I was going to hold off on posting this piece until I had had a chance to produce it a little bit more. I did cheat and added a four-on-the-floor kick drum pattern to drive it along, but otherwise every loop was generated with “light controllers” using the GMS.
For this piece I used spinning tops with flashing colored LEDs inside. You may recognize the melody from My Favorite GMS Generated Melody So Far.
GMS Practice Piece Number 4
I’ve been spending most of my limited spare time practicing with the GMS in preparation for tomorrow nights performance in Minneapolis. While practicing tonight I produced this melody. I was controlling the sequencer with a blinking led, spinning top and randomly looped this sequence of notes.
I’ve since built a track around it with more loops from the GMS, but it sounds good on its own. The nice thing about this technique is that everything I capture is MIDI, so if I get a good melody, but don’t like the sound, it’s easy to change the timbre, tempo, transposition, etc. In other words, beyond being a performance tool, I can use it effectively for composition and idea gathering.
My Favorite GMS Generated Melody So Far
I’ve almost finished with my initial round of tweaking and bug fixing on the GMS, so I’ve finally been able to put a bit more time into actually using the software for its intended purpose. My most recent work with it involves a companion document in Ableton Live that loads a number of virtual instruments into about nine separate MIDI tracks. Ableton provides the external sync via the Apple IAC (Inter-Application Communication) drivers. In turn, the GMS sends MIDI note on and off data to the instruments in Ableton. Using this method I can live loop on various tracks and build a multi-timbral composition in real-time. Here’s an example for a recent practice session.
GMS Practice Practice Track Number 3
This recent practice session illustrates the use of external sync and live looping of MIDI data captured from the GMS in Ableton Live.
GMS Practice Track 2
Here’s another sample of a practice session using the GMS and Ableton Live.
GMS Practice Track 1