Passacaglia

While I was fully obsessed with Renoise this week, I had an hour spare time during my work last thursday and what else could I do as Making some Music? But: I only had the computer in my classroom at my disposal with FLStudio installed and only a few VST’s.

The less the better, because that prevented me from fiddling with synths and sounds. So I loaded FL’s native TS404 and improvised some notes on my piano that was connected to the computer’s MIDI-interface. Not bad at all! In fact I liked it, so now I had to find out some harmonies. I realised them through SuperWave’s J-M Jarre’s preset. Notice the D9-chord at the reprise of the theme in bar 13 – a small reminiscence to Bartók’s “Hungarian Dances” that I like to play (when I am in an old-fashioned analogue mood).

Now I needed a bassline: MonaLisa’s Monophonic Synthesizer did the job. After an hour of hard work (and forgetting the time – I had to run for the meeting!) the piece was almost finished! So I saved it to my thumb-drive to continue the work @home. Of course, working with my own setup I couldn’t resist the temptation to involve the Ogun synth in the project.

Now I let it rest for a while to work with Renoise – I only needed a good closure, but didn’t know what it should be.

The Icing on the cake came with Computer Music #136. When reading the Renoise workshop I felt distracted and browsed through the pages. Scot Solida’s “Synth Essentials” is always a good read. This month he describes Hermann Seib’s PPGWave simulation WaveSim. An interesting instrument and a very interesting website!

I didn’t allow myself to study the instrument thoroughly, just picked a preset – exactly what I was looking for!

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  • The Aesthetics and Beauty of Knowledge

    Shih was the opposite of facts and raw information; shih was the elegance of knowledge, the insight and skill to organize knowledge into meaningful patterns. As an artist chooses colours or light to make her pictures, a master of shih chooses textures of knowledge – various ideas, myths, abstractions, and theories – to create a way of seeing the world. The aesthetics and beauty of knowledge – this was shih.

    – David Zindell, The Broken God, 1993

  • