Having recently traveled to Europe to visit friends and check out some grad schools I thought my first trip out of the country was a worthy topic for some music.

Edinburgh was one of the more amazing places I have ever been and staying with my friend and former musical colleague was amazing. The night we got to Edinburgh we stayed up till 5am and due to a bit of jet lag and a lot of whiskey we slept in till 5pm the next day. Mr.Pitts took us out on the town and one of his friends related to our sleep-through-the-day ordeal, she said “I think Edinburgh was made for sleeping” so here is my little track featuring a sample of street sounds the morning evening we woke up.

I hope to make one of these for each town we visited. Hopefully I can follow through for once.

edinburgh is for sleeping

so apparently 1bit audio player the excellent mp3 playing plug-in by Mark Wheeler has been disabled by yet another stupid wordpress update. my apologies for the direct link.

The Roland TR-707 is a member of the infamous Roland TR line which included the dance classics such at the 808 and 909 which were pioneered through disco and dance music. The 707 however lack some of the depth and bass of the previously mentioned drum machines, however, because it is less precious I was far more apt to get in there and modify it. The sounds it is capable of in its modified state are truly astounding.

I debated wether or not to upload a photo with this post since the snapshots are supposed to be audio… but I did anyways. I love taking pictures and I have for as long as I can remember. More and more tho I am aware of how visually literate our culture is and how illiterate we are when it comes to sound. With that in mind I have started trying to take “snapshots” with my digital recorder more often. I want to see if in 20 years they describe events, places, people etc as well as photos do now.

It just so happens these first ones are musical, i’ll try to add more atmospheric/environmental ones later.

We just got back from salvation mountain and we got to meet leonard who built/builds it.

He sang us a song he wrote in his “igloo” which you can find on that flickr set. I think the accoustics of this recording describe it nicely.

http://typenerd.com/goods/mp3/flower_tree_and_you.mp3

Later that evening my friends saw a small owl by the shore of the salton sea, and decided to play a song for it, the owl flew away when disturbed by the train that runs right by the camp ground.

http://typenerd.com/goods/mp3/owl_song.mp3

Being interested in ambient music and electronic means of creating it I have always been fascinated with generative music. When I took my first ever computer music class as CSUSM in the 90s I was fascinate with a seemingly archaic application simply called “M”. It was so old the computer lab kept intentionally outdated macs around just to run the app which I believe was less than 1 megabyte in total size. It is credited and contended that M is the very first piece of midi software for the home computer, regardless it was amazing. Amazing that in its limitations he allowed the user to explore music visually and in very non linear terms.

The very wise music software company Cycling 74 (makers of max/msp another of my loves) purchased the application a few years back, mostly for posterity from what i can tell. Even visually its totally gorgeous.

So anyways… M had me hooked on computer music and i made things with it for a few years, none of which i liked (as always) and im sure its all in dead hard drive land forever, resting bleep blooping itself to sleep. However, as M rests in its own hyper advanced grave, I was alerted to the existence of “Nodal”.

Nodal is a self described generative music application. It uses well… NODES to trigger notes in linera time based on parameter and connections you draw with the crude and charming interface. Nodal is dead simple. I had it sending singles to Ableton Live and generating sounds in seconds, and furthermore I was digging into the more “advanced” features within an hour. That is all to say Nodal is AWESOMELY POWERFUL. Being a visual person with little musical training nodal allows me to experiment with one of the fundamental building blocks of music… time. Time signatures have always eluded me, on of my close friend in school said that I secretly “loved waltzes” cause all the music i made resembled the waltz in timing. I would have never known there was a comparison to be made had I not know more percussively inclined individuals.

With nodal I have begin exploring generating beats that change constantly but are always “on time” something I can’t achieve personally.

Here’s an example of a structure that is a simple 4/4 time beat where the notes accross the x axis increase in distance exponentially.

here’s how it sounds:

http://typenerd.com/goods/mp3/nodal/1.mp3

Its pretty plain, but its sorta cool how you get a flam effect in the instances when the notes double up on each other.

Here’s the same experiment modified slightly just for interest.

heres how it sounds:

http://typenerd.com/goods/mp3/nodal/1.mp3

Whoa broooo, sorta instant idm. Ok that’s an exaggeration, in fact I hate myself for even thinking that.

The other thing that Nodal let’s you do, which is the truely interesting thing, is it let’s you think about time in a strictly spacial capacity. The above examples show you visually what 4/4 looks like. But what if “time” didn’t have to travel on the grid in perfect units of 1? What if it could take the shortest distance between A and B.

Here’s a standard 4/4 piece.

here’s what it sounds like:

http://typenerd.com/goods/mp3/nodal/3.mp3

Now heres the very same structure only I changed all the connections to be “direct” meaning they don’t follow musical timing laws… aka: DIAGONALS BITCHES!

here it be!

http://typenerd.com/goods/mp3/nodal/4.mp3

If everything up till now sounded samey to you then this probably sounds like a toddler banging on a cardboard box… well maybe a robotic todler. This is really interesting to me because it begs the question is the only thing that makes computer music inhuman sounding to some people the fact that it does exactly what we tell it to? We taught the computer how to make music OUR way, what if it doesnt give a shit about time (excuse the anthropomorphization), what if WE have made computers sound shitty not the other way around.

All this is to say I’m interested to see what weird poly rhythms I can come up with using nodal, and how I could potentially work them into a live situation, and what they can teach me about being spontaneous and intuitive with time.

More to come folks.

My wife bought be a really fun toy for xmas. I’m always on the prowl for hand held intuitive noise makers and the Gakken SX-150 is definitely that. It has a really simple range of capability which is great for learning about synths (which is the devices orginal intention), and it has remarkably rich analog sound. Beware the audio file attached it starts out loud and doesn’t let up.

This machine consists of two barbie karaoke cassette players severely modified and cross bent into one another. The end product is a effects pedal of sorts capable of whirling into rolling static, endless holding decays, and ring modulation type sounds. Many of the bends I added were thanks to casper electronics who’s work is always inspiring.

Audio Samples Coming Soon.

The 4×4 is a home made midi controller unit. I developed it partly as a way to better understand some micro controller basic and partly cause I wanted to knobs for live performances. Originally there was going to be 64 knobs (one for each pad on the monome 40h) but I quickly found that not only were potentiometers too expensive for my taste that but also the arduino system I was using would be too heavily taxed by that much input.

The “brain” of the system is an arduino which is then linked into a multiplexing unit designed byme with much help from folks on the arduino forums. All input is converted into midi through a small max/msp patch I wrote based on Arduino2Max. My wife found the little brief case that I built it into.

These are some recordings made live at Cameron Frasier and Allan Watke’s home in early 2007. Noah Smith and I were joining in on various instruments.

pacifist’s divide [2.2MB]
seth feels the love [13.6MB]

In 2007 I purchased a Monome 40h kit from the good folks at monome. Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cane are friends of mine and I actually took a max/msp programming class taught by Brian some years ago. I was excited to make this device and I’m happy to say it was a huge success (as are all their products).

The enclosure for my device was made with much help from a friend’s father who is a carpenter. He has really great tools and a ton of know how. My case is made of finished zebrawood and it feel really nice all around. The 40h has become a central aspect of my work flow when making music now. I love it.

The Speak & Creak is formerly a Speak & Spell with a storm-trooper-white paint job. It has some pretty standard circuit bent modifications but all in all its a blast to play. Currently it resides at the home of Allan Watke and Cameron Frasier who use it on recordings for the band No Little Kindness.

Speak & Creak Sample