I have been awarded a creativity grant by the Maryland State Arts Council! This is truly an honor, and much needed.
I used the grant to create physical copies of my album entitled Found and Chosen, which I will be giving away at my upcoming show at the Hamilton Gallery in Baltimore.
I finished all the work for the grant, and awaiting the arrival of the recordings. I’ll talk more about them in a different post.
This ended up being A LOT of work – more than I had originally calculated. I loved every minute of it, and I’m full of gratitude and happiness.
Andy is a friend from work who also plays guitar. We were talking about a podcast where the host asks each guitarist guest a question: “What four pedals are on your board right now?” The idea, I think, is to find out what four effects pedals are most important to their sound.
Andy has sent me a few audio clips of him playing through four of his pedals. It’s super cool, and it gave me an idea.
I wrote a tiny JavaScript function that randomly chooses four of my pedals, and displays the list on a web page. Here’s an actual example:
I hooked up these four pedals and made some sound. While this combination works really well together, I’m not sure I’d have put this together without this program. I’m going to use it for a week or so, and see what happens. I predict I’ll discover a lot of useful combinations I wouldn’t have otherwise chosen.
The program itself is very simple, and only checks to see that it hasn’t chosen the same pedal twice. I get decide the order of the pedals in the signal chain. One pitfall is that it may suggest truly unusable combinations – perhaps four distortion pedals (I have four distortion pedals). Maybe that would be cool for a second, too.
Next, it occurred to me that I might want split the signal at at the top of the chain with a signal blender. I like to record stuff as I go, and lately I’ve become interested in the idea of re-amping the signal. To do that, I need to record the dry signal directly from the instrument (an instrument might be a guitar, bass, tape deck, my iPhone, drums, some keyboard, thoughts transmitted directly to the pedal board, etc.). I also sometimes transcribe guitar parts so that I can recreate it in MIDI, and having a clean signal makes it easier.
So, the signal blender sends one channel to the pedal board, and the other channel straight to the direct box. The direct box sends the pair of signals to my computer, and both are recorded into Ableton Live on their own tracks.
I can also envision adding a looper after the pedal board, on rare occasions. I use loopers extensively, and they can record/save loops. Making loops in this step of the chain could be helpful. But, it’s not actually part of Four on the Floor.
Future iterations might include a switch that modifies the number of pedals: Two, Three, Four. I think more than four will lead to endless noodling, which is what I often do. For now, four seems like an ideal number. I could pre-sort the pedals into categories, to avoid having four distortion pedals show up, or four reverbs, etc. I think this might crimp some happy accidents from happening, so I probably won’t. Finally, I can see adding a way for other people to use this function. My pedal inventory is contained in a hard coded array, so I’ll have to make an easy way for others to add their own inventories.
I think this is an interesting little device. I like the constraints. I’m going to spend the next few months kicking this around.
Building on Sound Experiment no. 14, I put together this track, along with some wigglies inspired on our trip to Puerto Rico. I’ve been quite literally doodling this on the iPad for weeks.
As mentioned in S.Ex no. 14, I used the Excess V.2 by Old Blood Noise Endeavors. The audio also features a nocturnal frog, an ice cream truck I heard on a beach in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
All of the material on the first track of this release was recorded on an iPhone between 4/22/2022 and 4/30/2022 in Puerto Rico, with the exception of a guitar loop that was recorded in Baltimore on 4/22/2022. I brought the loop to work on with my iPad, and included it in this audio postcard as it felt like part of the trip to me.
The source material includes:
various vendors selling beer and food
a walk through Ponce
a distressed stray dog
street performers
the Atlantic Ocean at Castillo San Cristóbal
invisible frogs
a fellow traveler who snored continuously during a trip to the rain forest
I got to hang out with my daughter Chloë in the Theoretical Audio Laboratory, and we made some loops. We really don’t do this often enough. Hope to change that! Love you, Chloë!
I’ve successfully completed the RPM challenge for 2022. This is my third success in five attempts, and I think it’s the best one yet.
This video to explain the why’s and how’s of this one. I’m proud of this work, and I hope you’ll check it out. If you are a Patreon subscriber, I’ll share the free download link!
I’ve got some cassettes available from Scientifically Sound Records! This release is called “Music to Hear Blindfolded, vol. 1,” and it evolved from my “write music everyday” challenge for 2021.
This music and sound on this cassette is intended to inspire and/or accompany film and animation. Some of the audio was used in my videos.
Approximately 40 minutes in length, the tape is a mix of musique concrète, found audio, loops, and stuff I recorded at the Theoretical Audio Laboratory.
This will not be available on Bandcamp, and this will be a very limited release. All tapes are signed by me.
More material from my iPhone, passed through my pedal board into a looper. I then took each loop from the looper pedal, and put them in reverse chronological order in Ableton, playing them once.
This sound experiment features sound captured on the streets of San Francisco on my iPhone, and then slipped through my current pedal board into a looper.
Are loops interesting? Are they useful? Why, or why not?
I started asking these questions in graduate school, and browsed through scholarly sources. I didn’t find a definitive answer from others, but I will put forth that “Yes, they can be intersting and yes, the interesting loops are very useful.” Maybe the why doesn’t matter.
I recently visited the studio of one of my favorite drummers, Billy Martin, in search of more information. He’s inspired me for many years, from the first time I saw him play at the Knitting Factory in NYC with Calvin Weston and John Lurie, to the time Medeski, Martin, and Wood rocked the Ottobar in Baltimore. His short instagram loops have certainly informed some of my S.Ex work (putting an iPhone under the drums on selfie mode, particularly). So it was a thrill to stand in the room where he makes this stuff, and be able to ask a few questions.
Billy is easy going, and generous with his thoughts. There were probably 10 or 12 other people there, and he spent time with everyone. I enjoyed the whole day very much.
I’m about to embark on another studio building project, and he answered my questions about his own studio, The Herman House, which is behind his home in NJ.
After spending time looping sounds in this place, I came away encouraged by how much I’ve figured out on my own this past year. I have the feeling I’m on the right track (for me, that is). And a few thoughts drifted to the front of my mind.
It’s important to get it recorded – get it on tape, in your phone, in the computer, as it’s happening. Don’t wait for perfection, and don’t lose it by spending time getting set up, practicing, etc. The content of a loop can be simultaneously magical and imperfect, and therein lies charm. They are highly usable that way. I’ve found that a lot of cool loop segments have incomprehensible time signatures, and I get lost trying to find the “one” downbeat when I’m trying to play along with them on my drums. Billy said “forget about finding the one. Just find a shape and go with it.” I really like this idea, and playing this way is new to me. Something the either adds tension to the loop, or supports it, so I’m going to work with this for a while.
