That makes sense, thanks! I hadn’t heard the term before.
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The Acid Rain Switchblade does this with three channels, and I think the Klavis Mixswitch does as well (haven’t used the Klavis).
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How are you making arpeggios? I was thinking about setting up the modular to play through an arpeggio chord sequence.
Thirst idea I had was Rene v1. Programming chord notes in rows. This would give fours chords. CV control of the x axis would provide for playing patterns forward, backward, ping pong etc.
With careful choice of notes you would also have other possible chord notes on the y axis.
The limit seems to be four note patterns.
The second idea I had was to use Ornament and Crime. It’s not as obvious how this would work. There are lots of options.
I picture using Sequins with it’s four patterns. Mapping the CV to the pattern number and pattern length. The Multiplier/Divider option might useful.
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I’ve been intrigued by the “record a long jam, then edit it” type workflow that a few people have referred to on this thread, but I have a couple of questions:
- The boring, technical one: what do you use to cut the recording up? I haven’t found anything that works the way I would like it to work for something like this (easily jump around in the file, play a piece isolated or looped, export it with a minimum of fuss)
- The creative one: how do you make something from disjoint clips that sounds cohesive and not collage-like?
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I usually do everything within Ableton Live, so I can easily add effects.
I’ve been also trying Reaper which I found pretty intuitive considering the fact that I’ve never read its manual and haven’t been a long time and/or frequent user.
I also use Audacity when I don’t need to add effects. It’s pretty simple and gets the job done.
I just downloaded Ocenaudio with which I’m exporting reels to my Morphagene with markers. It looks like Audacity but I like it more, feels more intuitive even with little experience (maybe I’ll change idea).
I love collages so maybe I’m not the right person to answer but here’s my two cents.
I think cohesion is a compositional perspective, so a pretty wide range of strategies can be used, depending on what your aim is, what your starting material is, what are the “boundaries” of the genre you might be exploring and, not least, what cohesion means to you and/or inside the context of the music you make. Cohesion to me is always about relationship: in order to perceive something as cohesive or incohesive there must be a comparison based on an underlying implied model of cohesion, thus a relationship between elements both inside the composition and both outside.
Usually melodic content can help bring a sense of cohesion (i.e. a call and response pattern, a different melodic outline arising from the same scale or transposition of materials etc.)
You can also bring cohesion with dynamics: softer goes with softer and louder with louder (but also the opposite can be true if you want to bring contrast).
Generally it’s mainly linked to the question of form. What is the “general shape/trajectory” of the piece? You can have climatic forms where the piece reaches a peak and then decreases or even goes ever further to reach a higher peak, you can use forms which use repetition to establish a strong idea during the course of time or even try to weave a form that doesn’t use repetition and is constantly changing.
It really depends on what you’re doing, what you’re working with and what are your needs.
To me it’s a wide subject and it’s difficult to answer your question in a more specific way.
Hope I can help and not leave you more confused than before.
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I don’t know if these things are mutually exclusive – as orbit_f says, “cohesion” is about relationships, and those relationships are in the end always constructed only in the act of listening, regardless of what the composer might think they’re putting into the piece (and this holds true even for ostensibly straightforward melodic or rhythmic material: there’s never any guarantee that the listener will hear things the way the composer intended them)… even if you simply throw a bunch of stuff together in a completely random fashion and then listen to the results repeatedly, more often than not you’ll start noticing “meaningful” relationships, i.e. a degree of cohesion (unless we take “cohesion” to mean exclusively a certain amount of predictability, for example the aforementioned structures of call-and-response, build-up, repetition etc.). I’d encourage to experiment and look for cohesion where it doesn’t immediately seem to exist – and maybe as a practical tip, I’d try to keep the source material within some kind of pretty strict limits so that the results will edit more easily together. (I also hope this doesn’t confuse matters further!)
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Late to the party, but wanted to add a slightly different perspective. I’ve subscribed to this method for a few years now, but the value for me is not necessarily about the ability to chop and reassemble, it’s more about taking the pressure off of recording and just giving yourself the space to find something magical in the performance, a hinge or pattern that really works and then improvise around that.
I recorded my last album this way – free recording/improvising for 30-40 minutes at a time, listening back a few days later with fresh ears, and maybe just grabbing 3-4 sustained minutes that work on their own and calling it (mostly) done. That way you get the cohesion of a “composed” piece, without having to worry about making the disparate bits sound like they were always meant to sit next to each other.
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