music - tm

Scratch Ambulance CD

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scratch ambulance CD front cover

Spent some time today on the CD Baby website getting my disc with earcon ready for physical and virtual distribution. The CD will retail for $10.99 and tracks will be purchasable on iTunes (suck it up) and other venues.
Categorywise we're describing it as "electronic/electro" (genre/subgenre 1) ; "avant garde/computer music" (genre/subgenre 2); and "lo-fi" as a third level.
The tag line is "earcon's electro-style remixes of Tom Moody's Macintosh SE tunes from the '80s"; additional description is the text on the front cover (above):

The raw material for this CD is a series of recordings made by Tom Moody on a Macintosh SE computer, using its poignantly limited 4-voice, monaural sound chip. The bulk of the songs were produced in 1988 but efforts continued sporadically until the machine died. On this disc earcon remixes the tracks using the imperfections of the digital source material as the starting point; the CD is a hybrid of ancient digital signal processing and current music composing tools.

More info about distribution to follow.

"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.

"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.