb to the mix. (And it's a rehearsal opportunity.)

Title from one of the uses of this week's element hafnium--as the electrode in plasma cutting.

I spent the weekend at Cycling74's Expo, which is devoted to things we can do with Max/MSP, so this week's track is in Max. I used the input shifter patch I've been using for a while, with a filtered square wave as source material, and then dropped the recorded result by an octave. There's a convolution reverb send, and Full-Chain Master on the output.

Title from the use of Thulium in lasers. (A lot of these elements are getting tricky to differentiate.)

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.

Very busy week involving work, a report for a class I'm taking, and a live set, so here's a quick improv using my pitch-shifting and randomizing Max/MSP patch, processing some simple sine waves. There's a touch of compression and convolution reverb on there, too.

Title comes from one of the uses for rubidium, atomic number 37.