Posts

  • Spawn Of The Monster Centipede

    It’s the near future and a meteorite lands in the hills of Tennessee. A short while later, a monstrous centipede is seen roaming the countryside carrying off livestock and unwary teenagers. Intrepid Chemico Corporation salesman Brett Winston is trapped on the road, caught up in a sudden swarm of giant centipedes. Can he escape to warn the world? Or will he be another victim of … The Spawn Of The Monster Centipede!

    No, actually it is a poly-rhythmic sequencer piece that looked like a giant centipede when I was editing it. 18 tracks of madness that ushers in the school of “Maximalism.”

    Cover art by Bing/Dall-E

  • Proton Dance

    Performance video here.

  • Fanfare For The Corporate Oligarchy

    An upbeat melody to take you upwards and to the right while holding on for dear life. Image courtesy Bing/Dall-E.

  • Music For Washing Dishes

    Featuring the soothing sounds of our own small stream, Music For Washing Dishes incorporates real kitchen sounds and melodic interludes. Generative sequences book end the piece with watery arpeggios. Just long enough to get through a good stack of dishes.

  • After The Supernova

    Space music for the aftermath of stellar destruction. Think of expanding clouds of cooling gas going from blue-hot to red.

    Image: inner crab nebula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar_wind_nebula#/media/File:Chandra-crab.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_remnant

  • Cant Be Woke

    Wrote this a while ago and set it to music.

  • For HAL

    There once was a bot from SCHENECTADY,
    Who was so wrecked that he
    Trundled along,
    Singing a song,
    All the while losing his memory.

  • Orion 1

    This is the first composition by me, inspired by the recent successful completion of the live test of the Orion capsule. See the results here.

    The work is a mix of live audio from the December 11, 2022 splashdown, Csound synth patches along with some virtual instruments recorded in Studio One.

    First off, I split up the audio from the YouTube livestream into chunks using the Rust noise_gate project. The audio was filtered to give it a 60’s Moon-mission feel. I felt some sort of fanfare was needed at the start, so I added some Copeland-esque percussion.

    The first long section is Stratospheric Winds, what it might sound like encountering the Earth’s atmosphere from space. Yes, the stratosphere is not the top layer of the atmosphere, but it is the point where the re-entry is picked up.

    Section Atmospherics represents the long fall after supersonic flight. It is made up of drones with a rhythmic accompaniment ticking off the time. The drone sounds were based off of Ian McCurdy’s Csound Haiku I with modified tones and additional evolution.

    After the chutes deploy is Hang Time, where I use a Virt Vereor VST synth playing long chords to give the feeling of suspension. I skipped most of the dialog around the chute deployment after I found it detracted from the narrative flow.

    As the capsule gets close to the sea, there is a surf sound based on a simulation in Csound. I had also developed a glissando sequencer bit coded in Csound based off of a phrase from Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue in D minor. It was intended for section Hang Time, but when I put in the clip about the recovery beacon, it clearly belonged with the section Waiting for Recovery.

    There was a definite end to the mission, so I wanted to wind the piece slowly down to its conclusion. With the final note, the piece ends in Mission Accomplished (notably without any sense of irony in this case.)

    In the end I think its moderately OK. I’m not too happy about the mix, and I have since learned a lot about Studio One that would help out in that regard. Finding my way through the creative process was very instructive. I find that I like to plan out my pieces, and gather the bits around the plan, even if things don’t work out the way I expected.

  • Plugins to Try

    Watched a nice video on some remarkable free plugins here. All these are things I want to try so I am posting the list here for later. The presenter knows what he is talking about and doing and all these plugins seem worth looking into so I have reproduced the links below.

  • In the forests of Arkansas

    Beware the Jum-Jum,
    Hiding in the trees.
    It will sneak up behind you,
    And poke you when you sneeze.