In continuing my analogue synthesized study of the Japanese reed instrument called a shō, I have played and recorded the traditional chords for the instrument using my programmed version. This brief composition is a sequence of the traditional chords Otsu, Bi, Ichi, Kotsu, and Hi.
After pre-recording the chords I set them up with triggers on separate tracks then played them so that they overlap creating dense and eerie harmonics during the transitions.
Check out the latest Kutiman song that he created by shooting video of musicians while wandering around Jerusalem. I love Kutiman’s previous work with YouTube videos. This track sounds haunting and beautiful and is a pleasure to watch. A very special piece indeed!
This arpeggio includes stacked Roland D-50 and Roland MKS-80 sounds, plus some mad, metallic, nightmarish, knob tweaking that I did on the MKS-80. For me the piece invokes a vision of unsuspecting creatures going about their business, unaware of a predatory horror that lurks in their midst.
On March 13, 2011, my trio DGK (Jon Davis on bass, Tim Glenn on drums, and John Keston on Rhodes and Pro-One) performed at the Honey Lounge in Minneapolis, Minnesota in collaboration with an esteemed line-up of colleagues. Through the night people came and went, so in the upcoming parts of this series I’ll name the individuals involved. For the beginning of the evening it was DGK with Martin Dosh on additional drums, and Juno Alpha 1, Scott Fultz on electric guitar and soprano saxophone, Andrew Broder on electric guitar, Rajiah Johnson on flute, and Brandon Wozniak on tenor saxophone. The record is a bit chatty at times, but that’s to be expected with bootleg recordings. You never know, you just might stumble across a bizarre conversation buried in the mix.
DGK and Friends Part 1 (36:16)
I created this patch today on the unnamed synthesizer that I remain obsessed with and decided to record some triggered minor nine chords whilst adjusting various filter and envelope parameters. Perhaps this will end up as a layer in an ambient piece of some sort.
Triggered Minor Nine with Octave Saws
Tonight I am honored to be performing during the opening night of Execute Rogue Citizen. I have a lot of time to fill during the opening, so as well as performing the latest Ostraka material, I’ll be playing the newly mastered yet unreleased Ostracon (John Keston and Graham O’Brien) album, Unauthorized Modifications, and a recent bootleg of DGK from Try This at the Slam Factory. The City Pages writes,
“Execute Rogue Citizen” will be on display at Gallery 13 until April 1. The opening reception, Incarceration, will be this Friday night and features music by Ostraka starting at 7:30 p.m.The closing in two weeks, Reprieve, will feature the music of Seawhores. All the art that has gone unsold during the show’s run will literally be executed. By doing this, Rogue Citizen hopes to acknowledge the way the system benefits only those who can afford it.
Let’s hope there will be no art leftover on execution night. Created by science-fiction nerds who love to paint the abnormal, Rogue Citizen’s work is much too nifty to get tossed, even if it is to make a valid point on our current social system.
Here’s an excerpt from a track a produced today that I’ll be performing in my Ostraka set tonight. All the sounds in this piece were made with the Roland Super Jupiter MKS-80 apart from the drums.
Execute Rogue Citizen by Ostraka
I created this plucky microtonal patch by using the cross modulation on the Roland MKS-80 to effectively put the instrument into an instable, out-of-tune state. I mentioned in my previous entry that cross modulation is a form of frequency modulation or FM synthesis made famous by the Yamaha DX-7. My curiosity about this technique led me to an article in Sound on Sound from 1994 titled Exploring Analogue (Part 2) by Steve Howell. In the article Howell states,
“…take the output of one oscillator (Osc A) and feed it into the control input of another (Osc B). As the modulation level at Osc B’s input is increased, so its tonal quality becomes progressively nastier. In fact, in the absence of a ring modulator, cross-modulation can be used very effectively to create clangorous bell sounds and the like. But be warned! Because the tuning stability on old analogue synths leaves much to be desired, the oscillators don’t track too well, and a sound that is perfectly tuned on C3 may well have disintegrated by the time you get up to F3.”
