Category: studio journal

Video, audio, patch notes

Guitar Through Gates

A trial run

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A little after-dinner experimentation, making some headway amid our collective new abnormal. When I post things here I myself recorded, I tag them [studio journal](https://disquiet.com/tag/studio-journal/). Acoustic guitar through randomized sequences of gates. Took awhile to sort a good BPM to align with the strumming: too fast and the chord ended too late; too slow and the gating ended before the chord fully rang out. This is a little first-time experiment with the new Torii script (version 0.3.0) by Steven Noreyko, running on a Fates (aka an open-source Monome Norns port). A Zoom H4n served as the microphone, and that’s a little Boombotix REX speaker in the foreground.

And that is the first time I’ve used my toe to trigger a button on the Fates. I originally wrote “my toe to trigger the Fates” but that sounded ominous

Update: I swapped out the [instagram.com/dsqt](https://www.instagram.com/p/B-GleOlBJt3/) embed of the video for [youtube.com/disquiet](https://www.youtube.com/disquiet).

After Leaving

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

After today’s Leaving Records event, I needed some late-night guitar/Norns/Grid time. (Fates, not Norns, but you know.)

Update: Someone on Twitter asked what these things are. The little hexagonal box on the left is a little speaker. I need a louder small, portable amplifier. “Louder” and “small, portable” generally work in inverse proportion to each other along a single axis, so I need to choose where on that axis I want to be. The thing with all the lights in rows is a Monome Grid. The Grid is a controller that does nothing on its own, but lots of different things when connected to a laptop or other devices. The little black box to its right with a tiny screen is a Fates, which is a take on the open-source Monome Norns. It’s the sort of device that makes the Grid sing (or perhaps vice-versa). It runs various scripts and engines that create and/or transform sound. The script I’m running here, called Cranes, lets me loop in real time the sound of the guitar being fed into the Fates. That’s an acoustic guitar in the foreground, and the little black wire stuck onto it is a microphone I borrowed from a friend (given what’s going on in the world, maybe I can return it in a few months). The setup is too quiet. I need a preamp, or maybe to run the microphone through a reverb pedal before sending to the Fates.

Take on the Quiet

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The sun’s down, and the city is quiet. Quieter than usual, for obvious reasons. Hunkered down, you find online connections more important than usual. You download the alpha version of a new piece of audio software, install it, and take on the quiet, a few looped notes at a time.

“Gain Entrance (Test)”

A third week in the Weekly Beats series

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is the third Weekly Beats of 2018 — the third week of the biennial series wherein people upload tracks they’ve recorded as part of a communal challenge. It’s a bit like one of those largely non-competitive marathons where the majority of the people are just there to run alongside each other, and the only person anyone is gauging their performance against is themselves. (Which is to say, it’s like the Disquiet Junto to some degree.) For this week, I continued my efforts to combine electric guitar and modular, to run my guitar through my modular synthesizer in a manner that is, in essence, a very large effects pedal. My main goal this week was to incorporate a third element into the guitar + modular combination. The third element is piece of software called Rack, available for free from [vcvrack.com](http://vcvrack.com). It’s a virtual modular, for which at this stage well over a hundred different modules have been created, most of the available, like the software itself, for free download. I have a physical module in my rig that lets me send and receive both audio and CV (control voltage) signals, and so I hooked that up to Rack and used Rack-based modules to augment the sounds being processed by my physical modular synth. [Last week I ran the full guitar line through a looper](https://disquiet.com/2018/01/14/fever-pitch/), whereas this week I experimented with just sending two bands of the audio spectrum. It’s still very much a test case, but I thought it more important to get something up this week, to maintain the Weekly Beats cadence, than to skip a week out of self-editing. There’s some overdub toward the end, where I layered in material from an alternate take. That latter material involves no live playing. It’s all the circuit afterglow of the recording, where the guitar fragments caught in the system cycle through, morphing a tiny bit as they go. I didn’t upload this piece to SoundCloud, but you can give it a listen on the Weekly Beats website at [weeklybeats.com/disquiet](https://weeklybeats.com/disquiet/music/gain-entrance-test).

