Casiotone Samba Setting

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I’ve been sampling my Casiotone 403 recently. I have recorded and sampled this instrument in the past, but this time I wanted to gather some of the beats at a slow tempo so that I could play them at many different tempos without hearing artifacts created when time expanding or compressing. This is a loop of the familiar Samba setting. I recorded it at 85 bpm, then cranked the tempo up to 195 bpm and looped it four times before rendering this example.

If you turn it up loud enough you’ll hear an unfortunate buzz. I attempted to get rid of the buzz using a noise gate, but I couldn’t get it to sound the way I wanted it to. I also thought about (and will probably do this eventually) sampling each sound at a very slow tempo and creating an instrument out of the individual samples. But for now I was interested in maintaining the charm of the original programs.

Casiotone Samba Setting

Maxi-Korg Bass Line

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Here’s a short little bass line I recorded while reacquainting myself with my Maxi-Korg yesterday. I love the gritty sound of this instrument, one of the most well known of the duophonic synthesizers. Sometimes I find myself reaching for the non-existent pitch or modulation wheels, but the limitations of these vintage devices are part of their charm and might encourage the musician to come up with new ways to play (or rediscover old ways).

Another thing that I love about vintage gear is the lack of presets. When I come up with a sound I like I simply say to myself, “you’re never going to get exactly that sound ever again”. You can always jot down the settings, but I never do. This way you’re forced to learn how to control the device and approximate the sounds that you have created in the past if necessary.

Maxi Korg Bass Line

Manipulating Sound Through Imagery

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There are quite a few applications available that produce audio from imagery. Whether it’s photography, or computer generated graphics the results can be fascinating. For further exploration an article that describes eight programs that convert imagery to sound called Say it With Pictures is available on emusician.com. An additional application that I’ve been looking at recently called Photosounder has the unique capability of allowing you to manipulate sound in its image state. This creates a whole host of effects from time stretching to flipping the sound upside down creating a bizarre, inverse, reflection of the original sound. For this example I used Photosounder to process the sound from More Memory Man Madness. A few of the adjustments I made were the rotation of the image, the gamma property, and pixels per second.

Memory Man Through Photosounder

Maxi-Korg Repeat Function

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I literally dusted off my Maxi-Korg today which had been stored in a closet for well too long. To my surprise after a minimal amount of wiping and moving the controls it still sounded as clean as the last time I used it. This synth really sucks you in. After spending a couple of hours creating sounds I decided to experiment with the repeat function.

The repeat function has two sliders; one for speed and the other for the duration or width of the note repeating. It also has a mode switch. I set the mode to “A” to retrigger the note I was playing, then fussed with the speed and width to get this wet, growling, engine like noise. For the time being, I’m leaving this beast in my studio so expect to hear more from the Maxi-Korg in the future.

Maxi-Korg Repeat Function

Conversion of Graffiti into Sound

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Recently I was invited by Michel Rouzic to try his software, Photosounder, designed for converting images into sound. Image to sound conversion is something I’ve been meaning to explore, so today I finally had some time to have a look. The software does much more than create strange sound from images. It’s a great time stretching tool, and it also reads in wave files as images allowing you to use the same sort of manipulation you can do on image based files.

This sound was created from the full resolution version of the graffiti photo shown. I settled on this image because of it’s simplicity, and the diagonal strokes of the tag produced a nice cascade of descending pitches. The way the flash lights up the center of the photo gave the sound a dynamic swell that I emphasized by adjusting the gamma parameter. Photosounder allows you to set the time and frequency range of the audio produced, so for this example I put the bottom at 52Hz and the top at 12kHz.

Graffiti Photo to Sound