Here’s a segment from a new track that will be included in my performance at 9:30pm on Monday, April 4, 2011 at the Kitty Cat Klub in Minneapolis. Sputnik Viper with Centrific and newly formed BETAWOLvES are alo on the bill. Aside from the drums the new Ostraka track (working title, Monkey Dog Specimen) is made exclusively of sounds from the Roland D-50 and the Roland MKS-80.
Monkey Dog Specimen Segment
Inevitably one of the results of the One Synthesizer Sound Every Day project that I started in January is to produce an Ostraka album. So far I have nearly thirty tracks in the works. Many of them will end up on the cutting room floor, but here’s an excerpt from an introduction for one of the pieces that I’m confident will make the roster. The segment starts with a washy arpeggio on the D-50 morphed into a pad with copious amounts of reverb and delay. Next up are some MKS-80 effects that introduce an unprocessed bouncy arpeggio in six eight time.
Excerpt of Intro to Heavy Synth Track in Six
Now that I am able to program the MKS-80 with the Bitstream 3X I am attempting to do the same for other electronic instruments that lack tactile controls. This involves digging into the MIDI implementation of these instruments and then programming the BS3X to send the appropriate values. The first instrument I’m trying this with is the Roland D-50. So far I have had no success in getting the Roland D-50 to respond to the values I’m sending it, but hopefully I get it figured out soon. Here’s an example of what I’d like to accomplish. To create the sound below I used the D-50’s joystick to change the cutoff frequency on the first upper partial while sending it notes via MIDI.
Roland D50 Automation
Before I continue I must admit that I have always had a problem with the term “pad” as a catch-all term for sustained synthesizer textures. I also have an aversion to using sounds that are described in that manner. I’m not exactly sure why, but it might have to do with the idea of padding. Padding is an unnecessary stuffing use to protect things from hard edges, or prevent delicate items from being broken. I’ll stop there with the metaphors, but my aversion comes down to not wanting to produce work where any sound is considered filler. However, I realize that this term is impossible to escape, so over the years I have tried to embrace it, but it still doesn’t sit right for me. In any case here’s a “sustained synthesizer texture”, produced by the Roland D-50, that I’m quite fond of.
Glassy D50 Pad
Here’s a little arpeggio I recorded using my Roland D-50 and the factory preset, Vara Coma Veri La. A quick search shows that the patch, somehow on my D-50s internal memory, was part of the Cinascope Studio soundbank programmed by Paul Naton. All the processing heard is native to the D-50. No additional processing was added. Patches like this really show off the spacial qualities of the instrument with hard, slow auto-pan drenched in reverb.
Spacey D50 Arpeggio