Caller - Saxophone & Synthesizer

This one is about going out of your comfort zone in more ways than one...

Early last year I bought myself a tenor saxophone. I've been fascinated by the possibilities of this instrument for quite some time. Especially it's ability to defy expectations and being used in very different contexts. Oh and multiphonics of course.

I'm still a beginner but since I'm producing music all the time I've been using the sounds that I am able to create on this instrument in my music. There are of course still lot's of "errors" in everything. It honks, the notes don't come like I expect them to, but there's also something in the exploration of something you don't completely understand yet that captivates me.

Anyway I hope you enjoy the noises. The drone is made on my modular and I'm running the saxophone through beads for added space.

Geofact - Piano & Max/MSP

More loops! Using my Max Looper/Live Granular patch on piano this time.

Menhirs - Improvisation with Hohner Pianet and Max/Msp

Hello again! This one is an improvisation I did with my Pianet and a custom max patch consisting of a looper and a granular delay. If you are familiar with my videos and my approach for those you might notice that this is an adaptation of the small modular rig I’ve been using for a while. While that is always plenty of fun and much more tactile than a tablet I always had one big problem with that setup: noise. While I love the Lubadh looper I’ve always struggled with the noise it produces in all the racks I tried it in. I’ve been getting re-acquainted with max for a while now. I’ve been using it on and off for over 10 years at this point but never quite became as fluid in it like I did in SuperCollider. So this was a little weekend project to try to replicate the functionality of my small looping modular rack in a max patch maybe as a starting point for a new live setup that offloads all the digital processing to a laptop and I’ll only use the modular for analog stuff. Let’s see. The patch consists of two parts:

• a setup of two loopers inspired by the way I used Lubadh

• a granular delay inspired by Mutable Instruments Clouds or Beads

I used the “Karma” package for the looper and the “Petra” package for the granular delay. Everything is controlled by the Mira app.

Etude In Odd Meter No 3

For this piece I wanted to try to get a bit more experimental in the material that I’m layering. The upright is playing a pattern in 7/8 which is doubled by a pattern on a prepared grand piano (yes I own a grand now prepare to see more of that!). Unfortunately I messed up the shooting of the modular footage so it’s we can’t see it buuuuut: it’s playing the same pattern like the grand but with one note removed. The whole sequence is then periodically slowed down and sped up so it drifts in and out of phase but locks in every repetition of the form. That was all done in SuperCollider which then sent MIDI notes to three voices on the modular.

Etude In Odd Meter No 2

Happy new year everyone!

I’m starting this year of with a new video. The last year (and the one before that to be honest) have been very busy for me and while I have been working on some incredible projects, not having time for exploring, making new releases and these videos has been bothering me.

So I plan to do this more regularly this year. I’ve slowed down the pace. I started out with the plan of doing one video a week, which is just not doable, so I decided for this year to do one every month.

So here’s the first one:

It’s another exploration of rhythm and how different patterns and time signatures change the perception of a piece. The piece starts out in 7/8 and through the development of the pattern it shortens first into 5/8 and then a 3/8 pattern.

I originally planned this as a piano piece, but I wasn’t satisfied with how I was able to play it. But I had the idea of doing it on the modular as I also felt the piece was lacking something with just the pattern. For a recent film score I did with Gregor Keienburg we experimented with woodwind growls (singing and playing a woodwind or brass instrument at the same time) and how that technique produced difference tones quite similar to ring modulation. The inspiration for that came from the music of Colin Stetson or Bendik Gieske. So I decided to take the pattern and improvise a melody to it the signal of which will be ringmodulated with the signal of the pattern. Producing a sort of interference sound.

For the video the story is sort of similar. I wasn’t happy with the material I shot me performing the piece but I liked the piece itself at that point. So I recycled some footage I had of snow falling outside of my studio. I then took this footage and created a point cloud of it in Blender with the height of the point corresponding to the brightness of the pixel at that point.

You can get the score for the piece as well as the soundfile as an download on my patreon!

Looking Inward

A simple one.

Two loops of the piano going through Gamechanger Audios "Plus Pedal" into the Intruo "Lúbadh" and into Mutable Instruments "Beads".

Suffused

This one has a very light feel for me. I just sat down and played, something I’m trying to get back to more. I’ve been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work on a lot of very nice projects this year. Something you’ll hear a lot more of soon. But that has meant I hadn’t had too much time or headspace to do this videos. But different times will come as well.

Patch Notes:
This one plays with shorter loop sizes on Ludbadh and in general trying a hands on approach with the smaller system. Audio comes from the DAW into Ludbadh and then into Beads. I’m playing with a bunch of settings to get something that sounds right.

Aggregate

I almost forgot this one. I recorded this in January and for some reason it has been sitting on my hard drive ever since. Anyway, here it is. I really like the sound of the DX7 on this one. It's a tricky synth to use because the cultural connotation is so strong, and unless you're doing synthwave that connotation rarely serves the track.

