music - tm

"Modular Medley" [mp3 removed]

Instead of continuing to post 1.5 minute tunes I saved up a few of them and made them into a suite. The sounds are made with a combination of digital modular synths and analog effects.

Am continuing to explore using MIDI to control the Mutator filter (my one piece of vintage '90s gear).
About forty seconds into the first "movement" you can hear mirror image patterns written in the pitchbend controller grids of Cubase--one pattern for the left channel and one for the right, so there is an antiphonal effect. The sequences are "carving" pitch information out of a sustained synth note played into the filter's external audio input (and split by the filter into stereo channels). Pitched down an octave it reminds me of the eerie tuned drum bass note Goblin uses on the Suspiria soundtrack--it's instantly recognizable if you know the movie.

The Kraftwerk-y tune in the second "movement" is the MIDI demo pattern for the Reaktor SQP sequencer, drastically altered by turning the (virtual) dials on the HERW Modular-Mini synth while the sequence plays--my own patch, FWIW.

The final part consists of a Mutated and digitally delayed Sidstation solo over some analog kick sounds.

"Kicking Boy" [mp3 removed -- updated version is on Bandcamp]

8-bit flavored electro house, approx. two minutes. Pocket Protector House? Most of the sounds are analog synths, multitracked. Normally these are written in the MIDI piano roll but the main tune here was pecked out on the computer keyboard:

D5D3
D5D3
D5D3
DQQQ2

D5D3
D5D33
D5D3
DQQQ2

You can hum it in the shower. (Or not.)

"Blood Music (After Speedy J)" [mp3 removed]

Ambient-style work. The main sounds (e.g., the weird persistent sonar ping and later jackhammer pulse) come from a Reaktor abstract sound generator called Metaphysical Function--two patches designed by techno musician Speedy J. That very harsh digital audio is then made analog by running it through four of the Vermona Perfourmer's lowpass filters simultaneously--all with slow-ish LFO sweeps, two centered and two "hard panned" left and right so there is an autopanner effect. Lastly, that sound is further softened and smeared in a convolution reverb--a sound imprint of skyscraper stairwell echoes morphed onto the audio. Will probably not make anything this Eno-esque again, but it has an eerie mood.

"Radioactive Yeti" [mp3 removed]

Another ambient-style work using the set-up described in the next post, except that I made the Metaphysical Function patches myself and didn't use the convolution reverb.

"Non-Factory" [mp3 removed]

revised and reposted--an additional synth part was added at the end

Another all-analog composition (but is it really analog when recorded and mixed as a digital file? oh, never mind). Six synth parts (including percussive sounds) are multitracked. MIDI is triggering the individual tracks but the sounds themselves are all solid state voltage whatever. Five years from now my peers will not be GIF artists, they will be old men in chain mail huddled behind banks of modular apparatus, with wires going everywhere and their social security payments all going to electrical bills, oh yeah, and cats crawling around. So there.