Filthy Rhodes Loop at 110bpm

Posted on February 17, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

Love it or hate, the Rhodes is here to stay. Eventually we will have the Rhodes Mark 7, maybe even this year? Perhaps, in the distant future, after the patents expire, the Rhodes mechanics will become part of the public domain, similar to the acoustic piano, and be produced by a variety of companies. There might be a nine foot grand Rhodes, a studio Rhodes, a baby Rhodes, and an upright Rhodes. This chunk of “studio” Rhodes is running through loads of processing including MDAs RezFilter, delay and who knows what else.

110bpm Processed Rhodes

Pitched Loop from Some Kind of Adhesive

Posted on February 3, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

Here’s a short loop from one of our live sets. This clip is used in the piece Some Kind of Adhesive from One Day to Save All Life (Unearthed Music, 2008). I applied a little bit of knob turning on a few sends while laying down this segment, which is typical of how I use this clip during performances.

Pitched and Processed Loop

Harsh Backwards Resonated Rhodes

Posted on January 30, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

A variety of processing went into this segment of backwards Rhodes electric piano. I started with a chunk from a loop recorded during a recent performance. I reversed the chunk and then slightly time compressed in Ableton Live to give it a bit of a stutter. This caught my attention, so I dropped it onto a track that I had been using to test some processing including gate, distortion, Live’s paragraphic eq, compression, and delay. But in between the eq and the compressor I had added MDA’s RezFilter. I had also programmed a MIDI controller for adjusting the speed of the LFO and the maximum frequency on the plugin, so this gave me the tools to have some fun by automating these parameters while recording. There are some particularly harsh frequencies here, so I recommend starting out at low volume.

Harsh Backwards Resonated Rhodes

Hearing the Ocean Ripple and Crystalize Filters

Posted on January 29, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

No, this is not the answer to a “before and after” puzzle in an episode of Wheel of Fortune. They are two of many Photoshop filters. These sound files are the rejects. Although not bad, I did not find the effect these filters had on my electric piano passage as interesting as the rest of my experiments. They also sound very similar to each other, which might not be the case using different sounds, or with other settings. Anyway, this is it for my first round of using Photoshop filters to process audio. Next time I plan on trying this with some more natural, acoustic sounds.

Crystalized Electric Piano

Ocean Ripple Electric Piano

Obliterating Audio with Photoshop

Posted on January 27, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

So far my examples of Processing Sound Using Photoshop have been recognizable in comparison to the original versions. In my initial experiments my intent was to apply subtle changes as a reference. However, it’s interesting to hear what happens without restraint. Here I applied the Wave filter, which in many respects is analogous to sound. For example, you can assign a sine, square, or triangle wave to process the image. This filter changes the sound so dramatically that you might very well get similar results from altogether different sound sources. Imagine an ensemble of people wobbling sheets of flexible material in sync with each other.