I’m very excited to be participating in two performances during the Northern Spark Festival on Saturday, June 4 through Sunday, June 5, 2011. From dusk until dawn. First up is the Battle of Everyouth from 9pm until 12am on the steps of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. (A segment from tonights rehearsal can be heard below.) Secondly I will be performing an electronic rendition of Vexations by Erik Satie for Empty Words by Piotr Szyhalski, a nine hour multi-media event involving a long list of excellent performers. More on my part in this soon.
Lately I have not had the Pro-One setup in my studio since I’m using it frequently for live performances. Today I had a rehearsal for the Battle for Everyouth in my studio so afterward I decided to record something from this magnificent little machine. Here’s a drone that I programmed by tuning the oscillators to a major third, then letting them hold while the LFO swept the filter and I adjusted knobs on the Pro-One and Memory Man delay.
While still in the process of mining sound from previous sessions I came across this arpeggiated sequence that evolves over time as I adjusted the speed of the LFO which was mapped to the VCF.
One of the very special things about the Roland MKS-80 is that is has true analog, voltage controlled oscillators or VCOs. Unfortunately (or fortunately) VCOs are sensitive to environmental conditions especially temperature, not to mention lunar cycles and barometric pressure, but I can’t confirm those reports. In any case, this means that the synth needs time to warm up before the VCOs are stable.
Fortunately the MKS-80 has an autotune (no relation to the ubiquitous vocal processing of the same name) button that tunes all sixteen of the oscillators to each other automatically. Although, if you just turn it on, press autotune and start playing then it will drift out of tune again as the components warm up to a stable temperature. Below is an example of me doing just that followed by a pause where I pressed the autotune button and tried again.
Although an inconvenience to some, to me this gives the instrument more soul than its digital counterparts. As a piano player I know that a piano is never perfectly in tune. Also, the frequency of the notes played on a piano change slightly as they decay. Voltage controlled analog oscillators have a soulful, mysterious character to them that is partially defined by their imperfections.
