I am quite fond of how this short phrase from my interpretation of Vexations by Erik Satie turned out. I used Ableton to arpeggiate the upper melody on tritones while manually adjusting the patch on the Roland MKS-80 with the Bitstream 3X MIDI controller. This is what came out.
Vexations Arpeggiated Melody
Arpeggiated Vexations Phrase 2
Here’s sample of parts that I have prepared for participation in the Empty Words performance at Northern Spark. I used the Roland MKS-80 and the Bitstream 3X to create this evolving passage based on the original score for the piece Vexations by Erik Satie. In my interpretation I arpeggiated the bass clef notes on a tritone to create a flowing, angular pattern to contrast the traditionally methodical piece. As my interpretation continued I sped up the arpeggiator from eights to twelves to sixteenths and so on.
Arpeggiated Vexations Phrase
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.
Evolving Arpeggio with LFO on 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.
Out of Tune In Tune