Monotribe Meets Pro-One Part 2

Here’s the second microtrack from a series of experiments featuring the Korg Monotribe and my SCI Pro-One. It would be remiss to leave out the use of the Memory Man on the Pro-One for some distorted dub-delay. This particular piece has odd times and flams happening that were a bit of an accident. It could of been caused by dropping a beat somewhere using the active step function on the Monotribe, but I was also synchronizing with the DAW, so my sync loop may have been misaligned. In any case I liked what I heard and let it form the basis of this study.

Duet for Synthesizer and Robotic Vehicles

In May 2009 I toured a newspaper facility with a group of students and a field recorder. Recently I decided to revisit the recordings and found that one of them was laden with the varied-pitched warning beeps of several robotic paper transporters moving about the printing facility. Here’s a duet study that combines the use of the Pro-One with the recording in a similar fashion to the last two examples.

Duet for Synthesizer and Freight Train

This is the second study in a series of duet recordings that I am working on. In this example I made a recording of a freight train passing from about fifteen feet away using my Sony PCM-D50. On a side note the train recording was made in December of 2008, and I had no Idea until recently that I would be using it as a test layer for this project. Next I performed along with the recording while attempting to listen and react the same way I would when improvising with a human performer. The synthesizer I used (and may use for all of these) is my Sequencial Circuits Pro-One running through the Memory Man delay. There’s quite a bit of low end in the synth for the first two thirds of the piece, so I recommend listening on a good system, or set of headphones, turned up as loud as you can manage!

Listen to the original, uncompressed train recording from December, 2008:
Winter Freight

Duet for Synthesizer and the Washing

This piece is a test recording for an upcoming project. I recorded nine minutes of sound while doing the washing. Both the dryer and the washing machine were going at once. Several of the laundry cycles were captured including the fill cycle and the spin cycle. Accidentally some coins got into the dryer (I swear it was an accident) creating some nice high-frequency, stumbling rhythms.

Afterward I tried a few sessions of Pro-One along side the laundry sounds. I wasn’t satisfied with the first few attempts that I made where I was purposefully avoiding musical results. The effects were interesting, but seemed disjointed from the ambiance. For the last attempt I decided to try a drone in fifths developing into a simple sequence in six that finally degrades into filter effects and textures. Toward the end there’s a section where it’s difficult to tell what is an environmental sound and what is the synthesizer, which signifies a success of sorts for me.

I processed the washing sounds with a little bit of compression. The Pro-One was going through the Electro-Harmonix Memory Man analog delay that I manipulated throughout the recording. I recorded the synth and delay onto separate tracks. This made it possible to run the delay through an auto-pan effect while keeping the dry synth track in mono. This produced a nice sweeping stereo effect on the synth while maintaining a thick dry synth sound in the center, something that I’ve wanted to try for a long time.

Excerpt from a Recent DKO Performance

This improvised piece from my trio DKO was recorded live at the Kitty Cat Klub on December 16, 2011 (live mix by Ryan Olcott and post mix by John Keston) and features Jon Davis on bass, John Keston on keyboards (that’s me), and Graham O’Brien on drums. For more music, information about DKO, and booking please visit dkomusic.tumblr.com. My rig on this track included two of my favorite standbys; the Rhodes electric piano and my newly calibrated Pro-One. I also had my Electro-Harmonix Memory Man Delay on a send and used the Korg Monotron for some atonal synthesizer textures.