"The Lost Gig" [mp3 removed -- tune is now on Bandcamp]
The insectile buzzing background thing is an FM-modulated LFO sweeping a high pass filter (modular/hardware). Graphically the waveform resembles a Slinky flexing.
The "lead" is another LFO sweeping a wavetable in a chord (softsynth). The lament is half digits, half voltages.
Dedicated to friends slapped down hard by the Invisible Hand just because it can.
"Rack Dance 3" [mp3 removed -- tune is now on Bandcamp]
Using the Octatrack as a MIDI sequencer triggering four channels in the modular synth.
The recording is done in Cubase and edited as a single mono file, then mixed down to stereo.
The other "rack dances" have drums but this is four distinct synth voices. The sequencer pulse provides the rhythm. Might do another version with drums.
The appeal for me here is the always-slightly-drifting-out-of-tune quality of the monosynths against fairly tightly organized musical (harmonic) patterns. Some steel drum/gamelan associations without being particularly "world."
"Sadly Massive" [mp3 removed -- a remixed version can be found on Bandcamp]
This is "experimental" in that this melody doesn't really "go" with the drums. I decided to ignore that, create as credible a graft as I could, and call it harmolodic. It's kind of sweet for all that.
The drums are the pseudo-tribal congas from "Robot Jox (Ethnic Forgery)" with some additional technoid beats. The melody is a patch I made in Massive using wavetable modulation, and played live on the computer keys (then edited and pitch-shifted to keep time with drums, despite the awkward relationship).
"Modular Dining" [mp3 has been moved to Vimeo]
This is a 1 min. 22 sec. of the modular synth running on its own. The events (including some samples in a sampler module) are LFO-triggered as opposed to MIDI, so more erratic. Recorded in two chunks, spliced at :42, with some added convolution reverb that comes and goes. Also compressed for volume spikes.
"Lapdance Landscape" [mp3 removed -- tune is now on Bandcamp]
This started out as an industrial throbber done live with the modular synth (making use of every oscillator-type module and lots of envelopes), but then a wistful tune was added. The latter is the Massive (wavetable) softsynth, starting from a blank preset and building up a chord (0-2-7 -- what is that?) with some modulation and effects. The only canned sounds were some hihats but even those got effects.
