Sony PCM-D50 Arrival

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I found my shiny, new PCM-D50 in a box on my doorstep when I came home on Thursday evening. Luckily it was still there. UPS ignored my note to deliver it to the neighbor if no one answered my door. I haven’t had much time to play with it yet, but I have made a few test recordings in my house. It’s been freezing outside the last few days, so the forced air heating is on constantly providing every recording with some nasty background noise. To avoid the noise I made a few recordings in my bathroom. Naturally the first thing I recorded in there was the toilet flushing. Here it is in all its gurgling glory.

Toilet Flush

Chlorobenzene Mistfall

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It’s been a while since I have posted a rough mix, or musical idea for the One Sound Every Day category, so here’s an excerpt from something I wrote recently. It’s in very early stages, but has a high melody in 3/4 time along with some lower melodies in harmony with each other. The lower pitches are made up of the Rhodes Feedback that I posted an example of yesterday.

I cut up the feedback into sections that had specific qualities I was after, then I pitched them so that they worked underneath the high melody played on the Rhodes at an upper octave. Finally, after a couple of run throughs, I arranged the pitched feedback in real-time to form the passages heard in the excerpt.

Chlorobenzene Mistfall

Rhodes Feedback

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In order to get this example of feedback I ran my suitcase model Rhodes, which I confine to my studio, through an outboard processor with some nice amp modeling and cranked up the gain. For the processing I used an eleven year old Yamaha A3000 sampler. The A3000 allows you to edit and apply processing to an incoming signal and it has some pretty nice sounding effects. Once I had adjusted the processing I held down the sustain pedal on the Rhodes and let the amplification do the rest. Tapping or gently knocking the instrument also produced some nice sounds. Here’s a snippet of the results.

Rhodes Feedback

The Smallest Sample on ACB

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This tiny sample of audio represents the instant that my iPod ran out of battery life while recording a performance of myself, Nils Westdal and Graham O’Brien on drums from Monday, November 17, 2008 at Cafe Barbette in Minneapolis.

Typically when a recording is interrupted due to power loss on a digital recorder, the device is unable to save the document properly so what you end up with is a corrupt file, or worse, nothing at all. In my case I ended up with a corrupt file on the iPod of about forty five minutes of our second set. After a minute or two of searching I discovered that Audacity has a file menu option called “Import Raw”. Using this option I was able to import the unreadable content into Audacity.

I was delighted to see that most of the recording was intact. However, what was was interesting to me is that at the end of the file was about a minute or more of random white noise. I fancifully imagined this as my iPod going into a dream state as the power level was no longer adequate to support the standard functionality of the device. So here’s the first 48 milliseconds of that dream state with a three dB pad to eliminate clipping.

Ghost in the Machine

Insectoid X-19

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This afternoon I stumbled upon another one of my recent FM synthesis experiments from November 2, 2008. On that day I recorded eight minutes of output from select randomized programs that I produced using a MaxMSP patch called X.FM. You can hear all of the examples I have posted so far by clicking on the FM Synthesis topic.

This eighth example in the series has some nice rhythmic, pulsating characteristics to it. I edited the sound out from the surrounding audio, then exported it with normalization to boost the levels.

Insectoid X-19