Month: May 2018

Categories
Humour Music Technology

Studio Neologisms

Glossary of Studio Neologi(ci)sms

  1. Zimmer Frame – Writing in a style entirely influenced by Hans Zimmer
  2. Pain Threshold – When you realize you’ve been carefully adjusting a compressor on the wrong track
  3. Undo – The Hindu God of Editing Forgiveness
  4. Cardioid Attack – Almost dropping an expensive microphone
  5. Shyverb – using too much reverb on your own vocals (aka shy/wet mix)
  6. Presettlement – Valiantly building a sound you are imagining and then compromising with a preset.
  7. Green Piece – When you just use Logic’s default region colours.
  8. Refinalising – the art of renaming a ‘Final Bounce Complete DONE_[fixed] MASTER.aif’ audio file
  9. Enoyance – a hung MIDI note
  10. Zoomba – The constant readjustment of zoom values
  11. MIDIval – The ancient reedy-ness of insensitive MIDI files
  12. DAWk – Someone who espouses the merits of one platform over another
  13. Portamental – Sibelius’s crazy glisses
  14. Missed take – Not recording the perfect performance
  15. Ex-file – A file bounced to a random folder which you are mysteriously unable to locate.
  16. Phantom power- Disappearing kettle leads.
  17. Q-jumping – Flitting either side of the frequency you need
  18. Pandemonium – A mix with ridiculously complicated imaging
  19. Rampage – working with a flagrant waste of computer resources
  20. C4getting -Having to look up the MIDI note name for Middle C
  21. Batchelor Pad – When the fucking keypad interface in Sibelius is lost somewhere on its own
  22. ABBA – When you mix up which track you are listening to
  23. Cry-cycle – The irritation caused when the playhead jumps to the beginning of the cycle
  24. Hands Solo – Frantically scrolling around the screen looking for the soloed track
  25. Sample rate: how good your sound library is.
  26. Aux Return – the studio gremlins are back (credit A Pitts)
  27. Brick-wall limiter – picking a career that will keep you from home ownership. (credit J Willson)
  28. 50-cent – microtonal rapper
Categories
Music Technology Music Theory

Steely Dan’s Peg on Push.

Trying to push my Push skills up a peg with Peg and Steely Dan’s gorgeous µ harmonies.

 

 

 

Categories
Data Sonification Lectures & Presentations

A Year of Sleep

…I wish.

Delighted to be giving the final public lecture for the Physiological Society’s snappily titled Sleep and Circadian Rhythms from Mechanisms to Function event as part of their 2018 Year of Sleep initiative. December 6 2018 Barbican, London. More details to follow.

Home

https://www.physoc.org/sleep_circadian/sleep-and-circadian-rhythms-mechanisms-function

Categories
Composition Events Health & Training Live Electronics

Careful at the Rose Main Theatre June 5 2018

Careful at the Rose Main Theatre, Kingston June 5 2018 2pm – This unique dance/theatre performance puts you in the care of five over-stretched nurses as they struggle to balance empathy and efficiency, compassion and clinical proficiency. Inspired by its makers’ experience of long-term hospitalization, Careful celebrates the skill, beauty and toil of professional nursing as seen through the eyes of the patient. Introduced by Professor Karen Norman, a leading expert in nursing, the performance forms part of The Art of Nursing, an annual event hosted by Kingston University and St George’s hospital.

This event is designed for students and professionals of nursing, though members of the public are very warmly welcomed to attend.

Careful was developed in collaboration with the Clinical Skills and Simulation team at Kingston University and St George’s University London. The collaboration has also led to the development of workshops designed to enhance self-awareness and non-technical skills of patient care, which now form part of the Nursing practice curriculum.

Careful is a project by Chimera, an arts company/research network dedicated to making engrossing artworks about, for and with the medical and healthcare sector. Led by Dr Alex Mermikides (Guildhall School of Music & Drama) and Dr Milton Mermikides (University of Surrey), we also create impactful events for students, researchers and the general public. Our work has been supported with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Arts Council England. www.chimeranetwork.org.

Event details

Duration 90 minutes, including introductory talk and post-show discussion. Please note that the event will be filmed for evaluation and publicity purposes. Book FREE tickets here

 

Categories
Composition Live Electronics Music Technology

Clapping on Push

Here’s another classic process piece used as a ‘Push Etude’, Steve Reich’s Clapping. Even though it was written after Piano Phase, it is somewhat simpler (certainly to perform), relying on discrete rather than continuous phasing, so fits well into the discrete conceptual world of MIDI rhythm. The challenge here is to program the seminal pattern (which can be heard in triple or duple time like much of Reich’s Ewe-inspired phase pieces). You could of course play it in but I’m trying to roast my Push 2 programming chops. Duplicate the track and then shift it over in steps (you could also set global quantise appropriately and restart one clip at the appropriate metric point, but I wanted to make use of the lovely clip view now available). Unfortunately the push has little control over the fine control of offset, a shift move (as far as I can tell is always a semiquaver (1/16)) so I’ve set the Set to 6/8 rather than 6/4. I’m not sure of a more elegant way to reset the start offset other than how I did it, let me know if you can!

Being an 8×8 grid (we do generally reside in the normative binary default rhythmic world like it or not), the Push represents the 12 slots over a row and a half (I’d like to be able to move the rows into 6s for example) so imagine it like this:

You can then apply the pattern to melodic material as I’ve shown later in the video. Enjoy, njoye, joyen, oyenj, yenjo, enjoy.

Clapping for Push 2 Project

 

Categories
Audio Production & Engineering Music Technology

The Uncanny Valley of Instrumental Emulation

Categories
Composition Live Electronics Music Technology

Piano Phase on Push 2

Ableton Push 2 and Live 10 are incredible devices, both progressive and able to integrate seminal electronic, process and generative creative practices. In order to start exploring their potential I’ve been experimenting with recreating classic works as succinctly and fluently as possible. Here’s Steve Reich’s Piano Phase using just one track and Live 10 and Push’s new melodic sequencer layout which I find hugely valuable.

In essence you can break down the classic theme into its component pitches, and reform them by pitch rather than rhythmic placement.

Here’s the video and Live Set to explore. Piano Phase Push 2 Project

Quick overview: Set scale on Push to E Dorian and form the patterns from above on teh 1st, 2nd, 5th, 6th and 7th degree of the scale respectively. Once you can do this it can be fun to enter them in diferent orders, add chords to each of them and of course use in your own improvisational/compositional practice.

The phasing is super simple (naive really) each dial completes a rotation so you can settle on each semiquaver confidently before moving to the next rotation. This could all be done in microtemporal MIDI (creating fewer artefacts) with M4L devices but I like the ‘in-the-box’ constraint, maximising pre-existing tools.

Piano Phase Push Project (change the MIDI instrument to whatever you like)

Categories
Jazz & Improvisation Music Theory Publications Research Writing

Music & Shape

Very satisfying to receive this series of books from OUP at long last. Very pretty looking academic books, if you can believe that. My chapter with Eugene looks quite cool including all those brain bending Coltrane Cubes, M-Space and improvisational fields.

Available here

 

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