tom moody

"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.

"Gro-Rabbit"

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"Gro-Rabbit" [mp3 removed]

I'm still working on this song, I think--the "atonal" middle section bugs me sometimes at low volume--it either comes in to soon or needs to be converted to something more tuneful. Other times I listen to it it works, though.

OK, it's done.

One thing I learned today, independent of any work on this piece, was how to edit "Groups" and use "Group Insert Effects" in Kontakt 2. That would have helped to make "Hugely Massive" more complex, in that it has different samples spread all over the sample map, which I didn't know how to edit individually.

Receptor

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Muse Reseach is offering a new music product called the Receptor, a hardware module that stores and activates plugins--softsynths, samplers, effects, etc. Native Instruments has its entire product line bundled on one model. It's a general purpose computer as well as a sound card and you can hook a monitor, mouse and keyboard to it, but it also can be "slaved" to a musical keyboard or a software sequencer such as Cubase, located on, say, a laptop.
You make the choice whether the Receptor or your computer is the "center" of your work environment.
If the computer is the center, it will stream audio and MIDI to and from the Receptor using the Ethernet (!) connection. You can run a bunch of softsynths simultaneously and the Receptor takes the CPU hit.
On the one hand, this seems really retrograde, a way for keyboard players to go on the road without a computer.
Also, it's a way to sell another piece of gear when the software revolution was about using your computer to multitask.
But it's up to date in that the Receptor has a Linux operating system that plays the plugins more efficiently than they will ever be heard in Gates World (so they say). It also mixes plugins in ways that would bog down your computer even with the most efficient system (again, so they say). Something to think about--the site has massive documentation including very clear Quicktime tutorials.