snowflakes and drummer boy songs

apropos of weather events... snowflakes at high magification. i worked on a snowflake generator a few years back.  the pictures came out very similar... no, really :)

also, music.  good exercise i suppose to work on rendering a song you already know.  the little drummer boy.  this is a favorite of mine...

more universe-as-lava-lamp action

harley 2 pukes carbon dioxide snowballs and gushes ice.  but only when it gets close enough to the sun.  it would be interesting to hear the ice cracking and hissing as it gets thrown off.

stunningly cool music and vid

this is awesome in ways i don't even know about yet :)

On a Hill pad remix

I always wondered what the term "pad" meant in terms of music.  I think it means "padding" as in adding space, filling in... something like that.

Anyway I added some to on-a-hill.mp3 to generate on-a-hill-pad-remix.mp3.  The "spacey" quality has been enhanced, I think.

On a Hill

Here's a new tune I used Butte to generate.  On a Hill.mp3.  Enjoy...

Phasers to Stun!

If you play two beat patterns versus each other at different, but similar tempos they slide against one another... in effect they go in and out of "phase."  I'd never really listened to any example of this at length until I started picking up some Steve Reich tunes on Lala (see for example "Piano Phase".

I never have really tried this myself but for grins I put together a bidule for doing just that.  What you'll hear in 122v120-rpeg-rotator-shifty.mp3 are two horn lines.  One is running through quarter note triples at 120 beats per minute.  The other horn line is running through its triples at 122 bpm.  On top of that is an arpeggiated flute line.  The arpeggiated line is coupled to the level of correlation between the two other lines.  Initially the flute part plays more loudly the less-correlated the two horn lines are.  However, that line itself is designed to shift in and out of phase with respect to the correlation metric.  It gets complicated fast.  I have put three different patterns to use in the arepeggiator itself so you should be able to hear that as well. For grins one of the horn lines (the one which also drives the arpeggiator) is cycling back and forth between an i and iv type chord base.  I don't think I've yet listened to the entire thing repeat just yet :)

If you can handle Reich or Glass works of similar technicality you might actually enjoy it.  I've started using this as an element of a bigger piece.

For a more pure and easy to digest example... try 121v120-triplets.mp3.  That is a two line piano version which goes in and out of phase more slowly so it is easier to discern what's going on.  The notes used are  C,E,G in each of the piano lines (one an octave up from the other) but because they shift against each other there are arguably 6 different modes in a whole cycle.

Marching Too

New tune: MarchingToo.mp3 It is a bit of a "march." There's a crescendo at the end so listen all the way through!

This has one of my first attempts at non-trivial drum fills/rhythm change-ups.

A real song would throw on some sort of non-trivial melody and maybe some vocals. But I'm sticking with it being a "march" and calling it a day (weekend+day).

On the Ones sketch

Here's a sketch I came up with while playing around with some "on-the-ones" action: on-the-ones-snap1.mp3

Dancy120

I remixed some more freesound.org samples into a 120 bpm dance jig.

Song here: dancy120-cut3

The samples I used are attributed to: h.quinius (dutty grains.aif)

and ErrorCell (EC-Digi 006.aif EC-Digi 009.aif EC-Digi 016.aif EC-Digi 017.aif

Freesound remix

I've been lurking on Freesound.org for a while now. I like their idea so much I've contributed and have not one but two t-shirts to show for it :). It is a site dedicated to reusable-for-attribution sound samples. I enjoy poking around listening to bits and pieces. I'm weird that way.

To this point I've never used any of the samples. Usually in a search result I start one looping and play others on top. Much like using them in a song... sometimes the result is useful as an inspiration for something else.

Today however I found three samples right in a row that sounded neat superimposed, just by themselves. So I pulled down the samples and did a little tweaking. The result is freesound-remix-1. This reminds me of Amon Tobin. Here's a screen grab of the Logic-work necessary to get this put down: freesound-remix-1-screen.

Freesound is awesome in that it keeps track of the stuff you download so you can attribute really easily. Here are the samples I used:

By f_tts
Untitled01.wav

By dropthedyle
bongox.aif
resclaps.aif

Update: I posted to the Freesound forums to announce this little intro.