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.
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.
I don’t use software very often. I’ve never recorded a piece of music using only software. Until today.
With work looming early, and the promise of a late evening, a full modular patch just isn’t in the cards today. So I decided to pull out the iPad and create…something. Though just a little bit of effort went into it, I’m supremely happy with the result.
The patch is simple. The Alexandernaut Fugue Machine, a wonderfully conceived four head interactive midi piano roll where each head can be sent in any direction, at any speed or octave, sent 3 channels of midi data to Klevgrand Speldosa, a beautiful music box plugin for iPad, while sending a fourth stream of midi data to Decent Sampler loaded with the DK Solo Cello Spurs sample pack. Both software instruments are sent to the Eventide BlackHole Reverb, and out.
It’s not a super low effort day, I needed to figure out how to do a few things, and come up with a quick and dirty improvisation, but it’s not a high effort day. Whatever effort, the result is wonderful; in the spirit of Olafur Arnalds. After eight modular recordings in six days I think I can forgive myself.
