September 1974

I watched "It Might Get Loud" tonight and was inspired by how these three excellent musicians described how they make their art and how they came to do it.  In particular, Jack White's talk with his nine-year-old self and his comments about how music is often taught in public schools provoked feelings in me about my 12-year-old self taking up viola and I wondered what I would tell myself then if I had the chance.

Of course, at age 12, I had no way of understanding most of what I was going to go through during the next 10 years -- musically or otherwise -- even if I could pass the wisdom of hindsight back to that version of me.  But I realized that I am still struggling with many of the same things 40 years along, so taking a moment to articulate that advice for myself seemed like a useful exercise.  If I am fortunate, I will be more capable of heeding it in my middle- and old-age than I was in my adolescence.

Sixteen Things I Would Tell My 12-Year-Old Self Taking up Viola

1. This instrument has a beautiful voice.  Let yourself fall in love with it.
2. To play certain kinds of music, you may need to follow some rules.  However, there aren’t actually any rules.  
3. You can play anything on this instrument that your skill will allow.  (Go ahead; play Led Zeppelin if you want.)
4. If you don't have the skill to play what you want, let that be the reason to practice. 
5. Practice does not require suffering, but it does require effort.  Keep at it. 
6. It’s okay to make practice fun.  It’s also okay for it to be intense.
7. Listen for what wants to be played.  
8. Letting yourself go may be scary, but taking risk is the only way to real satisfaction.  
9. Make horrible noises.  
10. Experiment.  Dangerously.  
11. If you ever start to wonder why you’re doing this, stop what you’re doing and just play what feels good.  
12. Learn to measure others' feedback against your own sense of what works.  Give yourself time for this. 
13. Every teacher has something to offer you.  Listen especially closely to the ones that lead you to wonder.
14. Be inspired.  
15. Put your inspiration to use.  
16. When in doubt, go with what feels true.  

Maxed Out

Things have been changing around here quite a bit since my last post.  Along with goings on in my personal and professional lives, I've taken a bit of a left turn musically.  As a result of increasing frustration with the bugginess and other limitations of the Moog MMV, I looked into alternative softsynths that would give me greater power and flexibility.  While I was engaged in that search, I serendipitously ran across a reference made by Laurie Spiegel to Cycling74's Max/MSP as one of the only programs that allows for real musical invention, not limiting composers to established tonalities, rhythm structures, or even synthesis models.  Looking into it, I was at first intimidated by the learning curve (and second by the cost), but after playing around with it* during the 30 day free trial, I decided to take the leap.

I've been pleased with the results so far.  The learning curve is steep, but the program rewards jumping in and thrashing about.  Forum discussions are likely to contain basic questions answered by experienced programmers and there are some very excellent tutorials on YouTube and elsewhere for folks like me who learn best by observing.

I have made exactly zero music with it so far.  Part of this is that I have yet to figure out how to implement an idea I have that is especially well suited to Max; another part is that that project has fallen by the wayside as I have become entranced by another, more construction-oriented, project:  the additive synth.  Max's potential for additive synthesis is one of the big reasons why I decided to go with it:  the size and complexity of what one can build is limited only by the processing power of one's computer.  Plus, technically, additive synthesis is relatively simple, so it seemed like a good first project.  Below is a screenshot of the latest iteration (#8).

This version is based on adding sines in the overtone series.  The instrument allows full control over amplitude and phase of each overtone, along with exponential stretching the overtone series (partials are raised to an exponent ranging from 1 to 1.125) allowing the 8th partial to be stretched relative to the fundamental more than an octave.  The fundamental follows a MIDI tempered scale.  What I am enjoying about this project is the appreciation it is giving me of Fourier analysis:  how different aspects of how a sound is constructed change its timbre.  Although this has so far been primarily a learning project, I am now at the point where I can begin to make a more practical instrument out of it.

So what this means for my compositional productivity is that I'm probably not going to be producing much in the near future.  However, as I gain skill with this new program, I expect it will be easier (and faster) to make music with it, so in the long run, I expect it to facilitate my output.  In the medium-term, I have this idea and my work on the additive synth has helped me understand better how to implement it, so maybe soon.

In the meantime, please lend your attention to some very interesting work by a musician I ran across last fall.  All of his other work (that I've heard, anyway) is much closer to straight-ahead jazz, rock, even a little punkish, but this album is mostly about timbre -- and you know I'm all about that.

