Category Archives: Shots and Clips

Algorithmic, Iterations, Shots and Clips, Sound Clips

eLog A

I listen to a significant amount of chiptune music, but it’s been a while since I’ve tried working on any.  However, I’ve recently been playing with a small synth called MiniBit that I picked up during holiday sales.  It’s devoted entirely to that chiptune/lo-fi sound, and has some quite intriguing tones, including a mini-“additive” waveform editor.   I’ve been throwing some algorithmic rhythms at it and the results are far more intriguing than I anticipated.

The following tracks feature a couple of randomly-generated and subsequently edited waveforms, along with some default drum patches, with some processing by BYOME to get the “squishy” sort of extra ambient drum bed.  These are more demo loops than full songs, but the second one seems like it could have served as the background music in a rudimentary platformer back in the day…

elog

eloga

Shots and Clips, Sound Clips

Some new clips

It probably comes as no surprise to my listeners that the pace of new music released here has slowed considerably the past several years.  Part of this has to do with the fact that I am no longer a student, and am instead a professional building up skills, clients, and my own practice in the next phase of developing my career.  That isn’t to say that I’m apart from music altogether; along with my paid work, one of my other major projects is being part of a team that’s trying to start up a new community radio station from scratch (you can check it out at https://ksqd.org, a website which I’m quite involved in, as I’m the station’s web coordinator).  Put both of those together, and my time for working on other creative projects has been… fragmented, at best.  I’m still making music, still picking up new and interesting experimental tools to play around with here and there, but mostly I’ve ended up working on small, quick experiments rather than the sorts of full-on tracks I’ve worked on in the past.

So, for your listening… “enjoyment,” the following is a selection of the (more interesting) sound clips I’ve whipped up in 2018:

First up, a potential ringtone of a sort:

ringit

Then, an experiment with creating a… different type of noise:

noisetrack

A crinking experimental… something that may or may not be a tribute to Xenakis:

crinle

Some experimentation with running patterns through radical effects:

asojhafabcd

asojhafab

asojhafa

And some slightly eerie tonal granularization:

ambi ent

Shots and Clips, Sound Clips

Collected Clips

So, no surprise, I’m still busy with a dozen different things, which means that it’s been a good long while since I’ve actually sat down with my DAW and really worked extensively on a comprehensive new track.  That’s not to say, though, that I haven’t still been involved with music.  It’s just been a different process, more quickly playing around with stuff on my phone or tablet when I’m on the go, or pulling up a program and trying out a quick idea in a spare minute.  Or, for example, singing random weirdness into the new Music Notes program and seeing how surreal the accompaniment can get:

My Idea 2

What that means is that while I don’t have a ton of really cohesive songs to post, I do have a whole bunch of myriad random sound clips, that nonetheless have some very interesting sounds to them.

Such as this quick improvisation in iKaosscilator:

iK

Or a couple of really quick clips of how the same underlying sound can be dramatically different just by tweaking a few effects:

Climb

Scrub

Speaking of which, I’ve been playing around with a lot of new experimental effects, which can do quite a lot with even a very simple two-note sequence:

Kabalang

Karanga

And then, um, there are these…

UTF-7

recording-21-10-15_07-22-23

Gobsh

Skremm

General Pasteboard

gringy

So, yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to music-wise recently.  Admittedly, among some of these various tracks are some other clips that I think have some promise as the basis of a more extensive work, which will be heading for my DAW likely at some point in this next year (assuming the US isn’t swallowed up in a ravenous vortex of vicious politics).  I’m still playing around with sound, still making music, even if it is a little bit more… bite-size at the moment.  (Oh, actually, I did come up with a more complete track recently… trouble is, it’s another one for the NSFAE album, which means I can’t exactly release it here.)

In other news, while I haven’t really had a chance to utilize it a whole lot yet, I finally, after years of delay, made the jump to Logic Pro X.  Which does, admittedly, have some nice features, although it killed off all of my 32-bit plugins, some of which I do miss dearly, although some of the replacements are even more promising (for example, CamelSpace, from the Apple-devoured Camel Audio, was a nice and extensive trancegate plugin, but Tantra takes it to a whole other level).  And, in the interim, I have to admit that my musical style and technique have changed quite a bit, so while I miss some of the old sounds, a lot of the newer instruments that still work are more directly applicable to the things I’ve been wanting to work on, including some phenomenal granular synthesis instruments I’ve been having fun with.  Between that and the rather impressive mini-studios I’ve managed to get going on my tablet, there are more opportunities than ever to explore the boundaries of sonic character, and I already have some fascinating ideas about what I want to try next…

Shots and Clips, Sound Clips

Random Sliding Thing

A short clip that I came across while going over some audio projects I was working on on my PC.  I do most of my processing on a Mac, but I keep a PC DAW around for the plugins that are only available as .dll VSTs.  I haven’t had a PC setup for a while, but after picking up Music Creator 6 in a sale I decided to reconstitute it, and reinstall all my old PC VST plugins from backup.  During that process, I came across some other related folders, and found this unusual but oddly compelling audio clip resulting from one of my older experimental projects.

Random Sliding Thing