As it was so long ago, I don't really remember what I did here for the patch. There's a loop on "Lubadh" that goes into "Beads" and I assume the synth is my usual EvenVCO → BF22 → Hexmix VCA setup.

Note Augmentation

A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure of attending a concert of Grisey's "Les espaces acoustiques" at the "Acht Brücken" festival in Cologne. This concert came at a good time for me as for a while I have been re-exploring sound, spectra and overtones in my work. Something I was very interested in at university, but lost track of when I started working more and had my hands full.

So here is a slightly playful approach to it. I played this rather simple piece on the piano with the accompaniment of two short loops of different lengths on the Intruo "Lubadh" playing into Mutable Instruments "Beads". On the big modular system I patched four voices: two Even VCOs into the two BF-22 filters and two oscillators from the Kraftzwerg into the two filters of the Moregasmatron. Each voice has it's own filter cutoff and is amplitude modulated by either an LFO on Maths or Rampage. The voices are patched so that they modulate each other's frequency in this way:

1 → 4

2 → 1

3 → 2

4 → 3

Forming a loop.

I then cut out different parts of the piano recording and transcribed the highest four clearly audible overtones, which turned out to be mostly overtones 4 to 7. I then translated this data into midi notes and played them over the piano recordings.

I think it was interesting, and as I always say (and rarely do), this is something I want to explore more.

Vignette No.1

Trying something new today! As is evident from my lack of posting I’ve been pretty busy lately. Which is good (mostly) but still I’ve been trying to think of something that I could post for you guys that would be a bit more easy for me to fit into times when I don’t as much time to dedicate to recording, editing and posting videos. At the same time I found myself capturing small moments around town with my camera. So here’s one of these moments set to music. Hope to share more of these in the future.

Whitespace

This week's video is all about doing more with less. In the past few months, I have been rearranging my studio quite a bit. You'll be able to see why in a few months (hopefully). Part of that entailed moving my synths to a Jaspers stand. I quite like the setup, but it had one key drawback: it wasn't as easy to move the modular to the piano, and I found myself using it less and less on the piano. After seeing a video by Mylar Melodies talking about having everything accessible in less than 20 seconds to not break creative flow.

With the added experience of lugging all my equipment to a gig in December and the joys of breaking everything down in the studio, setting up at the venue, and in reverse the next day in my studio, I decided I needed a new solution for at least the stuff I use at the piano.

So I thought a bit about what I really wanted to use for the piano and got a small Intellijel pallet case to just house the Instruo Lubadh, Beads, and Maths. This is one of the first improv sessions I did with this smaller setup, which hopefully will get me back into the flow at the piano more.

Subdivision Etude

Another experiment with Lúbadh and the first in a series of videos each exploring a different technique I’m working on either on the piano or the modular at the moment. This time I’m working on getting more comfortable with different subdivisions of a pulse. I’m not fully where I want to be with this but while working on this video I improved a lot and that’s what it’s all about for me.

Patch Notes:
Really simple: just the sound coming in from the Piano straight into Lúbadh and then back into the output. I’m triggering the record on Lúbadh with the Make Noise Pressure Points as the buttons on Lúbadh are quite loud.

Collecting Notes

I recently got my first new module in a long while. An “Instruo Lúbadh” and this is one of the first experiments I did with it. I left my window open because it was a nice day and I thought it would be interesting to see what happens with the ambient sounds that get captured by the looper “by accident”. What I really enjoy is playing very sparse phrases into it and slowly building up a soundscape, and Lúbadh is great at that. But to spare you looking at me doing basically nothing I also filmed some clouds on the day I recorded this. So sit back and enjoy the view!

Patch Notes: This one is really simple. I’m just patching two channels from my Piano into Lúbadh and triggering the record functionallity with “Pressure Points” as the buttons on Lúbadh are too loud to press while playing an acoustic instrument. Then it goes straight into the output.

Fields (Piano, Modular and SuperCollider)

I’m mostly done with all my projects at the moment (and the album is out!!!!) so I have time to do videos and experiment again. This one has a bit of a journey behind it. I initially wanted to go in another direction with it. Having the synth be a looped texture that I did with the french connection. But I didn’t like it so the unfinished thing lay dormant on my hard drive for a while. Then I had the idea of doing some generative sequencing with SuperCollider and the modular. This I ended up really enjoying and can see myself exploring this more. I overlayed a very soft bass also.

Intermission (Piano + Modular)

A small sign of life from me. I’m quite busy in the moment with scoring work. But I’m still noodling. The new album is now planned for August. So stay tuned…

Patch Notes:

A lot going on here… The Bass is the AJH Vintage Triangle Core VCO going into the Transistor Ladder Filter. Added grunge from the Befaco Crush Delay and into an DIY SSL Style Bus Compressor and into the Culture Vulture for even more drive.

The Arps are my favorite setup. Two Befaco EvenVCOs going into the BF22 Filter. Envelope is Maths and the VCO are crossmodulated and the level of that is controlled by two looping evelopes from Rampage. The Arps are then fed into the 4ms Dual Looping Delay for some… Delay.

