music - tm

"Double Carbon" [mp3 removed -- on Bandcamp, this tune was incorporated into the track "Kicking Boy"]

Bluesy (?) micro house. A five note synth riff changes in real time as virtual knobs for its bandwidth and cutoff frequency are slowly turned. At the beginning only two of the notes are heard; the other three are just percussive hiss--the tune emerges gradually. A 4/4 analog kick commences, then three percussion tracks, layered together. Synthesized strings introduce another riff, playing in rough counterpoint to the first. The strings drop out, then most of the percussion, returning us to the beginning, slightly altered because the exact knob positions aren't duplicated.

"AIEEE! 1394" [mp3 removed -- a revised version has been posted on Bandcamp]

Scary song about a bus interface.
Digital modular, analogue modular, a breakbeat and some added percussion.
(Windows 7 is very proud of having rewritten the FireWire driver but on several forums I see people with FW audio recommending that you switch back to the "legacy" driver. I was having problems with sound "hanging" while clicking things onscreen and thought it might be a FireWire issue. Turns out it was my five-year old graphics card not being able to handle my current screen configuration* and causing audio dropouts while it processed changes in GUI activity--e.g., scrolling a large web page that has an active YouTube playing on it. The solution, I think, is to reduce the size of the active window, say to 1024 pixels wide--that seems to have stopped the dropouts. Probably will continue to use the IEEE "legacy" driver, as well; that might have helped a little.)

*I switched to a larger LCD screen around the time I got W7 and it may be the graphics card can't handle the increased resolution, but also, possibly, can't cope with "improved" Windows performance. If Windows was smarter it would default to a "safe" resolution commensurate with your card and you wouldn't have to find this out the hard way. Not that I necessarily want my computer to be smarter--attempts to do that seem to have unintended consequences. (Apple users, go ahead, laugh at all this, but indentured servitude in colonial times was also "idiot proof.")

"Electrolychee" [mp3 removed -- a revised version of this track is on Bandcamp]

The drums are all software (except for the kick that comes in at the halfway point) and the tunes are all hardware (with much editing of each). Control voltages, baby.

Am continuing to experiment with using MIDI pitchbend and mod wheel graphs to impose tunes on top of existing tunes. Near the end the "bridge" melody alternates between tonal and less tonal--that's me plugging and unplugging the pitchbend patch cord in real time. *dorky*

Update: reposted with minor changes.

"Hackerista" [mp3 removed]

Short Moog-y composition (although not done with a Moog; the Mutator filter is again prominent). I end up having to write these jazzy lead bits so it's not just the same thing repeating and then they end up being the thing that I hum and that kind of defines the song.

"Turntable Turncoat" [mp3 moved to Bandcamp]

My scratch sample collection once again on display, played in a couple of different virtual instruments. About nine seconds in this one actually starts rocking. (This has everything to do with painstakingly assembling loop order and nothing to do with live spontaneity.)