#27

I am thankful that I was finally able to buy a double bass - I waited about 15yrs - and then about 6 months ago a friend called me and asked if I was interested in buying his old one (which I’d played many times) because he was upgrading to a new one.
I’ve played electric since I was a teenager and always dreamed of having a double bass.
My friend sold it to me for much less than it is worth.
So now one sits in my music room,
for me and my family and friends to play anytime.
This is my first recording on double bass.

6 Likes
#28

What a lovely idea. I thought about this a lot, and there’s a lot I am thankful for, including gear. I love my piano, my guitars, my various MPE controllers and soft synths and DAWs. My collaborators too! But so much of my last year of music has involved DSP, soft synths, open source, and the like. So I realized the bit of equipment I am most thankful for is the c++ 14 standard compiler.

With that idea in mind I set myself a challenge. Can I take a theme I wrote in 2013 and render it using a soft synth that I code entirely from scratch, entirely from first principles, in C++. I allowed myself only one external library (I used libsndfile rather than writing a wav writer by hand), and I went and looked up the LPF Biquad coefficients rather than figuring them out, but the rest of it was from scratch.

That’s a dumb thing to do, and the code is silly, and doesn’t sound very good, but it was fun, and it made a bit of music I’m not ashamed to share. Of course, I have until Monday night to keep working on this, but then I will do too much, so I’ll force myself to stop now and share the music and the code.

Music:

Code:

7 Likes
#29

VIDEO CONTAINS FLASHING LIGHTS

I chose the Makenoise Morphagene as my tool to be thankful for. It’s my favorite module, but more importantly it, and its predecessor the Phonogene, introduced me to things like concrete music, tape music, microsound and the legacy of the SF tape center. Those ideas pushed and influenced my interests for years. So, thanks Makenoise…both for great modules, but also great manuals and sharing your influences. You were my gateway to bigger ideas.

The process for this video is a sample of how I spend most every Saturday morning. It’s a direct to disk recording of a Morphagene reel I made of OP-1 bits (sidenote: OP-1 could have easily been the tool I’m most thankful for.). After I’d built up some splices I liked, I hooked up the Vidiot, started a VHS tape I’ve been using as a scratch recording tape and hit record. This is a direct recording with no editing.

5 Likes
#30

I decided to be thankful to MakeNoise for the 0-coast.
It’s far from my most used synth and in fact I’m always kicking myself for not using it more - most of the time when I’m composing music I don’t have the patience (/knowledge) to patch it up how I want.
But as a tool to create some wild sounds and to break out of this preset mentality its great and really has taught me to approach sound making from a different perspective.

I recorded 4 different tracks with no prior planning. And between each track I removed all the cables and started a completely fresh patch.
I’ve been trying to make dark, 130+ bpm techno focused in the loooooow frequencies recently - with more attention paid to subtle modulation. So, as an antidote to that I wanted to give more space to mid/high frequencies here with a good portion of the recording time spent twiddling knobs.
Though - I still couldn’t resist adding a lower bass sound and some percussive sounds.

I did a bit of final tweaking + reverb / delay, EQ etc in Ableton at the very end

6 Likes
#31

Produced in a dark mood. ARQ heals. A bit. Thank you Zoom.
Love that machine. A very responsive creativity tool.
Track entirely made with Zoom ARQ 96. Some samples recorded from 856 for Zellersasn. Lots of sample modification and detuning… Easy on the ARQ. Unfortunaltely no modulation of start and end points. Lots of sound modification especially in the second part. Lots of dark dirt added.
Enjoy.

5 Likes
#32

I use Ableton Live Lite a fair bit as a kind of Swiss army knife. Serum’s a remarkable synth and Valahalla makes several go-to tools I use. Also, thankful for 19-tone .tun files…

4 Likes
#33

I’m particularly grateful for Ableton Live, a program I use pretty much every day. I’m also thankful for the plugin and instrument writers. In this case, on Friday, I bought a new Ableton pack of dystopian synth sounds and happened to watch an interview with Gary Numan, which was enough to inspire me to make this track.

I’d also like to add an extra round of gratefulness for this and the other communities online inspiring me to work on acquiring and improving my skills.

3 Likes
#34

…:grin:…:heart:… great video too

2 Likes
#35

Hi Everyone!

I’m thankful for electricity … the buzz from my electric toothbrush charger reminded me, so i stretched a recording of the 50Hz buzz and painted with the results:

Have a great week!

h u :slight_smile:

4 Likes
#36

Hey,
I though I was out for this week’s challenge for professional reasons, but I finished this track that I started a week ago, it is a highlight to my two electric guitars, so I’ll thank those two companions I’m extremely thankful.

But I decided to share the track here to thank @disquiet Marc and everybody in this joint, I made some great musical friends and like-mind collaborators and I’m really grateful that you guys have time to stick around.

