date	venue	banda	bandb	bandc	bandd
24/07/10	enigma bar	mammoth	the baron	forest of gnomes	abyzmal
28/07/10	forresters	macabre	guantanamo bay	iron worzel
06/08/10	enigma bar	black jesus	GBCR	Patrarchal Death machine	iron worzel
11/03/12	Thebarton Theatre	Priority Orange	End Vision	British Assist	The Chofters

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major assignments

They shall be posted shortly. You don't believe me? It's true, check back in a week, before the end of 08

Week 8 CC

This was good fun. But, I could have saved myself a lot of time if I had prepared some loops before hand. Most of my samples are from a recording I made of some harp sounds. I used 8 samples in impulse for my foundation (unfortunately paying very little attention to BPM). Impulse provided wonderful facilities for making samples unrecognisable, in particular the pitch shift and stretch functions. The rest of the samples were used in audio tracks same ala the nine inch nails samples. However, they were mostly very short making them hard to cue effectively. Also. I found the warp feature difficult to master and have yet to establish how I am supposed to tweak my audio prior to sequencing (for use in a live setting). Once again, have found the restrictions to be neither here nor there, just inconvenient when the computer crashes (once again, no screenshot). I do like the way live allows me to convert melodic sounds into percussive ones and percussive sounds into melody, very handy for meeting the demands of the avant garde. Would you believe it, that cello/bowed double bass sound is nothing more than downtuned harp sounds. Ya do harp on a bit

Week 7 CC

It’s hard to make an informed comparison on restrictions versus no restrictions without using the full-blown system, I would not say that the restrictions hampered me (except when my system crashed and I had to load all that stuff in and manipulate it again, which is why there is no picture). The main thing I found with this exercise was that my real time jam would have been closer to how I imagine it if I had spent more time organising my samples (I tended to find that samples that I would have liked to have layered over each other were on the same track and so I would have to choose). The live system seems like it holds a lot of potential for ‘playing a computer’ providing some care and thought has gone into sample collection. I guess it’s a lot like turtablism (minus the scratching) except you can get control down to a much finer level. What ever would Varese think? Bite the Remix

Week 6 CC

Lots of cool things I couldn’t try because I couldn’t divine from the tutorials (or my memory) how to operate them. The Environment is just going to have to wait for another day for me I am afraid. Things I did master…. Using the transform window to humanise things, drum beats, duplicate melodies (looking quite intrigued at that reverse option heh heh), The envelope plugin. In this instance, I really don’t thing it made a lot of a difference, come to think of it, should have tried it on some of the guitar tracks, that could have been cool, or the bass. Used quantisation to try and fix up the kick but it was too out of sync, had to go in manually. Had reverb on the snare, distortion on the guitar, felt no need for EQ, envelope on the drums and I automated fade in/outs to make the beginning and end less abrupt. Improved riffage Here's an old thought from last week making things sound real, I do think my guitar efforts effectively convey the impression of the pick on the strings. yeah, the lead guitar line needs work, more of, it sounds pretty cheesey. Although, that was kinda the sound I was trying to parody.

Week 5 CC

Authentic MIDI mission went as follows Guitar (the best achievement): Created a duplicate of my riff for muted guitar (with edited velocities and staggered chords) in accordance with a suggestion from the article. Borrowed a studio trick and replicated riff on an acoustic as well. The acoustic ended up very low as the steal string sample sounds a bit too electronic). Played Riff through an OK electric guitar sample, still needed cohesiveness. Bussed all guitar tracks to an auxillary and applied distortion, this tightened everything up and made it sound pretty nice, sounded a bit like QOTSA. I could probably do to lower the velocity on the melodic notes in the muted guitar part but other than that is good. Bass, didn’t really take any advice, it sounded good how it is, it is in the key of A though which could add to realism, and, I made the lowest notes a bit sharp using pitch bend for, to make a bass that low, you have to downtune and that makes the strings very susceptible to being played sharp (too much pressure you see). Drums: Separated Snare from rest of kit so it could be reverbed a bit and potential pitch bent on the harder hits. Should have spent more time lining up kick, hats and snare, they are still a bit out. Recording drum lines makes for the quickest route to realism, when having to rectify velocity and such, I thought back to how I would play it. riffage

Audio Arts week 9

The gruelling torture continues. FM synthesis I still don't know how to modify these patches, so, my modifications continue to consist solely of elaborate modulations, check it out: So, this, in a slightly less elaborate form, this patch yielded BUBBLES. Then I added some more obscure modulatory values, grouped it all, customised the parametres and started randoming away, came up with sounds including a mossie sounds, swarm sound, some toilet humour (cavalcade of laffs anyone?) some sort of industrial sound, a fairly convincing simulation of a highschool band practice (tuning to concert c as they say) and some cool sounding sound effect that I simply couldn't leave out. I'm starting to get frustrated, I've toyed with analogue, AM, RM and FM synthesis now and I still couldn't tell you what parametres to tweak for what sound. In short, I have achieved nothing! Oh how I dream of complex envelopes. Sonic Events don't bother trying to intellectualise it, just hit random a lot and enjoy the produce