Another long day at work and little time after for music making means another iPad day. In the spirit of Jamuary, the show must go on. Today I further experimented with using Alexandernaut’s truly excellent plugin, Fugue Machine. But rather than using Speldosa or some other bright and plucky sounds or cello, which I’ve done already this month, I decided to go very slow, sparse, and somber, using three of the four Fugue Machine outputs to feed the Decidedly Decent Sampler with Flannel Piano, while the fourth output fed a second instance of Decent Sampler and The Quiet Choir by Joshua Meltzer (available free on Pianobook). I can’t wait to have the ability to use Fugue Machine with the modular.
Between work and the second snow storm this week I was super short on time, which made today another iPad only affair. I started with something similar as with Jamuary 2507 and 2508, the Alexandernaut Fugue Machine feeding two instantiations of Decent Sampler, one with cello samples and the other with viola. Both go through some delay and reverb, and later Fluss, a beautiful granular synthesizer by Bram Bos and Hainbach.
I have lots to work to do with these sort of patches, and with this one in particular. I’m a midi novice, and still inexperienced with software instruments, particularly those on the iPad, so good chunks of my time were figuring the best way to do X or Y. It’s a pain, but the effort has not gone unrewarded, and, more importantly, I’ve opened a new world of possibilities for the future.
I was short on time yesterday, so put together a reasonably simple patch on the iPad. This Jamuary I’m purposefully trying to use unfamiliar techniques with unfamiliar instruments, and that’s what yesterday was all about in the little time I had. But the patch turned out so beautifully that I wanted to take some time to explore its possibilities in the modular. My first thought was to try and use the Oxi One as a Midi > CV converter so that I might patch the outputs of the Alexandernaut Fugue Machine to something like the Synthesis Technology E370 or some other quad sound source. But despite spending the better part of three hours trying to figure it out,1 I still had achieved no progress and so abandoned the idea and decided to do the next best thing. To patch a more intentional version of Jamuary 2507 into the modular and run it through several effects and see if I couldn’t come up with something new.
The initial patch is the same. Fugue Machine feeds the Klevgrand Speldosa and Decidedly Decent Sampler software instruments in AUM. Yesterday those went to reverb and I called it a day. The patch was beautiful and full of promise. Today went much further. The outputs of both Speldosa and the Cello samples were sent from AUM, via the ES-9 outputs, to the AI Synthesis 018 Stereo Matrix Mixer so that they might be spread around the system to three different effects, shifted and morphed matrix style, and finally sent back to AUM before getting some reverb. Though I’m trying new techniques with new things, that doesn’t mean everything in a single patch, lest I become overwhelmed and frustrated.2 The effects I chose were the Venus Instruments Veno-Echo,3 Pladask Elektrisk Dradd brothers, and the Rossum Electro-Music Panharmonium. Speldosa and the cello samples were sent to the delay, with Speldosa only going to Panharmonium, while the cello only was initially sent to the Dradd(s), before adding the delay to the Dradd(s)’ input, slowly adding more, and allowing those higher pitched notes to be granular-ized and spread through the stereo field. The Dradd(s) really turned out to be the highlight, though the delay isn’t far behind. Panharmonium sounds nice, as it always does, but seemed to get lost when it wasn’t leveled as a prominent voice in the mix at a given moment.
