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

 

Portable Digital Recorder Resources

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After several weeks of research I have finally made a decision and purchased a Sony PCM-D50 digital recorder (without the fancy leather carrying case) to replace my mostly broken Sony PCM-M1 portable DAT.

During my research I came across some excellent resources that helped me make up my mind. I found some of the most thorough information on O’Reilly Digital Media. Their comparison chart was invaluable along with the extensive reviews of all the devices listed there. I consulted other in-depth reviews and another great comparison chart at Transom.org. I also read many of Brad Linder’s reviews including his review of the PCM-D50 and Create Digital Music pointed me to more reviews of just about everything I looked into.

This is by no means a complete list. I read lots of other articles and websites along the way, but these sites certainly helped the process along. I have yet to receive my new toy, but as soon as I do I’ll be posting some first impressions and sample recordings.