The Piano is fed into Beads which is Clocked for that slicing.

Blanche (Piano and Modular)

This one is a lot more free-form than the last few. But it felt right, and it’s good to switch up the process once in a while. I really did a lot more on the modular for this piece. That’s also why it’s not by my side and I recorded it in two takes. The patch sort of reminds me of the sounds my girlfriends cat makes hence the name of the piece “Blanche”.

The patch on the modular consists of two generative sequences which are mainly driven by the Music Thing “Turing Machine” which is generating the pitches and the basis for the rythms as well. Two pulse outputs from the “Turing Machine” are patched into Befacos “Rampage” function generator which is responsible for the main envelopes. The Make Noise “Maths” is adding the ratcheting on top. The whole patch has a bunch of interconnected modulation going on which would take too long write down here but if there’s interest I might do another explanation video for this patch. Let me know in the comments!

Timid

A sweet song for hard times.

Patch Notes:

The Bass sound is made with a Befaco “EvenVCO” going into the “BF22” Sallen-Key filter and from there into the “hexmix VCA”. Afterwards the signal goes into the Doepfer "A-108" ladder filter to take some additional highs of. From there it is patched into the and into the output.

The piano effect is made with Mutable Instruments "Beads" with the reverb turned all the way up.

Shapes (Piano, Modular and Minilouge)

This week's video features a bunch of different synths and instruments. Nevertheless it feels quite minimal to me in a way.

Patch notes: A lot going on here. The piano is mainly being processed by the A700 Revox tape machine in a tape delay setup. The bass sound takes the oscillators from the MFB "Kraftzwerg" through the Doepfer "A-108" ladder filter and into the "Vnlcursal" VCA.

The plucky synth sequence consists of two EvenVCOs triangle outputs going into two channels of the Befaco BF-22 filter into the Hexmix VCA. The Oscillators are cross FM modulated with each other and the level of the modulation is controlled by two sequencers: the Make Noise "Pressure Points + Brains" combo and the RYO "VC Seq". The envelopes for the filters and VCA channels is "Maths". The output of the VCA is patched into two channels of the 4ms "DLD".

The synth pad is made with the Korg "Minilouge", it‘s a simple sawtooth wave with the filter almost closed and octave tracking on 100%. The envelope has a fairly short attack but not too clicky, a decent decay and no sustain. The output of the Minilouge goes into a Electroharmonix Memory Boy.

DAW is Cubase. Microphones for the piano are 4 Octava Mk12s two close two far.

The camera is a LUMIX GH4.

Link as always on my profile page...

If you like what I do please consider buying my music or support me on patreon!

Waves (Piano, Cello and Modular Synthesizer)

This piece is all about inverting the expectations I have in my music. Usually I start out on the piano and add to it. For this I wanted to work the other way around. I sketched out the synth line and recorded that first. Actually I thought about having piano from the beginning of the piece but I decided that this time, the piano would only be flourish. I really like how this turned out and how much more the focus is on the sound of the synth in this one.

For some added flavour I invited Ben Winkler to add to this piece with his wonderful cello.

Patch Notes: Two patches for this one:

1. The synth I used my trusty old MfB Kraftzwerg for oscillators, they are patched into the Doepfer “A-108” ladder filter the 12db/octave output of which goes into the Erica Synths “Acidbox” for additional filtering and dirt. The output of the “Acidbox” goes into the “Vnicursal” VCA by Zlob Modular and from there into Mutable Instruments “Clouds”. After recording all the lines I took the whole synth mix and ran it through the Revox A-700 in it's tape delay mode at the slowest speed.

2. The piano The piano goes into “Beads”. Grains are generated. The level of the piano going into the modular is controlled by a Keith McMillen “Softstep”.

Microphones for the piano are Octava Mk12s, recorded into Cubase.

Camera is a Lumix GH4 and I use DaVinci Resolve for Editing

Spin (Piano and Modular)

Beginning this year with polyrhythms, but this time a bit more hidden. But just a bit...

In this one I decided to record the modular and the piano separately. Firstly because I wanted my hands free on both the piano and the synthesizer and secondly because I wanted to use my Random Source / Serge "Triple Waveshaper" which gives a lot of life to the sawtooth waves of the EvenVCO.

Patch Notes:

As mentioned I'm using two sawtooth waves from my two EvenVCOs which are patched into two channels of the Serge "Triple Waveshaper" and from there into the BF-22 filter. The output of that goes into the HexMix VCA and from there into the 4ms "DLD" and into Beads for some reverb. The Cutoffs of the BF-22 are modulated by 2 envelopes from Maths the level of those is controlled by the RYO "VC-Seq" and the Make Noise Pressure Points. I'm using the send and return channels of the DLD in this piece to run the feedback path through the Erica Synths "Acidbox 3" which creates the nice distorted feedback at the end. Mics on the Piano are four Oktava Mk12s two close and two far. Camera is a Lumix GH-4. The DAW I use is Cubase and the editing was done in Davinci Resolve.

If you like what I do please consider buying my music or support me on patreon!