This is a hybrid performance / scored piece using Kontakt 3, pianoteq, sonar 8.5, and a Korg MS2000 as a midi controller.
Kontakt contributes drums, upright bass, sax section, and trumpet.
Pianoteq 2.3 contributes the jazz piano.
The drums were scored first, bass second and then other instruments played along with that. The goal was to keep the composition to 60 seconds or less since this is a submission to the Chicago 60×60 event (not selected at this time).
The main motive is a 17 ET analog to a suspended 4th to major 3rd in common practice 12 edo tuning.
This performance at the Oddmusic Convergence used the same tuning (19 ET), equipment and software as GR-20 Hexaphonic 19-ET Guitar Improvisation with the exception that Session Drummer 3 was added. I performed two pieces that night and this one received silence for a minute and then some scattered polite applause. Afterwords I received some comments one of which was “You sounded like the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange”. I chalked that up to the use of the tritone in a riff I quoted from Toni Iommi’s composition Black Sabbath
Here is the riff on the album
the main riff of "Black Sabbath" is one of the most famous examples of harmonic progressions with the tritone G-C#
The Oddmusic Convergence (Urbana IL 12/14/09) was a great deal more “folksy” than I expected – a lot of acoustic music was presented and this piece probably was the most “synthetic”. It was a good experience and I met some interesting people. What I wish I could get my hands on is the recorded we made at the end of the show – only performers left – we played a musical game in which random advant garde musical scores were interpreted as vocalizations – each score was lines, dots, curves, in 3 colors – each color assigned to a different vocalist and six sets of three performers took turns based on a screwdriver used as a “spin the bottle” spinner. The resulting collages were interesting.
To supply the text I applied the program Marktxt to a large number of lyrics by Evan Harrington and myself and used the output as the basis of the text in this video. Marktxt is a program that someone (Mark?) wrote to attempt to converse with people on USENET through randomization of text and posting it back on to the newsgroup it came from. This was discovered on alt.binaries.gothic about 1998 or so.
The original enhanced performance render (230 megs) which is much better quality is available here: performance enhanced
This is a jazz fusion piece featuring my Fender Mustang, Guitar Rig 4, GR-20, Session Drummer 3, and the following soft synths ARP2600, Absynth 5, Dimension Pro.
This is an orchestral piece scored for percussion, strings and brass in 7/8 time and 22 EDO. It was realized in Sonar 8.5 with session 3 drummer and Garritan Personal Orchestra ver. 4 which uses the scala tuning file capable Aria player. The main idea here was to work a bit with the Sonar step sequencer and some rhythmic complexity. The score is in 12 EDO but is midi note number accurate to the 22 EDO realization and is accurate to the nearest eight note for compactness. The brass was performed on a Korg MS2000 real time in 22 EDO and then some editing done to the performance.
A couple weeks ago I purchased my favorite prepared guitar device – round split shot sinkers – i.e. fishing weights! These would out nice because they are easy to use, removable, and provide sufficient weight to unmistakeably modulate the vibration of the string.
The improvisation is not the most impressive piece of music but it does serve as a demonstration of this modification. The tuning is a hybrid of 12 EDO and ring modulated alternate tuning pitches – and I don’t know what the other pitches are at this point.
My collaborator and fuzzy inspiration Charlie has passed over the rainbow bridge 12/22/09 – very old for a ferret at 9 or 10 years old. He was adopted from a shelter and remained a touch-me-not independent ferret all his life with us. Basically… he thought he was on an equal footing with us and invented several ferret games to play with the humans in his life. He will be missed.
Artist’s description:
This started as a iffy improvisation with my newly purchased Kontakt. Its still iffy. I tried to fix it but the end wasn’t the same without the beginning.
This is not one that will gather awards….
scored for
trumpets
french horns
trombones
tuba
violas
choir
percussion
two synthesizers
Stanley Ferret provides vocals.
This piano composition was an improvisation in 17 note per octave equal temperament performed in September of this 2009. On my way to the Odd Music Convergence performance yesterday I was listening to this in the car and started to hear a bit of oriental influence in the melodies. So today I dug out the pictures from a 2006 trip to a Japanese Garden and married the two.
This improvisation is performed for a Fender Mustang guitar driving a Roland GR-20 – the GR-20 provides the horn sounds – and converts my playing into midi signals. The individual midi for each guitar string is routed to Sonar 8.5 where each string has an drives an instance of z3ta+ – six in all. And then all of the of midi signals drive an instance of Session 3 drummer which provides the percussion.
The Sonar project after recording the improvisation
This study entailed learning how to simultaneously play six instances of z3ta+ in 19-ET tuning with my Fender Mustang using a Roland GR-20 as the guitar to midi interface.
I improvised in an ambient-ish style and explored the fret board combinations both in both harmonic and timbrel relationships with some melodic considerations.
The GR-20 has a mode in which each string of the guitar is assigned a midi channel, channels 1 through 6. Thus hexaphonic output is possible. In this case each string’s output is sent out the GR-20 through a midi to usb adaptor into my laptop and then into Sonar 8.5. In Sonar I assign each string an instance of z3ta+ – a software synthesizer that comes with Sonar that is microtonal capable. Each of the six instances of z3ta+ have a unique preset voice assigned and has a 19-ET tuning file loaded. In the case of the high E string, channel 1, which sounded too high for me, is transposed at Sonar by -19 midi notes which yields the octave below the one I’m playing when using 19-ET.
One of the points of doing this is to make each string spatially different – in stereo-space the strings are arranged 5 3 1 2 4 6 in increments of 20%, i.e., 20, 40, 60 percent off center each side. No hard panning allows some of the stereophonic aspects of the zeta+ voices to be heard.
Here is the improvisation – about 11 minutes and 30 to 40 megabytes depending which high quality format you choose. No post processing was done except to cut off the sacrificial midi note at the end and a slight normalization of the volume applied equally to each channel.
