With help from Josh Clos I have shot a short video documenting what my latest MaxMSP project does.
It’s a sort of swiss army knife of wavetable glitch machine and sample scrubbing tools. Hopefully the video will shed some light on what this project is about. I’ve been trying to describe it in a few other posts without much success, but seeing it in action seems to make a bit more sense.
Some of you might not be aware of the process to get electronic promos of my music for reviewers, radio, music blogs, publications, music venues, etc. If you’re in any way involved in the music industry please complete the Unearthed Music Service List Application.
As soon as your application is processed you will have access to download full length 320kbps MP3 files of all of the music currently available on Unearthed Music including my solo album, Precambrian Resonance by Ostraka. Don’t worry about being spammed because we send out no more that five or six mailings per year. Here’s Blitzen Machine.
My friend and hiphop producer Cornelius Noll (aka 84 Caprice) recently offered to share a track on ACB that he produced for the Renoise Efficient Music Competition. I just got a chance to preview the track, and while I’ve been quite fond of 84 Caprice all along, he has managed to conjure something special this time. Here’s what he had to say about his process and working in Renoise.
This particular track is one that started out as an instrumental for Prof, an MC on Stophouse Records where I get most of my work done. The original draft was created in a program called Renoise which falls under the category of “tracker” or “tracking sequencer”. It quickly became an exercise of figuring out how to truly work the insides of the program it was created in for a contest conceived by Renoise and Indamixx in conjunction with CreateDigitalMusic.com. Upon initial approach it looks like this; make a bomb track and license it under Creative Commons. I won’t discuss C.C. But will rattle a bit about Renoise and the technicalities of making fight-night weight.
These days I typically use a piano to work out ideas and then graduate into software to execute them. Renoise tends to be my favorite place to land as it loads up like butter and is quick for nailing down concepts. The implied constraints of this contest, however, had hoisted a series of difficulties in my process. The first being that while I like to use VST/VSTi’s in the process, non-native sound creators or effectors were not to be used in the final version. The second concern was the size of the Renoise file as the winning entry will be used as one of the demos within the program (I haven’t had to deal with file size since I turned my 1.44meg floppies into coasters). Third concern – CPU usage. I was shooting for a great track weighing in under 5 megs. My rough track was loaded with complex VST/VSTi’s and was well over 20 megs.
The process was actually more focusing than I imagined. Imbedded capabilities include “rendering” which allows creation of samples of MIDI performance very similar to a “bounce to disk” but without leaving the program. This proved helpful with some of the trickier performance passages. It also lent itself well to taking a small sample of more simple instruments allowing for creation of patches (which I have never made the time to do in Renoise). If you look at the file itself you will find within it instruments which approach “chip-tune” file size all the while maintaining my vision for a very anthemic quality to them. I found as I rooted through the sequences and the instruments that my samples were converted at 32 bit 44.1khz; this was rectifiable within the program. I reduced resolution on lower frequency and less important pieces. These were huge in dropping file size down.
Skipping ahead a number of hours, we now have the track entirely reconfigured. No external instruments. No external effects. Less than 3.5 megs (this just blows me away). While the original track would load my laptop to as much as 40% CPU usage, the current CPU loading on my laptop does not exceed 11%.
This has clearly been making the rounds, so it’s likely that you’ve already had the pleasure, but I can’t resist linking it to it here.
The piece features video and auto-tuned dialog of Carl Sagan from his amazing series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, mashed-up into a melancholy, downtempo, new-age, retro music video with just enough (or perhaps not enough) tongue in cheek. Finally, auto-tune use to be proud of!
The piece was produced by John Boswell. More about him and his music is available on his site. He has also made a download of the track and the video available here.
Earlier this month I shared an excerpt of music from a performance at a recent Minneapolis Art on Wheels exhibition. MAW artist, Andrea Steudel, did some excellent video documentation that highlights the artwork and sound that transpired at the event.
The audio quality is quite good, considering the conditions in the space, and goes a long way to illustrate the ambiance during the night. Please enjoy the video and checkout the original post at http://minneapolisartonwheels.org/content/media-mash-wbsc.
