Morning Music and Coffee Consumption

This video documents an improvised piece recorded on June 26, 2011 with David Andree, John Keston, and Jared Smyth. I was playing the Roland June-106, triggering the Roland MKS-80 with the GMS, and playing a few notes on the piano. David was playing acoustic guitar, cassette loops, reel-to-reel loops, percussion, and melodica. Jared was on a Monome running Grainslide, and live looping. Checkout Jared’s original post here.

Original Audio

Arpeggiated Self Resonance Part 2

Here’s another example of arpeggiated self-resonance from the Juno. This time instead of adjusting the settings on the synthesizer, I made adjustments to the arpeggiator. Basically I adjusted the style, steps, and distance in Ableton Live’s arpeggiator. It includes a total of eighteen unique arpeggiator modes or styles. I used “Pinky UpDown”, “Thumb UpDown”, “Random Once”, “Random”, “Chord Trigger”, and “Con & Diverge”. Perhaps a couple of others as well.

Arpeggiated Self Resonance 2

Arpeggiated Self Resonance

This sound was programmed on the Juno-106 with the oscillators off and the VCF resonance all the way up, which puts the instrument into self-resonance as was discovered in the article Eerie Pseudo Oscillator Microtrack. Right around 0:42 I turned on the sawtooth wave and manipulated the LFO, then at 0:57 I turned it back off again.

Arpeggiated Filter Self Resonance

Speaker Rattling Filter Sweep Saw Octaves

This is part of the bass line from a synthesizer waltz that I’m composing. The sound was played on the Roland Juno-106, which I can’t seem get enough of these days. No processing was applied. All you hear is the chorus along with the LFO modulating the VCF for a long, slow filter sweep. Oh yeah, and I was manually tweaking the cutoff, and probably the envelope amount as well.

Speaker Rattling Filtered Saw Octaves

Resonant Wobble

One thing I hadn’t explored yet on the Roland Juno-106 is how well it produces synthesizer effects. This is the sort of sound that I would normally create using my Sequencial Circuits Pro-One, and admittedly the filter on the Pro-One is a little more agressive, but I decided to give it a go on the 106. This sound was made using the filter self-resonance discussed in detail in the article Eerie Pseudo Oscillator Microtrack. Using the LFO on the VCF creates the wobble, then I adjusted the LFO manually for speed modulation.

Resonant Wobble