I started the track on my Stratocaster over a drum beat, then added my upright bass (another tool I can’t thank enough) and then decided that the guitar sound wasn’t making it, I added a new track of electric guitar but this time on my Epiphone “jazz” guitar (in the end I kept some of both) , it wasn’t making it so i added my piano, recorded proper drums, and added final touches with vibes and organ. Eventually an unexpected Latin flavour popped up and added some slight percussion (cowbell).
It was a week long process but it was rewarding in the sense that the final result is far from where I started and planned to go.
Thanks once more people, love
DD

6 Likes
#37

The Caustic App for Android and iOS (Mac, Windows) is a mobile DAW with a handful of included synths. Although I have much better instruments, virtual and real, I still use it very often, mainly because of its UI (which, compared to fx Korg Gadgets and its better sounding synths, is so much simpler to use). It allows me fast prototyping of something I want to hear. I mainly use the simple sampler, which can be fed with shitty WAVs and old .SF2 soundfonds, and the pseudo modular synth (with it’s limits, compared to VCV and these things) plus the FM synth. Many times this was all I needed to combine strange noises and harmonic sequences or, like here, pads.

This simple App brought back so much musical fun to me after selling all my hardware synths some years ago, that I am really grateful. This track was quickly screwed together with some SF2s and the FM Synth.

5 Likes
#38

iris 2 is my go to software at the mo. i like working with samples and quickly making them sound unrecognisable. can work pretty much in box, lots of fx that can be controlled by lfos/adsr

these are just cello samples and quite quick bpm variations in live 8

image from the film Only Yesterday

4 Likes
#39

Hi, this is my small contribution made with Automatonism:

My humble patch: https://www.dropbox.com/s/twdhcpzzwpm4qfr/disquiet0413.pd?dl=0

It is a chance to say thanks to Johan Eriksson, the creator of Automatonism. For me it was the entry point to begin exploring modular synthesis and electronic music in general. Still learning.

Thanks Marc for providing the context for experimentation and creativity!

4 Likes
#40

very interesting arrangement. Beautiful!

2 Likes
#41

Glad you like it! Thanks for telling me.:hugs:

1 Like
#42

I am thankful for arpeggiators. This four-track piece is comprised of drums, pad, Logic’s Bell Echo synth, and grand piano with Arp plugin.

3 Likes
#43

I just traded my main microphone for a beat-up old RCA. I’m still learning it, but I like the challenge of working with it. It can sound velvety or grimy when different distances and sources are used. I ran an old Regal plywood guitar droning an open string while improvising on a decidedly nicer acoustic guitar. This is culled from the start of that dalliance.

4 Likes
#44

I have just gotten Ableton Live v10 and some new plug-ins (very timely to have this happen over Black Friday/Cyber Monday), so I took something I made while messing around with my new Izotope plug-ins and turned it into a track.

The harmonica sound is actually the guitar sample pitched up an octave. The bassline comes from converting the guitar part to MIDI.

The name Able not Evil is an anagram for Ableton Live, and Sour Rubble is an anagram for (Herbie Hancock’s) Rubber Soul.

3 Likes
#45

Disquiet0413
Random Beats
• Key: A Mixolydian BPM: 120 Time signature: 4/4 DAW: Reaper
• Instruments: Electronic drum set
• Plug-ins: Captain chords, captain deep
• I am most thankful for my Simmons electronic drum set because I have been playing drums since the age of 10 and I am now 68 and still playing in three bands.
• All sounds were chosen randomly with the help of Random.com
• The numbers and sounds chosen are as follows:
• 210/mute tabla high/closed HH
• 196/giuro short/open HH
• 12/metal BD/pedal HH
• 41/studio snare 2/snare drum
• 79/short TR SD 2/bass drum
• 16/bigdrumroll/tom 1
• 49/snappy SD/tom 2
• 185/conga slap low/tom 3
• 37/wood SD 2/crash cymbal
• 234/granite block 2/ride cymbal
• All drum parts are random

4 Likes
#46

For this assignment, I highlighted the Tocante Bistab, a handheld, touch-sensitive 24-voice analog synthesizer designed by Peter Blasser. Although it can be played straight, somewhat like a xenharmonic electronic melodica (that you don’t have to blow into), it also has a set of touch points that allow all sorts of chaos to erupt forth. When cross-modulated this way, the square wave oscillators start evolving new timbres and it can unexpectedly begin to sound like an electric guitar, an angry saxophone, a flute, a human voice, hellish machinery, or who knows what…

I didn’t immediately warm to it, setting it aside for a time after it arrived in the mail. For me, it took an intuitive approach and a temporary loss of inhibitions for it to finally click. (I still have a long, long way to go to ever master it.) I don’t understand how Peter Blasser was able to design a circuit that produces steerable, slowly-evolving chaos. It seems alive at times. Sometimes it seems like it’s playing me.

Besides using it play drones in the dark late at night, I’ve found that it can also be used to generate usable polyphonic MIDI material when fed through an audio-to-midi plugin and rhythmically quantized. I’m very curious about the other Tocante models – do they have the same fierce spirit as the Bistab? I hope to have chance to try some of them out before making another purchase.

For this piece, I created a rhythm track using an Ellitone Ultrarollz Farm Detective, which I believe is based on Peter Blasser’s Rollz-5 paper circuits. I used an instance of AAS Objeq Delay to make this sound more like acoustic drums. Then I played the Tocante Bistab on top of this, using another instance of Objeq Delay to provide an echo effect.

5 Likes