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.

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.

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