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Friday, 4 June 2004
Learning my tools ::
Sometimes it seems that I need to practice the art of taking a creative approach to my tools as much as anything else.
Two weeks ago I finished a demo of the piece I started May 1. V IM’d me as she listened to it shift through three distinct gears, glued together (I think) by timbral consistency: “spacey” ... “like Switched On Bach” ... “very upbeat”.
More!
I was stuck. For several evenings, I meandered aimlessly with the Emagic ES2, which is a favorite starting point because I have it wired to be editable on the fly from my control surface. But that well was beginning to feel dry. One night I routed the ES2 out to be mixed with my hardware synths and routed to the Electrix Repeater, and set things up to record the live mix and the Repeater to separate tracks. I recorded maybe 45 minutes of improvs in a couple of evenings.
There was a nice bit, but it was flawed—I’d inadvertently hit Stop while overdubbing on the Repeater, leaving a small hole in the loop. I put aside the idea of developing that piece.
GoBox
One evening I went hunting through the 45 minutes of improvs, and made a small collection of short samples, categorizing them as “percussive,” “rhythmic,” and “tonal.” The next evening I imported the percussive ones into Reaktor’s GoBox and had fun just playing with that.
Memorial Day weekend interrupted.
Tuesday night I made some recordings of the GoBox experiments. I found a really cool effect to put on the percussion: a send to an (Emagic) EVOC filter bank going through a delay—the filtered echo of a percussive thwack gives the distinct impression of coming from about three feet in front of my face, outside the headphones. I overdubbed a couple tracks. A few cool things happened, but I don’t know yet if this piece is going to grab me enough to make something of it.
Wednesday night I began to work with the Repeater loop jam. It was painstaking, but I managed to fill in the holes in the loop. I found some new techniques:
- Import a tonal sample into Absynth and use it as a source for a granular oscillator. Gotta figure out how to make it not just stop when it hits the end of the sample. Maybe I need to put loop points in the AIFF.
- There are three fat, juicy-sounding synths in Reaktor, which now works tolerably as an AudioUnit in Logic. One can assign any MIDI control to any parameter in the synth, reasonably quickly. Fun for tweaking the filters on the fly. Green Matrix has a couple of wild X-Y grids which can be programmed to do cool modulations.
- Use an envelope plug-in to soften the brutal attack of one of the randomly-generated-on-the-fly ES2 patches I’d used in the improv.
- I love using the EVOC for eerie resonances.
I recorded several tracks on top of the loopy piece, though a lot will probably need replacing or heavy editing—the loop’s beginning is pretty amorphous before a rhythm emerges, so it’s hard to get multiple overdubs rhythmically aligned. But it seems it will be possible to create a stable click and then line things up with it. The piece has been stuck in my head all day.
| << Portrait of Jaco | 2004 > June | LA, David Arnay >> |