Marc Hasselbalch – "Howdy Maestro" (download)

Releases
1

Hello all.

Today I’ve released “Howdy Maestro”, a four part 31 minute piece using mainly a broken sitar, transducer, computer-controlled motor and Supercollider oscillators and processing.

Very short snippets of each parts

Listen and buy at:

PROCESS:

I was gifted a battered and broken sitar by a fellow sound enthusiast. Only a few strings left, sympathetic strings broken, tuning was difficult, etc etc. So I toyed around with just exciting the few strings that were left with various Supercollider oscillators, mostly just pure sinewaves, having them do chords and sweeps to listen to the silvery timbres. I was doing some recordings with a shoddy homebuilt motorized monochord at the time, so I transfered that setup to the sitar, having the motor excite the strings via a rubber tube and a piece of soft felt.

All the parts are, in some way or another, connected to the sitar. Either through directly playing it, processed recordings of it, things being transduced through it or all of the above. I also did some wonderful wonky stuff with tracking pitch and amplitude of some of the source sitar recordings, using that control data on a wonky, phase-modulated sinewave oscillator in Supercollider and then transducing that through the sitar string. With certain configurations of the pitch tracker, it will just go nuts, sometimes lightly but somethings violently overshoot and track brief overtones. I also did a short setup where this is implemented in a feedback loop, so the pitch is tracking itself, which of course goes nuts every easily.

I hope you’ll enjoy it.

DOWNLOAD CODES:

w3nl-3ba4
caaj-hhua
sf96-55a7
pw32-b335
xx7e-b8gr
jq5b-wnfl
7r7m-cajj
lxwf-xb8y
qejv-ecuf
9rb7-uwam

Redeem at: https://marchasselbalch.bandcamp.com/yum

7 Likes
2

Excited to listen to this!
I used download code qejv-ecuf

Thanks for sharing!

3

Great concept for an album. I am listening now. Thanks for this!

4

I used w3nl-3ba4 – thank you! Sounds great so far.

I’ve always liked the work you post here, and it usually seems to center around unique ad-hoc setups like this one. Has that always been your approach? Do you consciously avoid putting together the ultimate set of tools, or using any one tool/instrument too often?

2 Likes
5

Thank you for saying so.

I think it’s a mixture of things. Mostly because I tend to get easily bored with setups and need to do something else to keep myself interested. Sometimes just adjustments to a simple setup to yield complex – or just different – results.
I wouldn’t be able to assemble the ultimate setup if i even wanted to. Not sure what that would even be. Different tools for different tasks, I guess. But after all these years I’ve found myself circling back into setups that then seem fresh or have slight adjustements made for the new “task” at hand. Which is fine, I don’t give it much thought.

Short answer: I change setups because I bore myself easily.

3 Likes
6

haha mark i’ve just twigged that it’s you behind mockfuneral! i didn’t realize. i love your work on ‘brushed steel minesweeper’. looking fwd to hearing this

2 Likes
7

Hey Elin. Yes, that’s indeed me. Thanks.

8

Thanks, psyched to check this out!