Signature Rhodes Chords: Part 1

Posted on March 9, 2009 by John CS Keston

It’s no secret that I’m a lifelong Rhodes electric piano fanatic. I could come up with a laundry list of reasons why this is the case, but one of the main reasons is how well the instrument responds harmonically. Therefore, I have decided to briefly forgo articles about sound design, processing, and field recording in order to present a few of my favored chord voicings on my suitcase model studio Rhodes.

The first example is a poly chord. It’s basically an E major triad over a D major triad, except I’m playing the D as a tenth with the fifth in the middle in the left hand and the third inversion of an E major triad in the right. You’ll need a wide reach in your left hand to play this voicing. The nice thing about it is the deep, open, and complex sound created by the thirteen and the flat five.

Rhodes Chord D7 (13 flat 5) Poly E over D

Kutiman Remixes YouTube on Thur-You.com

Posted on March 7, 2009 by John CS Keston

Early last week a student showed me Thru-You.com, a collection of YouTube video mashups by Israeli, neo-funk artist Kutiman. I was thoroughly impressed with his work, but soon afterward the site went down due to bandwidth limits. Since then it’s been up and down several times. Hopefully they’ll have their bandwidth problems sorted out soon, so If you can’t view these videos straight away, bookmark the site and check back because they’re worth the wait. Update: The videos have been moved to YouTube, so there should be no more bandwidth issues.

Pitched Loop from Some Kind of Adhesive

Posted on February 3, 2009 by John CS Keston

Here’s a short loop from one of our live sets. This clip is used in the piece Some Kind of Adhesive from One Day to Save All Life (Unearthed Music, 2008). I applied a little bit of knob turning on a few sends while laying down this segment, which is typical of how I use this clip during performances.

Pitched and Processed Loop

Dirty Clavinet Sound

Posted on January 19, 2009 by John CS Keston

I recently recorded a few passages of clavinet on a piece I’ve been working on for a while. My Hohner E7 is still in disrepair, so I had to rely on a sampled version of the instrument. I processed the sampled version in a similar way to how I would have processed the real thing.

Generally I tend to try new things rather than rely on previous settings and techniques, however, I almost always starts with compression on the clav. This time, I followed the compression with amp modeling, chorus, and reverb. The context is the key to what kind of processing I’ll use on this versatile instrument.

Fire Diamond Segment

Happy Anniversary Audio Cookbook

Posted on January 16, 2009 by John CS Keston

I registered the AudioCookbook.org domain in December 2007, but the first few entries on the site happened on January 14, 2008, which I am hereby declaring as the birthday of ACB making it one year old as of Wednesday. It has been an interesting year. In July, 2008 I started the One Sound Every Day project. Creating at least seven sounds a week with written accompaniment has been at times exhausting and exhilarating. Regular readers, commentary and contributions from around the globe have kept it fun and inspiring for me along the way. Thanks to sponsorship from Unearthed Music, who provide the hosting for ACB, we are non-profit and free of advertisements.

I would like to thank all the readers / listeners who have set their eyes / ears on ACB. A special thanks goes out to everyone who has commented, either with words or sound, keeping the discussions alive. A very special thanks goes out to the contributors including Simone Giuliani, Michael Koppelman, Nils Westdal, Leafcutter John, and Tom Player. I’d also like to thank Peter Kirn for helping to legitimizing ACB on his site Create Digital Music. Here’s a link to one of Keston and Westdal’s most popular tracks from the late nineties, Sonny’s Cut, off of our first album, Super Structure Baby.

Sonny’s Cut
from Super Structure Baby (2004, Unearthed Music).