John CS Keston is an award winning transdisciplinary artist reimagining how music, video art, and computer science intersect. His work both questions and embraces his backgrounds in music technology, software development, and improvisation leading him toward unconventional compositions that convey a spirit of discovery and exploration through the use of graphic scores, chance and generative techniques, analog and digital synthesis, experimental sound design, signal processing, and acoustic piano. Performers are empowered to use their phonomnesis, or sonic imaginations, while contributing to his collaborative work. Originally from the United Kingdom, John currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota where he is a professor of Digital Media Arts at the University of St Thomas. He founded the sound design resource, AudioCookbook.org, where you will find articles and documentation about his projects and research.
John has spoken, performed, or exhibited original work at New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2022), the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2022), the International Digital Media Arts Conference (iDMAa 2022), International Sound in Science Technology and the Arts (ISSTA 2017-2019), Northern Spark (2011-2017), the Weisman Art Museum, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Walker Art Center, the Minnesota Institute of Art, the Eyeo Festival, INST-INT, Echofluxx (Prague), and Moogfest. He produced and performed in the piece Instant Cinema: Teleportation Platform X, a featured project at Northern Spark 2013. He composed and performed the music for In Habit: Life in Patterns (2012) and Words to Dead Lips (2011) in collaboration with the dance company Aniccha Arts. In 2017 he was commissioned by the Walker Art Center to compose music for former Merce Cunningham dancers during the Common Time performance series. His music appears in The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (2012) and he composed the music for the short Familiar Pavement (2015). He has appeared on more than a dozen albums including two solo albums on UnearthedMusic.com.
The conversation happening under Acceptable Use of Factory Presets and Samples? is starting to reflect the subject matter that is examined in the film Good Copy Bad Copy, so I thought it would be a good idea to reference it here in case any ACB readers haven’t seen it yet. I have been showing this one hour long documentary to friends and students since its release in 2007 and highly recommend it.
Good Copy Bad Copy is a fascinating look at the current state of copyright law and how it clashes with popular culture. The film has extended interviews with artists like Danger Mouse and Girl Talk, industry big wigs like Dan Glickman CEO of the MPAA, and IP and music copyright expert Dr. Lawrence Ferrara director of the music department at NYU. It covers the Brazilian phenomenon Techno Brega, a form of electronic music that merges western pop songs with latin styles, and takes a look at the rapidly expanding Nigerian film industry. The film can be viewed here at ACB, at their website, or legally downloaded from a torrent (www.goodcopybadcopy.net).
I am not, nor will I ever claim to be a guitarist, so please forgive the playing in this example. I do like the sound I have achieved here though. To get it I ran a cheap Fender Squire through VST distortion, thickly modulated chorus, followed by delay, and reverb. It’s very 80s, although I was not necessarily going for that. I does seem to go well in the piece in which it was recorded.
An issue that I often contemplate is, when is it acceptable to use factory presets and samples? I tend not to use them most of the time in favor of inventing new sounds and sampling from my own recordings and instruments. However, sometimes I make exceptions, such as using presets for classic keyboard sounds like pianos and organs, or individual drum samples for programming beats. Personally I have an aversion to using them, but I don’t doubt that lots of excellent music is produced using unchanged samples and factory presets. So the question remains, when is it a good idea and when is it a bad idea to rely on what has been painstakingly produced for us by industry professionals?
When I use presets I usually make some adjustments to in order to get closer to what I’m after sonically. In the piece Rihaku that I wrote with Nils Westdal for our album Truth is Stranger I used the factory sampled piano on the Yamaha A3000. I would have preferred to use an acoustic piano, but opted to give the sampler a go for budgetary reasons. In order to get a bit more sustain out of the sound I made some subtle but effective changes to the patch including manipulating the envelope, adjusting the velocity sensitivity, and slightly compressing the output.
I created this synthesized effect using a Korg MS200 Analog Modeling Synthesizer. I often use this instrument with the external sync enabled for arpeggiation and and tempo delay processing. The delay does some strange things with the external sync enabled. As you adjust the delay time it jumps from different units of time within the tempo including triplets. This can produced some future dub, spaced out, synthethized effects when the feedback is up all the way.
Here’s the piano from the last entry without the distortion applied. I left on all the other processing including limiting, stereo chorus and reverb. Now you can hear why I was not happy with the original recording. The recording is a bit noisey and although I used a nice mic (AKG c4000b large diaphragm condenser), the piano is quite old and suffers from a thin sound along with knocks and rattles that occur when using the keyboard and pedals. One might hear these features as the instruments character, but that rational only goes so far. I do like how limiting is manipulating the dynamics in the example. Adding the stereo chorus and reverb blends much of the rattling and knocks into the overall sound while the limiter expands the noise as the sound decays.
I am not, nor will I ever claim to be a guitarist, so please forgive the playing in this example. I do like the sound I have achieved here though. To get it I ran a cheap Fender Squire through VST distortion, thickly modulated chorus, followed by delay, and reverb. It’s very 80s, although I was not necessarily going for that. I does seem to go well in the piece in which it was recorded. 
I created this synthesized effect using a Korg MS200 Analog Modeling Synthesizer. I often use this instrument with the external sync enabled for arpeggiation and and tempo delay processing. The delay does some strange things with the external sync enabled. As you adjust the delay time it jumps from different units of time within the tempo including triplets. This can produced some future dub, spaced out, synthethized effects when the feedback is up all the way. 
Here’s the piano from the last entry without the distortion applied. I left on all the other processing including limiting, stereo chorus and reverb. Now you can hear why I was not happy with the original recording. The recording is a bit noisey and although I used a nice mic (AKG c4000b large diaphragm condenser), the piano is quite old and suffers from a thin sound along with knocks and rattles that occur when using the keyboard and pedals. One might hear these features as the instruments character, but that rational only goes so far. I do like how limiting is manipulating the dynamics in the example. Adding the stereo chorus and reverb blends much of the rattling and knocks into the overall sound while the limiter expands the noise as the sound decays.