*PS:  For those who might be interested, there is an open source program that does essentially the same thing as Max:  it's called Pure Data.  I spent a fair amount of time considering it Pd, too, since, being open source, it's free.  I went with Max because it has better support for non-programmers like me, but for those who are unintimidated by geekspeak and open source forums, Pd is a great program. 

Taking Flight

The trip home for the holidays this year was made much more pleasant by my (re-)discovery of GarageBand for iPad.  This was especially exciting because it has a few feature allowing the user to record from external iOS synth apps, in this case NLog Pro, an iPad-based synth that I particularly like.  I spent most of the 4 1/2 hour flight west tweaking sounds, building sequences, and recording tracks in GB:  I'm now convinced it's the only way to fly.  When I got home, the results became the basis for this new piece, named because of the sense of freedom and optimism it evoked in me -- and which, in turn, came from the bright anticipation of a week with family and friends.


This was a tremendously fun piece to write.  One of the things I love about NLog is its ability to create easily sounds with complex, scintillating layers of overtones, from shiny leads to rich basses to hypnotic pads.  It is also available for desktop (stand alone and plug-in) which, further, allows sounds created on the iPad to be transferred relatively easily to one's DAW of choice.  The new GB feature allowing input from NLog means that messing around I do that, in the past, would have gotten lost or forgotten now can get moved to my main work application (Logic Pro 9) and actually developed. 

Another iOS app I really like that I used here is Little MIDI Machine.  It's a throwback-style sequencer with great functionality; it is very stable, works well with other iOS synths, and is relatively intuitive.  It's great:  by setting it up to run in the background while controlling, in this case, NLog, I can switch back and forth to either work on sound design in the synth or the music in the sequencer, letting the evolution of each influence the other.

Although it was very fun, I'm a little self-conscious about this piece:  Despite three years of music school (30 years ago), my knowledge, understanding, and feel for harmony is very weak, and the vertical structure of Flight Song reflects this.  It's a very, very simple piece.  That said, sometimes happy feelings are pretty simple:  there was not much need to adulterate my joy with gravity's alloys.  I hope you find listening to it as fun as I did making it.

This work was composed using TempoRubato's NLog Pro, Synthetic Bits' Little MIDI Machine, Apple's GarageBand (all for iOS), Apple's Logic Pro 9 and its native synths, and NLog Polysynth for OSX. 

Aurrery

Here's a new piece!  I invite you to listen to it before reading my comments: 



This came from a flash inspiration I had while driving home one night (something I spend a lot of time doing these days), when Venus was blazing in the sky well after sunset.  The sight got me thinking about the orbital period of the planets and how they relate to each other and it occurred to me that these relationships might be represented aurally, in a kind of musical orrery.

Over Thanksgiving, I spent several hours pulling numbers off of Wikipedia into a spreadsheet and figuring out how to get the ratios of the planet parameters to fit within the range of human hearing and the limits of my softsynth modules.  I had decided to represent the orbital periods with LFO-controlled LPFs (making a wah-wah), while the pitch of each line would represent the mass of each object.  The orbital periods converted easily enough to frequencies within the range of my LFO, but the range of the masses was wild:  if I assigned Jupiter the lowest pitch, say a nice fat 32 Hz, Mercury would be about 185 KHz.  So I took a page from my statistics classes and did a square-root transform on them and they fit very nicely!

This was all well and good, but it wasn't very musical:  if you turned them all on at once, it was pretty cacophonous, kind of like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams all going after each other with Wiffle Bats and piped through a tape delay.  Not to say that I don't enjoy a good cacophony now and again, mind you, but it needed, well, something. 

You can decide for yourself whether I succeeded in creating a passably engaging piece of music here; I was personally surprised by how well it turned out.  I filled out the family, of course, with tracks for the sun, the Asteroid Belt, a couple of innominate comets, and the Kuiper Belt.  As I worked on the piece, I imagined myself flying slowly (relatively speaking) outward from inside Mercury's orbit, through the rocky planets, across the Belt, around the Giants, and finally ending among the KBOs.  As I often do, I relied on texture to provide interest, playing with the wave forms (pre-LPF) and a few simple effects to create a voice for each object.  Overall, the piece is fairly representational, but not strictly so.  I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I did making it. 