On the Roland MKS-80 the tuning stability is pretty good, but it does use VCOs (voltage controlled oscillators), so they won’t track as well as DCOs (digitally controlled oscillators). This imperfection is part of what many of us find attractive about analogue synthesis, and what made it possible for me to produce this bizarre, out of key, yet delightful sound.
Cross Modulated Microtonal Improvisation
Today is my fiftieth article so far in the One Synthesizer Sound Every Day series that I started on January 5, 2011. Throughout the process of presenting these sounds, I have been learning about new instruments, old instruments, and reflecting on my personal music technology background and philosophy. Today as musicians, we experience a vast wealth of sonic possibilities never before possible throughout history. How do artists that are fortunate enough to experience and participate in the invention and use of these instruments find a distinct voice?
This is something that I have pondered since my childhood exposure to synthesis in the 80s. My dad brought home Tomita records and a friend exposed me to Wendy Carlos, Jean Michel Jarre, and Laurie Anderson. This led me to my first synthesizer; a Moog Rogue monophonic with a broken key. Next, after disciplined savings, came a Korg Poly-800. Polyphony and MIDI implementation opened up a new realm of possibilities, but I missed the expression of tactile controls. Unfortunately, the replacement of costly knobs and sliders with cheap LED displays and a few buttons was an industry trend by the time I started performing regularly as a keyboardist.
By the early 90s, sampling overshadowed synthesis. Many chose, and still choose, to use samplers to play analog and acoustic sounds rather than lug the instruments themselves. These are often choices of convenience rather than an aesthetic decision. I became, as many of us did, frustrated by these “slabs”; featureless keyboards with hundreds of presets, but only programmable through a two inch wide LCD and minimal set of cold buttons. I largely rejected the “slabs” and looked backwards in time at Hammond organs, the Hohner clavinet, the Rhodes electric piano (my main axe to this day), and my favorite monosynth of all time, the Sequencial Circuits Pro-One. I used processing, such as delay, distortion, wah wah, and a Leslie cabinet to augment the sound of the Rhodes and Pro-One. These instruments are still a dominant voice in my work. Simplicity and expressiveness is what led me to this palette.
The key to finding this voice was limitations. I like that the Pro-One has no way to store presets, no MIDI, and needs to be tuned. I have learned to use it expressively and quickly dial in approximations of the sounds I’m after. The Rhodes is limited to one sound, but it’s mechanically velocity sensitive – much more dynamic than a mere 128 possible levels of loudness. We are easily lured into embracing magnificent technological devices that can do everything and more than the last thing, but is this what’s best for our musical psyches? Personally I aim to discover new ways of using my instruments. With the lack of sonic limitations that many new instruments achieve, every way you use them is new. New discoveries are a button press away. There’s no path to discovery, it’s just there at one’s fingertips. I need the path. Along the path we learn, experiment, develop, gain experience, and ultimately become better musical communicators.
The One Synthesizer Sound Every Day project has initiated a period of exploration for me. I have opened myself up to the possibilities offered by a new subset of instrumentation. While this is a fascinating time and I have already begun composing music with these textures, I understand that I will need to scale down the possibilities and create a new set of limitations in order to find a path to producing meaningful work.
Here’s a live recording of DGK from Monday, February 21, 2011. Jon Davis is on bass, and Tim Glenn is on drums. My instrumentation is Rhodes, and Pro-One through an Electro-Harmonix Memory Man delay.
Lost on Enceladus by DGK
Here’s a test composition using another patch I created for Curve titled Auto Octave Filter Sweep by AudioCookbook. On this patch I used two of the LFOs. The first one I setup to alternate between the octaves with a square wave, and the second I used with a sign wave to modulate the cutoff frequency on the filter configured with a 24dB low pass filter. On the second LFO I used the fixed rate that ranges from 0.020 hertz all the way up to 5.24 kilohertz. I mapped a MIDI controller to the LFO speed and adjusted it over the full range during the sequence. I also made adjustment to the cutoff frequency, resonance, and envelopes during the 5:20 minute recording.
This microtrack was made with a D-50 factory preset called Twilight Zone. The D-50 is quite capable of generating sophisticated special effects. Still looking for a PG-1000, but might start using some librarian software specifically designed for the D-50 to at least be able to use a mouse or track pad to program patches.