Month: November 2010

Yes, It is time to give thanks, not for pilgrims getting fed so they could survive another year to get the great American land ripoff going in New England, but for a brand new rreplay tune, atmospheric phenomenon.

Two new experimental tracks from rreplay are available. Pop the player out in the background here and come back to read while you give them a listen.

They are from the more experimental end of our stuff. I think I was having a hard drive problem and had to use a bunch of stuff I don’t normally use for jamming, and we had no drum loops. The first, short piece is modem and dial tone sounds worked through a sampler that I played via my guitar. The second uses chipsounds and something called scanned synthesis. One of the big breakthroughs in the 1980s synth scene was wavetable synthesis, where you could construct one cycle of a sound wave of any shape you desired, load it into memory, and then play it at any pitch. While it opened up new possibilities for synthesis, it also had its limits, the most telling being that the wavetable is static, while the timbre and thus waveshape of acoustic instruments varies over time. Scanned synthesis (pdf) attacks this problem by having the wavetable change over time using shifts to the wavetable so that the sound evolves. The shifts are slow vibrations that vary over time, modelled on struck, plucked, and bowed vibrating objects (like a string, for example), and lately on multi-dimensional creations that exist in more than four dimensions. The result is much livelier, natural sounding synth where the tone evolves with the playing. Strings are actually a lively area of math and theoretical physics work right now, and I think some of the concepts from string theory are working their way into the synthesis method (pdf).

As usual, lots more to listen too at way.music. Please give us a listen.

Just an update of the Todos Somos Arizona July 29th civil disobedience soundscape. The original sounded fine on the computer speakers where I mixed it, but when I played it at H’s party, I was a bit horrified at how loud and rumbly the helicopters were on a pair of speakers that actually had some bass response. So I tweaked the mix a little: presenting the Todos Somos July 29th action soundscape remix, now with less helicopter [mp3]. If you play it on computer speakers or headphones, it won’t sound any different, but if you have a big stereo with good speakers or maybe a good subwoofer, it should be much less anxiety producing now! The sound quality is still all iPhone though. Maybe I’ll get my hands on a good digital recorder for the next time.

Todos Somos Arizona (“We are all Arizona”) is a collective of like minded people opposed to the racism of the new immigration laws being put into effect in Arizona and elsewhere. They are based in Los Angeles. You can find out more about them — and what you can do — from their Facebook page. 24 people are still facing charges stemming from the July 29th protest, and they could use your support.

This is an old thing I probably wrote 30 years ago It is a bit orchestral in a post-trippy sort of way. It has words, and this is just a draft of it, but I was pleased with how it worked out. Hope you like it. As usual, FB people might have to come to the waymusic page (http://way.net/waymusic) to hear it. I hope you enjoy it. It is not my usual fare. I’m not sure if that means it is more or less likely you will like it!

For plugin freaks, the strings are from Cakewalk’s Dimension synth. The acoustic guitar is the Godin xTSA played through Voxengo’s Perfect Space, but with the convolution set to the sound of ice defrosting in Lake Baikal instead of crossing it with the usual acoustic guitar body. The loop for the acoustic sound is made with Mobius. The electric guitar in the rhythm is played through a twangy setting on Voxengo’s great free boogex amplifier then piped through the no longer available Glaceverb reverb set to model the inside of a piano with the sustain pedal down and all the string resonating. The electric guitar in the last half of the piece is again the Boogex, this time heavily distorted with the speaker modeling turned off and run through the same setting on the glaceverb.