Tag Archives: Composition

Sound For Dali’s Melting Clocks

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I created this track using Tiction (recently featured on CDM), an interesting piece of MIDI sequencing software created by Hans Kuder and developed in Processing. Tiction works by connecting nodes together to form loops. Each node has properties that can be adjusted like the number of “tics”. Dragging the nodes around the screen changes the pitch and volume of the nodes. I routed the MIDI output from Tiction into MDA’s DX10 while dragging and adjusting the nodes on the screen. After capturing the output I processed it through Pluggo’s Comber and a little bit of reverb. Here I have rendered the first fifty seconds as an excerpt for today’s sound.

Melting Clocks

Broken Beat Jazz Funk

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I’m too busy to produce any new sounds today, so here’s a track off Keston and Westdal’s second release, Truth is Stranger, for your listening pleasure. My best estimation is that we produced this track back in 2004, but the album wasn’t released until we partnered with Unearthed Music in March, 2007. The track’s name, 128 Dirty, is an example of one of those working titles that doesn’t go away. We must have used up all our creativity on producing the track and had nothing left to name the damn thing. You can preview all of the tracks on this album on the releases page at Unearthed Music, or just click on the image or title to go to the page specifically for Truth is Stranger.

128 Dirty

Signal to Noise Magazine

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Keston and Westdal’s latest release, One Day to Save All Life (ODTSAL), has been reviewed in Signal to Noise, The Journal of Improvised and Experimental Music. This review from “The most respected journal of experimental, improvised and otherwise interesting music” (DustyGroove.com) is the highest praise yet for the release. Please visit Unearthed Music to read the review.

Unearthed Music makes full-length 128kbps MP3 previews of every track in their catalog available on their website. So, in light of the review I am including one of my favorite tracks from ODTSAL, Electric Sheep, as today’s sound on AudioCookbook.org. If you like what you hear consider purchasing music from our independent and artist owned label. Why? Because without your support we and others like us would not be able to continue providing you with the music you love. And what kind of world would that be?

Electric Sheep

 

Piano Mallet Bass

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The sample I included in the Piano Mallet Loop has been used in three pieces that I know of so far and are all linked somewhere on AudioCookbook.org. So tonight I am presenting another example of using a mallet to produce sound with a piano instead of using the traditional keyboard that we are familiar with. The mallet I used to get this sound was the steel handle of a socket wrench with some thick rubber bands wrapped around one end. I bounced the rubber bands of a few of the strings in the lower register and got this simple bass melody.

Piano Mallet Bass

Here are the pieces that used Piano Mallet Loop. All of them are very nice. A big thanks to tacitdynamite, Fourstones, and small.cat for sharing their compositions.

Little Ditty #1 (tacitdynamite)

Mississippi (Founders Mix)

Red (small.cat)

Cuba, Illinois

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Once again, today I set out to experiment for a few minutes and make a new sound using some processing I had yet to use. But like it is prone to happen, as I tweaked and played around a musical piece started to emerge. I sequenced a series of vocal samples then applied a real-time randomizer to the sequence. Second in the chain was a vocoder plugin programmed to produce a Csus chord, followed by a stereo delay. Underneath it I layered a low melody and automated the waveform setting for one of the oscillators to get a digitized static effect. I titled it Cuba, Illinois after a town of about fifteen hundred people in Illinois called Cuba. I’ve never been there, but I like the juxtaposition of the town and state names.

Cuba, Illinois (Rough)