This is what the virtual modular setup looked like:

And this is what my modular synthesizer looked like:

Building on “Fever Pitch”

Joseph Branciforte has created a duet by adding to a track I recorded.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Disquiet Junto has been going on since the first week of January 2012, and though I have moderated the Junto from the start, and we’re currently on the 316th consecutive weekly project, and the [mailing list](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto) has over 1,200 subscribers from around the world, I myself have participated less than a handful of times, most recently this past week, for project 0315.

I hadn’t recorded the piece of music, [“Fever Pitch,”](https://disquiet.com/2018/01/14/fever-pitch/) as part of Junto 0315 initially. I recorded “Fever Pitch,” in fact, for an entirely different weekly music project series, one called [Weekly Beats](https://weeklybeats.com/disquiet/music/fever-pitch). When I subsequently recognized that the simple track, just a guitar line filtered by a modular synthesizer, fit the constraints of Junto project 0315, I posted it for that as well. There is a lot of cross-pollination among only compositional series. For example, I wrote a poem for the great Naviar Haiku series on the occasion of its [40th weekly project](https://disquiet.com/2014/10/09/disquiet0145-theresalifetimein/), and some people have cross-posted pieces of music between Naviar and Junto, which share a bit of the same roster in general, and we have collaborated [once](https://disquiet.com/2017/08/24/disquiet-junto-project-0295-disregard-echoes/) or [twice](https://disquiet.com/2014/03/27/disquiet0117-naviarjunto/).

In any case, the point of project 0315, “First Chair,” was for musicians to make short pieces of music that would serve as one third of a trio, with the idea that in the following weeks other musicians would, in turn, flesh out the trio. It’s an exercise in asynchronous collaboration, which is a central theme of all Junto projects. The sequence originating with Junto 0315 is simply a reinforcement through emphais of that concept.

Well, as part of Junto 0316, which is currently ongoing and will close at 11:59pm on Monday night, a Brooklyn-based musician named Joseph Branciforte did me a great honor. He added a second part to “Fever Pitch,” which he simply titled after the day he recorded it, “January 18, 2018.” It’s a marvel of simpatico consideration, his Fender Rhodes, coaxed by some [effects pedals](https://www.instagram.com/p/BdlvXDxFvz1/), filling in the blanks left by my guitar. I’ve been fiddling with a modular synthesizer since 2014, when I started to assemble one after marveling at a performance by Marcus Fischer at Powell’s Books in Portland at an event for my then just published book on Aphex Twin’s album *Selected Ambient Works Volume II*, part of the Bloomsbury 33 1/3 series. Since last July, when I started taking guitar lessons weekly, my synthesizer has gotten less attention, but I recently got into using the synth as an oversized effects pedal, which is how this piece came about.

All of which is to say, I’m writing this evening to thank Branciforte for the great pleasure his piece — that is, his piece and my piece in tandem — has brought me. There is a misunderstanding that music critics are frustrated musicians. I’m in no way a frustrated musician. I have such low expectations for what I might accomplish musically, that learning guitar and synthesizer is just as sequence of pleasurable discoveries fed by curiosity and reinforced by the steady pace of practice.

As I write this, there are already 21 tracks by almost as many musicians in the [0316 Junto, “El Segundo,”](https://disquiet.com/2018/01/18/disquiet-junto-project-0316-el-segundo/) some others of which have also built on my “Fever Pitch.” I’m just beginning to work my way through the accumulating duets, and listening for the space they leave for what will soon be trios.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/joseph-branciforte](https://soundcloud.com/joseph-branciforte/january-18-2018-disquiet0316?). More from Joseph Branciforte, who is based in Brooklyn, New York, at [josephbranciforte.com](http://www.josephbranciforte.com/), [twitter.com/josbranciforte](https://twitter.com/josbranciforte), [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCRLfR5Cwt6i3PaLawqJdsQ), and [instagram.com/josephbranciforte](https://www.instagram.com/josephbranciforte/).