Music & Techniques by Chris Vaisvil

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

And a cropped raw version is here

MP3 is here

OGG is here

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.

MP3 version
OGG version
PDF score

The prepared electric guitar

A couple weeks ago I purchased my favorite prepared guitar device – round split shot sinkers – i.e. fishing weights! These work out nice because they are easy to use, removable, and provide sufficient weight to unmistakeably modulate the vibration of the string.

Here is an mp3 of an improvisation done with strings 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 prepared (see photo) and string 6 left normal. MP3 of the prepared guitar improvisation

The Prepared Electric Guitar

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.