Day: July 19, 2007

"Strangely Massive"

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"Strangely Massive" [mp3 removed]

Another piece using the samples from the Massive groovebox (a Reaktor instrument, not the synth).
They were supposed to be raw material for glitchy granular deformation but I exported them to a straight sampler. I like them unprocessed--they have an archaic club feel.
In this song I mapped the samples to an entire virtual (8 octave) keyboard, with percussive hits as single notes at the high end and other sounds playable as tuned single octaves.
Some of the better tunelets came from doing AbEx on the sequencer's piano roll. Not to make dissonance--those bits I discarded. The song has a "heavy" ravy sound--almost a parody.

Update: This font--I don't know. Windows IE can barely render it. It's more elegant on Firefox but on some sizes the kerning is such that lower case CLUB looks like DUB. This is the Word Press "original" skin and you can't get much more default-y, but I can't bear any lack of clarity, or DARITY, in the text. So far, I haven't found any WP themes I like better.

Update: I changed the title to "Strangely Massive" from what it was previously.

Stupid as a Keyboard Player

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A remark below implying that keyboard players might be wasting the Receptor multi-plug in module was inspired by one of the demos on the Receptor site, a video of a professional "keyboard whiz" playing different patches and mostly showing off his fast, Rick Wakeman-esque fingering techniques. He says "here's an organ" or "here's a glitchy electronica sound" and proceeds to play the same type of riff, each with a different state of the art timbre.

In the movie Moog Herb Deutsch recalls that, in the early stages of designing a portable music synthesizer, Vladimir Ussachevsky recommended that Robert Moog not add a keyboard, because he felt that would encourage playing the instrument in a traditional way, as opposed to discovering new sounds it was capable of. That observation was prescient since most players went on to use the Moog as a kind of spacy organ. And they still are: the fellow in the demo has this powerful box packed with elaborate soundware (including Reaktor and all its DIY instruments) and he's using it to play prog licks.

I wonder if Duchamp's phrase "stupid as a painter" might also apply to musicians who think mainly with their hands.