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

Logical sure

This task is old news to me as I learnt all this basic logic stuff last year. Alas, I could not find any of my old programming efforts so I wasted some time knocking up some imitation Cure (boys don't cry). Mostly used step entry with the exception of the solo line which I recorded in (lost patience with step entry by then). Used the Ultrabeat VI for the kit, VI samples of bass and clean electric guitar for the other 3 parts. Needless to say, no guitar sounds available to select sound anything like a guitar so I made some lame attempts to disguise this on the solo line using EFFECTS. Ended up using compression on the drums too, worked pretty shmick. "I Can't Believe it's Not" Boys Don't Cry Oh yeah, after like an hour and a half solid of programming, Logic crashed, but not before making an emergency save of my work, what a considerate program.

CC wk 3

For some reason, I find working through these tutorials amazingly time consuming, possibly because I desperately want to understand why I am doing what I am doing before I do it... going on from my simple synth I made last week, I have worked through tutorial two in full and listened to my synth progressively sound more authentic. I added the filter and envelope functions as instructed, added the sub osc and noise osc, combined various things into groups. I found when I stopped to tidy that a lot of cables should have been disconnected during the course of construction and had to go through and intuit what they were. I was also missing the fancy oscillator so I constructed my own based on the information and diagram given. I still have sound so if nothing else, the circuit is still complete. I began tute 3 and got stuck on the first instruction about the variable, it doesn't say what it is supposed to be patched into. I wish I had a keyboard to truly appreciate the products of pressing random (for now I just have my little ditty programmed into the step sequencer demonstrating the many shades of 8 bit sound). I would like to post some audio but I have yet to figure out how to extrapolate sound from plogue and into a recording program, a mission for another day.

CC wk 2

with a virus

CC wk 1

wedges wedges icecream

creative computational creations

creative compy

creating

nothing

Creative

Sigh

Week Fix Creative Curmudgeoning

Well, didn’t feel like I needed to do too much more to my sequenced composition
as I had already effectively mixed it (I felt) and incorporated such tools as
volume automation and effects to make it feel more natural. I did however
attempt to pan one of my more melodic sounds for the sake of interest and I
panned the ‘snare’ and ‘hihats’ a little to the left as they would be if they
were in a rock recording. The end result being a somewhat empty right-hand
speaker for most of the 45 seconds but oh well, in the name of realism ha ha.

MP3 here

Patchwork take 2

"Creative" computing oh yeah now we getting somewhere

thus far i have created drum sounds from samples of strummage

kick - comparatively low chord, pitch shift down considerably, compressed lots, mass EQ boost at approx 250 as advised

snare - pitch shift up somewhat, reverb, vague EQing

hats - pitch shifted, reversed, squashed

these i sequenced into a basic drum beat that repeats and provides a frame work to explore other sound potential in sampled audio

more...

NB I used beat detective/my eyes to suss the tempo of the original segment of riffage. In theory, I could have layered it over my drum beat and it would have been in sync (I didn't want to use it though)

with a rhythmic frame work established, I sought to add depth and colour using melody....the guitar sample provided certainly did not lend itself to any melodic contours that I would put my name to...I experimented with stretching/condensing the samples, reversing them, pitch shifting them. A reversal of a strummed chord took my fancy and became part of the drum beat. I experimented with trying delay on chord samples/pitch shifted chord samples, nothing sounded good because none of the delays I tried sounded the note as it happened (only after the delay time had elapsed). A plugin called Resonator provided what sounded like a harmonic breakdown of the sound. This fitted in nicely with my reverse chord and became the final addition to the instrumentation.

I used trial and error to try and break the drum beat a bit and keep it interesting with some degree of success.



The long anticipated link to an MP3 of.....Patchwork all 43 seconds of sequenced glory

Wk 4 Creative

I'm so behind in this class, it is absolutely brutal!

Wk 3 Paper projectiles

Load failed Internal error #10001111451711

Wk 1: Some lecture about MIDI networking that I also missed

Based on the information available to me through the reading of my classmate’s blogs, I proceeded to attempt the tranmittal of MIDI data between two Mac lab Macs by doing the following…. Open MIDI keys Open Audio MIDI setup Click on MIDI devices, Network Ensure anyone can connect to you In the ‘directory box you should see some names (humemu003, humemu015, that sort of thing). Select one and press the ‘connect’ button I get a bit hazy at this point but, you tell it where the info is coming from and where it is going to and then, n theory, you should have a connection demonstratable in MIDI keys. Having missed the lecture itself I’m guessing I am meant to comment my thoughts on the virtues/drawbacks of this function…Sending MIDI data in general from point A to point B is the whole reason for MIDI existing. In terms of controlling miscellaneous pcs in the Mac lap it seems pretty superfluous save fro playing pranks. Or, if the latency was good then you could theoretically bring in your far superior Mactop with wireless and somehow use one of the Novations as a controller for you far superior software without having to unplug anything. Whoo