Can I just say that this, if it works as advertised, induces in me a severe case of gadget need? The idea of playing live alone with a laptop thrills me about as much as it probably would an audience, and I’ve been trying to rough out setups that involve something more — and this is perfect, in that it crams mixer, recorder and effects into something small enough to schlep in addition to, say, a smallish synth or two. Pluperfect, in that you can even eliminate the laptop. Await news of pricing with interest. Not that you want any cold...…but you definitely don’t want the one I have. After a day of endurance, 24 hours’ sleep and another day of endurance, I am now coughing sporadically, cannot breathe through my nose, am seeing double and feel that slight sense of unreality you get when your body temp is out of whack. Have written half of two new songs in the midst of this, but cannot sing worth shit. So a bit more time before anything gets recorded. Sigh. Mentioned this briefly on Twitter, and it’s by no means recent, but I thought it was worth a repost here as I found it immediately motivated me to get deeper into Quartz Composer. In short, it epitomises what a tutorial should be—it quickly allows you to do something cool that both gives a hint of what further possibilities lie ahead, and is worth showing off to people. In this case, creating a rotating, lighted cube that changes height in response to audio input. Week TwoI should note that these are Martian weeks, made up of Arctic days, and should not be confused with any normal Earth unit of time. But wince-inducing excuses aside, the next song has finally got a head beyond other similarly half-formed ideas. The hungriest tortoise in the plodding race toward the lettuce, if you will. Working title is “Last Train”. By the wayIt’s pronounced joo-nigh. Rhymes with “you fly” or “blue pie” or “shoe dry”. The Motus Mavis Star Synth. Puts me somewhat in mind of what modders might get up to if you let them at the Tardis’s centre console. Via Matrixsynth. Geek notesA little premature given we’re still at the demo stage, but just to go through what’s making the noises on the recording: Floating-around-your-head bleeps: A blippy analogue sound from a Tenori-on processed through a bitcrusher, pitch shifter, LFO-controlled filter and delay. Drums: From the iPhone, using an app called IR-909. I do own a real TR-606, but this whole thing was done in a couple of hours in the living room and I already had the loop programmed in the phone. The strings are a Mellotron sample, slightly downgraded; the bass is a slightly-tweaked Logic sample. Both played using a Korg nanoKey on my lap. I’ve opted for a widget in the site’s sidebar rather than importing tweets as blog entries — less annoying overlap that way, I think.
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