Segment of Piano Piece with Rhodes

With help from my father who was visiting recently, I have built a new desk for my studio. The idea I had was to build a desk wide enough to build a keyboard drawer underneath. What I came up with was a simple design using three quarter inch plywood, quarter inch ply for the backing and one by three pine for a brace and attachments for the eighteen inch ball bearing drawer runners. The keyboard is a CME UF7 semi-weighted controller.

It has made a huge difference in the ergonomics of my studio to have this controller readily available without having to have it take up extra space on a stand. Here’s a segment from a piece I wrote soon after putting the studio back together with the new desk. I’m using the CME to control my the grand piano patch on my Yamaha A3000 rack mount sampler. The Rhodes is my 1976 suitcase model that does not leave the studio.

Segment of Piano with Rhodes

Forest Floor

I found this short loop of loose keyboard playing in an Ableton Live set. I had played it and live looped the phrase during a performance. Most of these little clips are never heard again, but every so often I save the set with the clips intact. Even more rarely I go back and listen to these archives. Here’s one that had been sitting in a folder of collected files for a while, so I decided to loop it and add some reverb for a finishing touch.

Forest Floor

 

 

Korg MS2000 Noises for Sunset

Here’s a segment from a single track out of the piece Sunset on Keston and Westdal’s first album, Super Structure Baby (2002, Unearthed Music). Sunset was the final piece on the album until Kinon’s Path was added as a bonus track for the reissue.

Sunset was the first track that I wrote after buying my Korg MS2000 in 2000, so I was still learning the instrument but enjoying myself fully in the process. The knob turning goes on for the whole seven minutes and two seconds of the piece, but I have edited it down to the first minute and six seconds.

Sunset Noises

Unreleased Extended Version of Some Kind of Adhesive

Another collaborative effort that I am quite pleased with is this extended version of Some Kind of Adhesive produced and performed by myself and Nils Westdal. The piece is eleven minutes and seventeen seconds long and contains four interwoven movements. The original condensed version is heard on One Day to Save All Life (Unearthed Music, 2008). Once again, processing played an integral role in the production and performance of the work.

This is an ACB exclusive preview since the track has not been released on Unearthed Music, or any other label. It will probably be released this year on a compilation or as a single. In the meantime, please enjoy listening to this full length preview at 192kbps.

Some Kind of Adhesive
[Extended Mix]

Studio Version of Spring in December

I would like to share another track from One Day to Save All Life. This was one of the first pieces completed for the album and set the tone for the rest of the collection. The atmosphere at the beginning is created with water and wildlife ambiance mixed with a passage of backwards Rhodes electric piano. At around two minutes into it the main theme is introduced which is a combination of Rhodes along with two synthesized oscillators tuned to fifths done with one of my favorite workhorses, the Korg MS2000.

Spring in December