Some time has passed since I last posted here. Creativity comes on me in waves, when I am stressed it abandons me – that is living a life.
I have been looking for a SIMPLE way of capturing performance. I have a DAW, but that requires me to cart my laptop to the place all the music gear is and… sometimes that is not easy. Sadly, my old MiniDisk recorder is clunky – it now skips and jitters on long recordings and hates ANY sort of vibration while recording. Getting recordings off the recorder requires me to re-record in something like Audacity, which is also inconvenient.
I have discovered a performance style I really like – it is a “sort of” overdubbing approach. Let me explain.
I like to layer audio – this requires me to be able to capture an initial performance, and then add another on top of it, and so on. Up until now I have been using my Ditto+ looping pedal – the down-side of this is that the recording is MONO – I learned that guitar pedals are all MONOphonic – necessitating my to clone the channel to the other channel to give the illusion of stereo – not ideal.
I also loooooove starting with a field recording (some spatial/stereo audio I have captured from the real world) like a storm, seascape, walk in the woods or whatever. I have a Sony stereo microphone that works pretty well, but batteries, cables and a thumping sound generated by just holding it makes that solution clunky.
I agonised (like literally for a year) about portable field recorders. The Zoom product range had some exceptional spec’d gear and, because of cookies and browser history (I guess), a “special” appeared in my DMs for the Zoom H1n – a discount bundle that was waaaaay cheaper than I had seen before, so I jumped on it (fully expecting it to be a scam – I have been burned with scam purchases before … leather alien face hugger mask for one).
It arrived, along with a multi-pack of mini SD cards (32Gb cards cost nearly nothing – how did that happen), along with an accessory pack (case, power pack, mike pop shield). In nearly no time (like, literally 10 minutes) I was using it, and I understood the feature set – sooo cool that someone can design a product that just works, and the internal GUI is intuitive. One SD card gives me a week of recording time at the highest sample rate WAV – the crossover microphones capture spatial sound deliciously – I just love it. I also love the “overdub” feature that allows me to layer performances – it creates NEW files of the newly combined layers – so easy.
Interested in all things synthesizer, I wanted a PITCHED synth that I could, for example, lay down a bass line then Theremin over the top of it. I was following the re-development of the Stylophone Gen X2 – that little stylus-based “keyboard” that made buzzy sounds and noticed they had re-worked it to include a whole lot of synth features (delay, envelope shaping, CV in and out etc) and added myself to the waiting list for when they became available. It seemed to take months for my local supplier to get stock – long after they were released overseas – all good.
Because I was now in the mailing list for Stylophone, I got propaganda for the first of their Compact Portable Modular products – a Drone Synth CPM DS-2. I thought “fuck it” and bought one also (after agonising over it’s feature set, comparing it to other things I could throw money at etc).
Long story short (TLDR), I now have a set of gear that is really fun to play with, and i have been exploring the sonic landscape now possible. Explore the pieces I have made so far:
- More on my Soundcloud account: https://soundcloud.com/wonko42
The possibilities for being sonically creative have literally exploded for me – Because both the Gen X2 and the DS-2 have CV in/out, they can talk to and control each other, and the Claravox can control them also via CV – loads of experiments I have yet to try.
My aim is to use the DS-2 as a background texture, Gen X2 as a pitched accent and the Theremin over the top as the main melodic controller – I am getting there. I also aim to be able to do all this LIVE, so public performance one day may be possible (if I can get over my anxiety of public presentation of my musical expression).
All very interesting – watch this space.
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