"Krolock's Dub" [mp3 removed]
Still poking around in the Reaktor User Library. This track has an effects chain ending in a delay instrument called Dubbyk, which features really rich, long-tailed, filtered echoes erupting at unpredictable intervals. The beats are fairly rudimentary, just enough to anchor it. It's a short, fairly structureless piece--the structure comes from the random triggerings of effects events.
"Streetsong 3" [mp3 removed]
This started with cymbals on an analog drum machine tuned to a kind of chimy percussion. Those sounds were sampled, pitched down and played over the top as loops, with MIDI changing some of the notes and filtering. Another actual '70s breakbeat was sliced and added underneath. The trumpety sounding instrument is from the Reaktor User Library, a synth called Shark (because the capacitor wave that serves as its main tone generator looks like a shark's fin), with reverb added to soften it. This is all pretty technical but the melodies are klutzy and sing-songy, hence the title (inspired by Carl Orff's pieces for children). Something musical does happen at the end--still mulling whether that (or some other hint of compositional chops) should happen sooner.
"Latent Hunk" [mp3 removed]
A short, slow electro-ish piece, similar to other recently-posted work where MIDI is driving a rhythm box and each percussion sound is changed by its own dedicated insert effect: a weird "talk box" for the snare (Spektral Delay running on laptop), distorted filter for a low tom, etc. All the cabling in and out generates hum so the combined sounds go through the compressor/noise gate I bought last year. The hum kind of pumps up and down with the gate, adding some nice, which is to say gnarly, ambient sounds.
"Hog Heaven (Drum Solo)" [mp3 moved to Bandcamp]
Have been wanting to trim, slice, and accelerate an actual '70s break beat for awhile. I finally did it. (It's hard work--props to djs who accomplished this in the '90s with primitive gear.) This is not a major occasion--I'm being a little ironic. Anyway the historic break comes in here at...well, you'll know when (and no, it's not "Amen, Brother.") It plays for three bars and would have gone out of sync with the timing of the surrounding beats, if I hadn't painstakingly written a fourth bar, using MIDI notes trigger the sliced drum samples from the break loop. The inserted notes didn't work at all until I applied some "MIDI echo"--then miraculously the beat matched the rest of the song.
Anyway the technical term for this solo is "hard as fuck." (Talking here about the style, not the level of difficulty.) I also manipulated the timing of the surrounding commercial drum loop.
(Deep thought for later--could a poet use the linguistic or phoneme-generating software equivalent of MIDI echo to conform a phrase to the meter of a poem?)
"Selectro One" [mp3 moved to Bandcamp]
Commercial MIDI drum patterns playing sampled 808 kit running underneath "live," MIDI-triggered analog beats (some effected and some not). Song development: pure grid with patterns being turned on and off.
