Blitzen Machine Excerpt #2

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I have come close to finishing a track that I have been working on occasionally since September, tentatively titled Blitzen Machine after an ACB entry that contains a few bars of the original concept. What’s nice for me about exposing some of my techniques here is that afterward I have a resource to help me remember them. I have tons of archival recordings with sounds on them that I have little recollection of the process involved in making them. Perhaps another function of this blog can be to remind me what I did to make those sounds. Here’s an excerpt from Blitzen Machine that contains a little bit of the melody.

Blitzen Machine Excerpt

MIDI Arpeggiation in Ableton Live

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I recenty had the opportunity to take a good long look at Ableton Live’s Arpeggiator MIDI effect. I have used it here and there in the past, but recently discovered how flexible it is. There are many more algorithms (labeled as styles) than I have seen on other arpeggiators (a total of eighteen styles) for a broad variety of patterns. This example uses the “Thumb UpDown” style. Imagine playing a sequence of notes on your right hand starting with your thumb, then index finger, back to thumb, then middle, etc. and that’s kind of what this particular style does to the notes fed into it. Other capabilities of the arpeggiator include a velocity ramp to manipulate the dynamics of the patterns, and typical parameters like retriggering, gate, and groove.

Solar Arpeggio

Transdimensional Bypass by ten72

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Unearthed Music artist ten72 has completed a luscious album of sonic experiments titled Transdimensional Bypass (full length previews). This gapless collection of pieces has astonishing textural depth and sonic complexity; something that I’ve come to expect from ten72’s music, but surprising in this case since every bit of audio on the album was recorded on a mobile phone.

To make this a possibility ten72 has ingeniously used a profusion of processing to metamorphose the lofi, metallic sputterings of his mobile field recordings into an opulent dream scape of illusory audio. A single part of this anthology out of context is not the best way listen, but here’s Folds of Color to give you a tiny taste. The release will be available from Unearthed Music and major online distributors as a high quality download on January 8, 2009.

Folds of Color
from Transdimensional Bypass by ten72

Filling and Draining the Sink

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Tonight I’ve decided to share another of my first few Sony PCM-D50 test recordings. It is simply the sound of filling my bathroom sink partway with cold and then the rest of the way with hot water followed by the much quieter sound of the water draining down the plug hole. These sorts of mundane sounds are especially interesting to me once they have been recorded and taken out their context. Do we ever really listen to the sounds things make while we go about our daily lives? Probably not. And for good reason. If we were distracted by the qualities of the typical sounds in our environments we would never survive as a species. Our hearing is tuned to alert us when we hear irregular or unusual sounds. To my ears, ordinary sounds become extraordinary when I focus on listening to them.

Filling and Draining the Sink

Notes From a Hat in C Minor

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I created this sequence of randomized notes using Processing.org with the RWMidi library installed. The notes were randomly selected from a C minor scale. I also randomized the occurrence of the notes to eliminate any rhythmic qualities. The velocity was also randomized within a range so there’s absolutely no consistency to the dynamics either. I could go further into Dada territory by using a chromatic scale, or even random frequencies entering into microtonal realms, but this is just an experiment I did to test some of the functionality within the library.

Notes From a Hat