noah adler

Reminder to self: remember that fretted instruments have their character based not insignificantly on the sounds their tunings make easy to voice. guitar sounds the way it does for a reason. use the hand patterns that feel funky and you just may be coaxing out the inherent characteristic funkiness of the guitar. don’t be overly anxious to jump into music theoretical chord patterns. don’t be afraid to use plenty of open strings and patterns and time signatures that don’t really make much sense but feel good.

(I wrote this down on a piece of paper a few months ago when watching this.)

I’ve been playing a lot of music recently. I’ve fallen in with some great players in a band called Fuma (http://fuma.fm), whom I feel extremely lucky to be playing with.

Here’s a clip from our show last night at Al’s bar:

Also, big thanks and respect to Nemo & the Free World for their killer performance. Check it out.

playing with toys.

• Stillbirth Nomad Mix

Yesterday I, along with my good friends Dan and Steve, spent the day making music. I first read about the Immersion Composition Society and their “Twenty Song Game” quite a while ago (and even bought their book), but for some reason Dan decided to wait until right after I started a new job before he was willing to participate. Anyway, none of us ended up meeting the goal of twenty songs, but we all had fun and made some decent music. I had planned to record a bunch of improvisations and then remix and mash them up, but the idea was savaged by the apparent difficulty of beat-detection for cutting up the loops. Consequently, the improvisations have to stand by themselves:

1. Rusted Rage
2. Soul Chub
3. Longing
4. Macchiato
5. Fish Cannon
6. Nod
7. Space Race
8. Trapdoor
9. Fireflies
10. Dynasty

With my newfound appreciation for weekend, I also used Saturday to work on a project I started back in Kentucky. I finally got around to painting the pickguard and headstock of my $80 Bullet Strat.
3706

Despite being more tired than I’ve been in quite some time, I’m happy with how I spent my weekend.

February has come to an end, and with it my chance to complete the RPM ’07 Challenge. Despite my best efforts, I failed to record a whole album. However, I was working ambiguously alone, and I nevertheless did get quite a bit accomplished, at least in terms of learning. I may not have anything finished, but I’ve got quite a few nice starts. I suppose I should’ve devoted more time to this, but as always, I had my hands in too many projects (some of which I’ll detail in future posts), not to mention entertaining visiting friends, hanging out, etc. I thought I should go ahead and post what I have done so far. Perhaps some critiques at this stage in development will lead me in another direction in some of these experimental ideas.

• Acoustic Grains
• Arpeggiated DnB Experiment
• Dirty Pizzicato
• Spooky Thumbpick
• Floating in Five

These five aren’t the only things I did during February, but they are the least experimental, and, though I hate to admit, the most developed. I will certainly continue working on these, and record more for them.  I’ve written some lyrics for a few of them, and will record the singing as soon as I can compel my roommate to stop rearranging the basement mics every twenty minutes.

Though I first looked at ChucK quite a while back, I recently decided to give it another look and give it an actual try for more than a few minutes. After playing around with it for an evening, I ended up liking it a lot more than I had previously. The feature set has improved markedly since I last tried it, as well as the consistency and thoroughness of the examples. There are still a few areas I would definitely like to see added, mostly centered around integration with other audio applications. Being able to load ChucK scripts as a VST/AU/LADSPA plugin would be a nice advantage, although routing via Rewire or JACK would be about as good. If my interest with this language keeps up, I may decide to get involved with the development and implement some of these myself.

I’ve wondered about alternative scores for music performance a lot, and while a ChucK script may not be exactly what I’ve been thinking about, it might make a lot of sense for virtual accompaniment. A properly written score could direct the human performer, playing a specific part such as guitar or voice, via visual cues; at the same time, the input of the performer could be processed by the program to affect changes in the machine’s performance. Louder RMS values on the input could be reflected by more rapid note generation by the computer, more periodic transients could lead from ambient soundscapes to rhythmic sequences, different instruments could noodle about on riffs within the current chord, etc. Of course all the typical MIDI and OSC control tricks still apply. All this could surely be done with Ableton Live or any other host with sufficient plugins, but setting up some of the more complicated things with that particular model could be roundabout, to say the least. Obviously everything could be done with C++ as well, but it would take forever and be tough to maintain across platforms. The point is that ChucK seems to be a good middle ground. While it isn’t a ready to go solution, it offers a direct and quick path to implement any of silly audio ideas floating around.

I’ve attached my first little experimental composition script, and a sample performance of it. It uses the Stk instruments, so sounds a bit similar to many of the examples, but I think it’s a bit nicer. It’s short, but it certainly gave me a nice introduction and greatly increased my comfortability in the language. Hopefully I’ll soon be capable of writing some longer, and nicer compositions.