You may have noticed that my contributions to ACB have been sparse as of late, so I really appreciate Tom Player’s fascinating articles comparing electronic orchestration to the real thing. I have been busy teaching interactive media at two institutions and just finished an artist residency at Metropolitan State University working with students in the Experimental Music and Intermedia Arts program headed by professor David Means (I’ll be sharing more about that later).
In addition to teaching and other academics I have performing regularly and maintaining a studio practice when my schedule allows. Recently this involved the addition of two new instruments: the Moog Sub 37 and the Elektron Analog Four (A4). The Sub 37 arrived back in September and the A4 in November.
This weekend I had a couple of hours to interface these new additions with my DSI Tempest analog drum machine. These three instruments seem to complement each other really well. The Tempest is gritty and a little unpredictable, the Sub 37 is instantly gratifying and expressive, while the A4 is precise, clean, and technical. Here’s an excerpt from one of my experiments last weekend.
As per your article, it’s great to hear the 3 instruments playing to their strengths.
Small question – can you comment on how you put together the kick drum on the Tempest? I’ve constantly struggled to come up with nice kicks on that machine and was curious what you plugged together.
Hi Preston. I’ve programmed lots of kicks on the Tempest and get the best results by using self oscillation on the filters. Just crank up the resonance and slowly bring up the cutoff. You can add a little noise at the transient if you like and adjust the filter envelope to get the pitch to drop during the decay. There’s also some good recipes here: http://stimresp.wordpress.com/tempest-recipes/
Awesome – thanks for the info. I’ve played around with the filter self oscillation technique a bit and have had mixed results. Guess I’ll keep tweaking to find that magic combination!