This was created using Apple Logic Pro 9, its native ES2 softsynth, TempoRubato's NLog PolySynth, and sounds shared on Freesound.org. 

Perfect Existential Angst

Like many of us, I studied Macbeth in high school, along with a handful of other Shakespeare plays, but, also like many of us, I didn't really grasp it at the time.  In fact, it wasn't until the last year or so, when I've been on sort of a Bard binge, that I've come to feel I can really appreciate the play.  I think one has to accumulate a certain number of years to understand the fears underlying the self-destructive ambition that drive Macbeth and his wife.  In particular, the existentialism of his soliloquy in Act V, scene 5, upon learning of Lady Macbeth's suicide, demands of the reader/audience at least some awareness of one's own mortality. 

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

The more I saw productions of the play this past spring and summer, the more I was moved by the perfection with which Shakespeare conveys the inherent meaninglessness of life, the irony of existence.  Here is a man (Macbeth) who, as nearly all of us do, sought meaning outside himself, and is forced to face the empty-handedness of his grasping attempts.  (Fortunately, most of us do not come to this eventuality with the cruelty and finality that Macbeth does.) 

I do not find this speech dispiriting; rather, to me it describes the blank canvas of our lives, the surface upon which we may express whatever we wish.  Life does not come with meaning; if we want it, we must make it ourselves.  As, again and again, I listened to great (and not-so-great) actors say these words, as I read them to myself, I began to hear music with it.  Eventually, it became this: 

As you can tell, this is a very different piece from what I've been doing, but it was a lot of fun and a new kind of challenge to compose.  I was inspired by the words in ways I have not experienced before.  I don't think of myself as a songwriter and have gotten further away from music with words in it as I've gotten older; nonetheless, this really grabbed me.  

It was written as a duet for tenor and viola.  Unfortunately, as I confirmed in the attempt to record the piece, I am neither the tenor nor the violist that the music requires; hence the electronic version.  This performance was constructed in Logic 9 using, for the voice, the native EVOC-20 digital vocoder over a sawtooth wave from the native ES2 digital synth, and Native Instruments' Kontact Player plug-in with the Garritan Personal Orchestra's solo viola sample.  Despite the piece's conceptualization as acoustic, I endeavored not to shy from the electronic sound; I believe it works reasonably well, if nonetheless different in character from my original intent.  In composing it, I started with the vocal line and struggled for several weeks with how it should be accompanied.  After futzing with a lot of different ideas, I began to hear a simple accompanying line, which I worked out in its entirety before deciding -- realizing, really -- that it should be played on a viola.

As it was my original intention that it be performed acoustically, I would be thrilled if someone who has the chops I lack is interested in playing it.  I have the score and would happily share it with anyone who wished to take it on; I would only ask for a recording of the performance, either audio or video.  Just contact me via the comments. 

On Traveling and Distance

This piece started out with a very different intent and mood from how it ended up.  Initially, I was striving for something pretty dark, which is where I was at at the time.  However, as I revisited it over the last eight weeks or so, I began hearing other things in it; it called from unexpected directions.  The experience was a lot like I've what heard from novelists talking about how characters develop:  you start, but they tell their own stories which you are privileged to hear first and record.  So the dark tritones with all the overtones and the saw pulse with the pinging echo that I initially imagined being the foundation of a brooding meditation began demanding a more present, less introverted evolution.  What could I do but listen?



The title is also a reflection of this process.  The initial name, which actually made itself known at the same time the original ideas for the piece did, became not merely inapplicable to the final version, but actually felt counter to it.  The current title came to mind as I was working on it this evening and seemed to fit perfectly its new mood.  It may merely be the fact that I was primed to think of it because I have been reading about recent developments in and corrections to scientists' understanding of exactly where Voyager 1 is, but, regardless, it felt right.  It was not merely a descriptive name for the piece as it revealed itself, but a metaphor for how my own life feels right now:  passing a profound but poorly demarcated boundary, crossing into a new phase in a long, important journey.

This was performed on Arturia's Moog Modular V 2.6, controlled in real time variously by keyboard and Lemur 4 for iPad; it was recorded and tweaked in Apple Logic Pro 9.

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!