Post Heliotrope Bells

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Church BellsAfter checking out a few bands during the Heliotrope festival at the Ritz Theater in Northeast Minneapolis, I starting riding home as a light rain began to fall. It was about 1:07am. Halfway home I heard church bells. Loud, cacophonous, church bells. Not what you’d expect to hear at that time. I dug my recorder out of my bag and started cycling quickly toward the sound. There are churches (plural) on almost every block in my neighborhood, but it didn’t take long to find the one making all the racket. I stopped in the middle of the street and recorded the ringing for more than six minutes. There’s a lot more to this story, but for now, here’s one minute and sixteen seconds of what I captured.

Post Heliotrope Bells

Particle System Jam 3 Part 2

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Here’s another segment of our recent session that highlights a bit more of Graham’s drumming. In addition to his great playing, Graham has managed to get a really clean a warm sound from his recorded drums.

Particle System Jam 3 Part 2

Particle System Jam Number Three

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toponwoodAs I mentioned in a previous entry, I’ve been planning on using the GMS in an ensemble setting. I finally had the chance to do this as a duet with Graham O’Brien on drums. Things went fairly well, although I managed to discover another bug my application handling the external sync. Rather than trying to fix it during the session, I just used an old version and tiptoed around the difficulties by not using an external controller as I had wanted to. Nevertheless we were able to produce some nice studies for our first attempt. Here’s an excerpt from our third jam of the evening.

Particle System Jam #3

External MIDI Control via XML

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After a few performances live looping with Ableton and the GMS, I have found it cumbersome and frustrating to have to repeatedly swap between the two applications. To solve this, I have added he ability to control the GMS with an external MIDI device. I achieved this by creating an XML document with the parameters included as tags with a CC attribute to designate what control change value to use for each setting here’s a few lines out of the XML document.

<GMSMidiController>
    <MIDIControllerName>Korg MS2000</MIDIControllerName>
    <MidiChannel CC="31" type="knob" />
    <TopOctaveIncrement CC="82" type="button" />
    <BottomOctaveIncrement CC="78" type="button" />
    <Preset useProgramChange="true" />
    <ToggleFreeMode CC="77" type="button" />
    <StartStop CC="89" type="button" />
    <Sustain CC="64" invert="false" type="pedal" />
    <SetDuration CC="30" type="knob" />
    <ToggleDotted CC="92" type="button" />
    <SetScale CC="29" type="knob" />
    <ToggleMirroring CC="86" type="button" />
</GMSMidiController>

As you can see I’m using knobs to adjust some settings and buttons to adjust others. It’s really fun to turn a knob on my Korg MS2000 and see the sliders in my software start to move in response. Program change for presets and note on for transposition will work from any old controller, but the rest of the parameters need to be mapped to knobs, sliders or buttons. In total I have around thirty-six specific parameters that are now adjustable with a controller.

GMS Performance Excerpt #4

YAGMSMT

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gmsdata1Translation: Yet Another GMS Micro Track. Many of these experiments are all starting to sound very similar. The reason why is that I’ve been doing all my testing with the same GMS preset file and the same set of virtual instruments in Ableton Live.

Soon, after I’ve slowed down on tailoring the code, I’ll start creating some new versions of things to see what sort of variety is possible. I also have plans for using these techniques in an ensemble.

GMS Microtrack 2