About John CS Keston
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.
Very nice.
I was looking for a similar sound, lately.
Could you kindly provide some details on the recipe?
(Even if I’m not a lucky owner of a MKS80).
Well, you need to start with a polyphonic synthesizer, either analog or anlog modeling. Sync the oscillators set to pulse or square wave. Add a touch of slow pulse width mod to one of them. Put a fast attack on the envelopes with a relatively quick decay on the filter env. Lengthen out the release for that plucked string like quality. Tweek to your taste then douse it in copious amounts of delay and reverb to finish it off. I used two ping pong delays in series. The first set to sync on quarters and the second on quarter note tuplets.
Wonderful sound! I listened to it 5 times over. Did you also pan the sound output or is that a side-effect of the delay?
Thanks, Wouter! Yeah, I forgot to mention that I used Ableton’s autopan processor on the track itself. Of course the ping pong delays also contribute to the stereo spread.
Thank you very much.
Let’s cookin’.
Really nice tone ! I try with the info you gve but i still have nothing as amazing as your tone !
Do a screenshot or let the ableton file on download it would be awesome !
nice work – I enjoyd it a lot – thanks
Thanks, @Emmanuel. I think the Ableton processing has little to do with it. You’ll need to start with a good analog poly. What are you driving?
i’m in with analog on ableton and i do like you say
Pulse + Square osc – slow pulse on one – fast attack quick decay nice release ping pong triplets + reverb + autopan.
You do something amazing i really feel this arpeggio
Thanks, @Emmanuel! There’s just something about voltage controlled oscillators isn’t there?
Yes ! They bring a feeling i can’t actually reproduce virtually
i wonder how was the sound before processing in ableton !
I will try until i get something near
Thanks !
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@Emmanuel I have posted the unprocessed version here:
https://audiocookbook.org/one-synthesizer-sound-every-day/unprocessed-evolving-arpeggio-in-seven/
You helpd me a lot.
Thanks