Messing Around

One thing I've been trying to do in organizing my studio is to set myself up so I can be more improvisatory in my music-making.  Initially, didn't have a controller keyboard attached to my DAW; it took a while, but now I do.  I also got Lemur for iPad a while back and have spent quite some time playing with different configurations for that; I recently settled on one that covers a good bit of functionality for the Moog Modular V.  And getting to know one softsynth reasonably well (the MMV) has been important, too, making it easier for me to figure out how to create the sound that I want.  String all of this together, and music-making looks a lot more musical and a lot less like programming.

This makes it easier to create the kind of music I've been interested in making from the beginning.  At first, I thought the way into that sound was through careful -- even obsessive -- attention to structure and detail.  It turns out I'm not so good at that; I get overwhelmed and lose my focus and inspiration trying to manage tiny particles of music.  After reading some of Morton Subotnick's writing and hearing/witnessing a lecture/performance of his, I've discovered that I can get much closer to what I hear in my head by just messing around, creating some imperfect but honest expression of what I feel and then going back and pushing, prodding, tweaking it into shape.



This piece started with a couple of sounds I heard in my head:  I wanted to see how closely I could synthesize a dripping faucet, and there was a kind of crash sound that I made using the LMMS in In Three II that I really liked and wanted to try to recreate in the MMV.  As I worked on the faucet sound, I came up with the sound you hear here and decided I liked it more than a faucet.  I then controlled this "singing faucet," as I called it, with the sequencer in the MMV, coming up with a semi-random pattern controlled by two out-of-synch LFOs to trigger the sequencer on and off.  While looking through some of my old sound designs in the MMV that I might use as a basis for the crash, I found this bell-like sound I liked and added some noise to it, running it through the LPF with the frequency tied to the keyboard.  However, instead of controlling it with the keyboard, I used a pad grid I built in Lemur with a 1/2 step (x-axis) by tritone (y-axis) design.  As I messed with these, I began to imagine a shooshing sound cycling in and out; I implemented this using the MMV's pink noise run through its Bode frequency shifter (the change in the phase gives it the shooshing) and controlled it on the Lemur. After that, it seemed to want some thick, dark, bottom notes; this was just a series of the MMV's square-wave oscillators tied together, with one of them taken out of phase periodically to give it some unpredictability, and then run through the LPF.  Using the Lemur, I was able to control the LPF's frequency and resonance simultaneously.

What's exciting about this for me is that it's much easier to produce expressive sounds with this approach, and it sounds much more natural, too.  The real-time nature of it makes it feel more like a performance and less like I'm Ray Harryhausen's apprentice.  I hope you enjoy it!