Friend Giskard

Friend Giskard - a new track!

Made using a Doepfer A112 8 bit sampler, various other Doepfer modules, LSDJ midi synced with a LSDJMC2,  a home made matrix mixer with feedback loops, and home made spring reverb. All the panning and envelope manipulation was done with two VCA's and an VCLFO (with a voltage inverter).

I edited the samples using a Mac running Audacity and dumped them to the A112 using a script called MAKEDOEPFER written by a member of the Doepfer forum, which converted my Wav's into sysex files. Thanks to Zoe for this!

The track was inspired by Asimov's character R. Giskard Relentov and the sample was taken from his final speech. You can listen to the whole speech here...

Friend Giskard - The Final Mix?

On a train journey I managed to mix down Friend Giskard to a state I think I'm happy with, or as happy as I'll ever be. The whole thing was done on small headphones with train noise, so I'll sit with it for a bit and play it on a few different stereos. It's possible I might have punched the kick through a bit much, but we'll see!

It ended up being a piece in two movements. The first having abstract atmospheric noises, and even a small melody structured around the four-time kick, and the second having the noises cross into a backdrop of silence building to ambient noise (with a spring reverb fade out.)

Anyhow it's got all the elements I wanted, and I think for me at least it evokes Asimov's writing.

You can listen to it here - Friend Giskard.

Is it finished? I hope so!

Salmper Version 2 - Friend Giskard

During another early morning pre-breakfast session I had the great idea of re-naming the track 'Friend Giskard' in honour of Asimov's robotic literary creation, and so added some manipulated 'The Galaxy' samples from Giskard's final speech, beat mapped my previous audio that was LFO clocked, added the booming bass drum from my ER 1, and a crappy hissy noisy, thus muddying the mix into sludgy mess which you can listen to here...

Things to do:

1.Sort out the mix!

2. Add Star Trek Theremin type Choral Sci-Fi noises.

3. Keep the track emptying into silence, I kind of like that.

4. Possibly add some LSDJ type computer jibber jabber, in sync.

5. Try and focus a feeling of robot thought processes and conversations in sci-fi-deep-space.

6. Finish the damn thing...

Samlper 2013 - Music in Progress

A new type of blogpost for a new year - I've got so many unfinished pieces of music I decided it was about time I started finished some of them, hence this 'music in progress' post, which I hope to be the first of many helping me manage the creative process.

I recorded Samlper 2013 early this morning before the family woke. It's starting point was to make an spatial-sci-fi-soundscape with a limited palette of two 8 bit samples and feedback loops, which then I modulated in three sweeps of stereo-space-time.

Version 2 coming soon...

(and yes I did mean to misspell samlper!)

May the Pang be with you

A short track made using a Commodore 64 running Mssiah.
(Drums and vocals in Waveplayer so all samples in glorious 4 bit, 8 Khz! Synth lead in Monosynth. Recorded and mixed in Logic Pro)

Kawai Battery Replacement

Recently I was lucky enough to aquire a Kawai K4r. A 1989 digital classic!

Cosmetically it was in great condition but upon firing it up the machine gave me an Internal Battery Warning.

Contrary to what I'd expect, fixing this was very easy. There isn't much about it online however, hence me writing this post to help anyone else in a simliar situation.

First thing to do is to get a Cr2032 battery. You can get these EVERYWHERE! Mine cost me a quid.

Next open up the beast; as you can see from the photos the battery is easy to find AND in a clip holder, so no desoldering required.

Remove old battery and insert new one. Screw the beast back up.

You will have now lost all your preset sounds but do not fret,  KAWAI have them all available for download! How cool is that!

These can be transferred to your machine either with SysEx using something like SysEx Librarian or Elektron C6 SysEx Manager or with a MIDI file using any MIDI sequencer program that can play it.

I decided to go for the MIDI sequencer file option.

Import the downloaded .mid file to your favourite DAW. I used Logic.

Set the K4 to: INT PROTECT = OFF, RCV EXCL = ON and RCV CH = 1.

Then play the file on your DAW - make sure the track header is set to external MIDI.

And hey presto you're up and running!

I love this machine already so more Kawai K4r posts to follow...

Laurie Spiegel Reissue

This is such an wonderful LP, I cannot believe it is over 30 years old.

To my ears it still sounds so fresh - I highly recommend it!