Here’s another segment from the live recording I wrote about in the last entry. This is an excerpt from the piece Some Kind of Adhesive from One Day to Save All Life (2008, Unearthed Music). If you are familiar with the piece you will probably notice that this excerpt bares little resemblance to the original recording.
This is an example of how far a piece can stray from it’s original structure. The tempo hasn’t changed and some of the same instrument recordings are used, but these elements have been shaped into something new by cutting, stretching, looping, processing, and other forms of manipulation in real-time during the performance. This makes every set different from the next and keeps things interesting for us and (hopefully) our listeners.
Some Kind of Adhesive Live Mix (Excerpt)
To create this sound I started by programming a beat. In this case I pitched each slice of the beat individually to create a variety of pitches in the loop. Once I was satisfied with it I rendered it to a clip and applied a plugin by Paul Kellett (
Here’s another example of using a mallet to get sounds out of my piano. In this case, instead of striking the main part of the string, I let the mallet bounce on the small piece of string after the bridge. This part of the piano is traditionally not used to create sound and the pitches are quite high and not tuned, similar to the area between the tuning pegs and the nut of a guitar. 
This dissonant phrase of piano was created by using a metal mallet to gently taps the stings on the piano in the upper register. I’ve been experimenting with getting some unique sounds out of my piano by not using the keyboard.