Things in my head that make it to my fingers.
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https://youtu.be/PcWQj_B3qxM After wrestling to get Reason to do what I wanted for earlier part of the day…I decided to sit outside in the unseasonably cold May air and run through various permutations of scales, LFOs, wavetables and envelopes with these two apps.
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https://youtu.be/AS1f-DcQbqs So what I aimed to do here was just play around on the piano, recording the midi and audio, stop when I want to talk about something I did and then move on with the “improv.” Not slick at all – in fact I was a bit nervous – but this is where I am today.
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https://youtu.be/x5u88q-TTS4 Picking up on yesterday’s failed experiment and following up with a few more yesterday, I now understand a bit better how to use the playlist and automations. I do a bit more talking than usual on this one because now I am a bit more comfortable.
I’m using a 3xOsc kick and I spend time automating the oscillators as well as then adding delays and distortions and automating them and spending time exploring the automation sequencing and the randomization there and the possibilities of overlaying/skewing different automations. I also mess with the LFO automations. Near the end, I take a side trip into Edison, which is a cool concept to this Ableton Live user – a VST that captures and records – though I don’t record the MIDI, I did learn that yesterday with a short piano improv.
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Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World, a painting so famous that it was on the show That Girl…
I consider this stuff archetypical – this, and Arles, Water Lilies, Pollack, Dali, fauvism, Matisse, LeGere, the cutouts…these were all this my 11th grade art teacher had on the walls. I imitated lots of that stuff, especially expressionism, along with more cultural things (like The Saint and tie dye) on t-shirts. I enjoyed that class so much – she made me work in the unoccupied part of the class because I was throwing paint around, getting it on other people…
In 12th grade, I had an older man who graded strictly on technique and I didn’t do too well. I was doing things like cutting the boards in odd shapes and pasting cardboard figure cutouts onto watercolors. I would spend my free period with my old teacher, help her and participate and like that better. Also, a friend was in that class. In my regular class though, I sat with like a Breakfast Club of assorted characters; the kid who was in some of the same nerd circles as I was and could draw perfectly Chuck Close photos almost; a twitchy 10th grader whose brother blew up a desk with an M80 when we were in 6th grade; a rough but kind of hot spitfire girl in a 70s blue eyeshadow porn star kind of way; a kind of precious red head who drew lots of flowers and ponies but ever though we were in classes together forever turned out to be interesting and intelligent and last by not least: an almost mutual crush friend. I think my other friend was in that class, too. Anyway, they all liked my stuff way more than the teacher and I think even appreciated the experimental nature of what I was doing. Not experimental to be weird but going to an uncomfortable place and trying to “solve the problem” and make something out of it. That’s my connection to what I do now.
At community college, I took a design class and did well, discovered all the great stuff for sale in art stores, but I’d say by the mid-80s, I thought I had it all figured out and that people like Dali were the products of some kind of class war, based on what the Dadaists said. This just made me freeze – thinking I knew everything – and I stopped painting. Also, I never saw any of those art class people again, except throwing a counter 30 year reunion with one of them and another guy on the same day as the real reunion.
I think a combination of opening up and appreciating photography as art (while also doing it) as well as a friend of mine who paints figuratively – mostly female comic-like figures – about thirty years later inspired me to find things to paint. I had realized I knew very little about the mechanics of painting – how to hold a brush, how to mix paints, how to draw a straight line. I started drawing basic shapes and hands and figures and even kind of painted one but quickly found more interest in composition and trying different materials and to get there quicker and purer, I began using some of my old expressionist techniques like dripping, throwing and blowing. Lots of the paintings I do now are derived from the shapes and relationships in some of my ordinary photos of trees and ponds. Then I started to go to museums more – partially to learn more about materials but also to kind of meditate near art. I absolutely hate going to museums with other people and I like painting in relative peace.
I think the thing I hate the most in the arts is the kind of in crowd mentality that has lots of rules – digital is bad, have to have a real drummer, no photos of the Grand Canyon, can’t use autotune – I think being around that and participating in these rules to help us think we know everything really robbed me from making much much more art and music. I think.
https://youtu.be/lPz-P86DeBA Another experiment, this time using Arturia Beatstep connected via MIDI to an iPad mini which is passing through a Rozeta scaler into an edited saw preset (with a slower attack, so sort of a pad) which then goes into GliderVerb (later added FAC Bandit to distort) and recorder into AudioShare for upload into Dropbox.
Windy voiceover with birds, lawnmowers and other sounds – included at no additional charge. Still not sure what mic I was using but I was too far away. Voice gets overwhelmed by the wind and music but does cut through during the quiet spots. Take it or leave it.
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https://youtu.be/eMINN0O28JI Here’s an experiment (with a decent but infrequent voiceover) with FLStudio this morning using a saz sample/soundfont and a kick sample. The idea in my head was to create a loop using both playing similar parts, speed it up until it blurred into a drone using slow attack times and then transfer it to the playlist to manipulate the automation. It wasn’t well thought out and I would recommend skipping to around 26:00 when you hit 12:00 because that middle part is just me trying to work out how to move patterns into the playlist, which I was not successful at. At this point I decided to turn on Edison and hit record to get audio (even though this video captures more, including some stomach growling, chair creaking and me searching on my iPhone for instructions on how to move things to the playlist). The last 6 or so minutes are interesting I guess and the first 10-12 just to see how I went from point a to b.
After I made this video, I walked away and came back and looked up how do the playlist thing.
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https://youtu.be/4LCjSlDG7V4 An outdoor session which crashed at the end when I tried to add an effect. MIDI effect used was Rozeta Scaler. Audio effects were GilderVerb and briefly FAC Bandit.
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https://youtu.be/5iuDX_D4QMU In this video, in a series of many videos exploring my experiments not only in music but also in video sharing, I’m using Ableton Live and an Ableton instrument called “Alpine Sprinkle” which appears to be a combination of Ableton’s stock Electric plugin, their FM synthesis engine Operator and some Max4Live probability. Initially this was going to be an exploration of Audiomodern’s filterstep VST and at some early point, I decided to try to record my own narration as I manipulate the devices. The voice audio is too low at times, so my apologies.
Thanks for sticking around for the whole video.
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https://youtu.be/Wd-zH79MGGo Cozart 12, Pitch Hack, Cut Envelope, Broken Tube – 19 Apr 2020
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https://youtu.be/GpU-aFXGDnE This was from Day 375 (April 16) and a part XIII of an exploratory series. These are iPad apps – SynthOne and Particles. Go look them up
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Jimmy Lem - Blister Pop Unlimited 