Category: studio journal
Video, audio, patch notes
Guitar Through Gates
A trial run
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
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
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
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:
