Hey friends! 
Here’s a live recording from my recent ambient set at Studio 45 in San Francisco, hosted by the wonderful @mbillz and sharing the lineup with @mbn! You can hear the whole performance below via Bandcamp, or wherever you stream your music:
Performing live again felt like coming home. In the weeks leading up to the set, I built out a brand new eurorack patch and live setup. It was centered around a generative sequencer powering a synthesized soundbath, all with a lot of hands-on control over every aspect of the sound. Pairing that with a little travel piano for improvising, a trippy little drum sequencer, and a pedalboard full of effects… it made each performance a new experience with a lot of different directions to go.
There’s something magical about improvising in front of a live audience, feeling the music take on a life of its own. Each note was a conversation with both the crowd and the synth, and together we made a unique experience that I’ll never forget. It was truly heartwarming to see so many faces, both familiar and new, gathered together.
Full notes below:
Eurorack Voices:
Sequencers: Marbles and Teletype. Teletype was running a patch imitating marbles, where CV in controlled a “spread” parameter (aka how large the note pool was)
Oscillators: Rings in modal resonator mode as something of a “lead”. Plaits in resonant noise mode and Just Friends in sound/cycle mode as 2 different washy pads. Plus Mangrove right on the edge of undertone breakup as a bass. Rings took Plaits’s aux out (white noise) as sound input for the first half of the set, then I unplugged it to switch to the bell tones for the second half
Filters: Plaits through Three Sisters low, in negative quality mode, with LFOs modulating the cutoff. Mangrove through Ripples V2 with plenty of drive
Effects: Rings, Plaits, and Just Friends mixed in Veils and routed through Beads and FXAid. FXAid switching between a Gen Loss mkI effect and a LoFi Junky effect. Then FXAid routed through a VCA on sidechaining duties before going to the master output
Eurorack Rhythms:
Sequencer: Stolperbeats, with each channel tuned to have different “densities” of hits as you spin the knobs. Switched between a few different banks throughout the performance to change up the rhythm
Oscillators: Basimilus Iteritas Alter and Plonk on Hi-Hat duties, receiving lots of modulation from Voltage Block. DistingEX for kick, snare, and percussion samples
Filters: Everything mixed in PanMix, then routed through Blades with plenty of drive
Setup:
I used the 16n to control everything I wanted to control during the set: every voice’s volume, Blades cutoff, sidechain strength, Just Friends intone, curve, and ramp, Beads reverb, FXAid settings, Marbles spread, and Teletype “spread”. This made it easy to control multiple parameters together during the set, without having to reach into the rat’s nest of cables either
Both of the eurorack cases were plugged into a TX-6 for mixing duties, along with an OP-1F on which I’d improvise little motifs for each section of the piece, responding to the crowd and what Marbles was giving me.
The OP-1F and Eurorack Voice were then sent out of the Aux out through some pedals: Blooper, Starlight, and Mood mkII. Blooper was set up in sound-on-sound mode, with a bit of Scrambler and Dropper modifiers (and low Stability) messing everything up. Starlight was doing its wonderful DMM thing, and Mood mkII I had on a low-clock crunchy reverb. The Aux out was then routed back in to the TX-6.
The TX-6 master out was sent through some more pedals as something of a mastering chain: Max for compression, Golden for a hint of plate reverb, and Generation Loss mkII for a bit of tape saturation. I actually routed this back into the final TX-6 channel, which I muted to avoid feedback, and then routed that channel out of the Cue output to the PA (unmuted in the Cue, of course). This allowed me to record both the stems and the summed master to disk.
“Sheet Music”
A single page of notes that I brought with me to remind me my plan for the performance (click to expand)
- Hit record & play on TP-7
- After you see the left marbles channel green, fade in rings on 16n
- Slow fade up plaits voice, marbles steps
- Slow fade up sidechain, bass, tx-6 ch1, and a bit of JF
- Slow fade up blades freq, teletype steps
- Slow fade up quiet JF voice (still in unison)
- Consider vibing for a bit here if it’s chill
- Add closed hat and perc1, then JF entrance
- sweep to fully +intone slowly, while moving wave shape and volume faders up
- rings volume fader down and teletype steps to 0
- time it so it hits fully +intone right on a downbeat, basically
- Immediately add the snare (and quick sweep beads pitch up to +12 if you haven’t yet)
- Unplug rings audio in
- Twiddle JF waveshape faders, ride its volume back down a bit, rings back up a bit
- Everything’s up now: first full section here
- Vibe for a while, twiddling JF waveshape, fxaid 1 (bitcrush), beads reverb, etc
- Op-1 motif (on preset 4 or 5) comes in while full section keeps vibing
- Change up stolper bank (bank 29)
- JF exit: fade JF down as you bring it back to unison intone, fade out plaits, fade rings up
- sparse section here
- Vibe for a while, twiddle FX, plus OP-1 motif on 1 or 3
- maybe cut some stolper tracks and/or bring blades freq down
- build your way up a bit by changing to stolper bank 28, add back some stolper tracks
- prepare: get fxaid 1,2,3 to a bit above zero, and mix to around 50%
- JF utone sweep
- Slowly sweep JF to utone and loud
- Right when you hit full utone, click over to lofijunky, add any stolper still muted
- then fiddle with JF waveshaper to make it rumbly and huge (both near the top)
- Fiddle with beads verb and fxaid 1,2,3 to keep making it rumblier and huger
- Change up stolperbank (bank 27) to start bringing the energy down
- Op-1 motif again, maybe a pad loop (preset 8)
- Fade out: blades freq, plaits voice, JF, marbles steps. Then Op-1, rings, and bass for last
- End with GenLoss tape stop
