Here’s the latest from my solo project Ostraka (not to be confused with my duet project Ostracon with Graham O’Brien). An arrangement of this will appear on my upcoming album. I can’t say how soon it is upcoming, but I have a big collection of unreleased tracks that mostly utilize analog hardware that I’ve been collecting for decades. This piece has a little of the old and the new combining the Korg Monotribe, Sequential Circuits Pro-One, and Roland MKS-80.
On January 27, 2012 my trio DKO (Davis, Keston, O’Brien) spent about thirteen hours at the lovely Waterbury Studios in Northeast Minneapolis. We have yet to properly edit or mix any of the six or more hours of material that we performed during the session, but Jon Davis has condensed a few segments recently for sharing. Here’s one of those segments for your listening pleasure.
This is the latest piece from a group of microtracks that feature the Korg Monotribe synchronized in various ways with the Sequential Circuits Pro-One. In this case, to create the swing on the Pro-One, I ran it’s sync track through an eighth note triplet groove setting. In post I took the liberty of adding some delay during the outro and reverb in a couple of places.
For this experiment I recorded the Monotribe sync signal into Ableton Live, then I made two separate tracks of warped sync output – one to drive the Monotribe and one to drive the Pro-One. Not only does this give me the capability to set the tempo in Live, but I can also manipulate the sync signal independently for each device.
Notice the galloping shuffle on the Pro-One bass line? This was created by adding a delay to the sync signal that is going to the Pro-One. Using this technique I can instantly add groove, double-time, or triplet feel to either or both of the instruments. Who knew these instruments, 30 years apart, would pair so well together.
This is my favorite from the series of microtracks featuring the Korg Monotribe synched with the Pro-One that I’ve produced so far. For this experiment I also plugged my Korg Monotron into the Monotribe’s audio input. This can be heard as the higher pitched drone following the bass line. At around 0:15 the Pro-One arpeggiator fades in. Finally at about 0:54 the Monotron pitch ramps up about an octave, goes a little sharp, goes at little flat, then rests fairly close to the octave as the feedback on the Memory Man saturates the Pro-One notes.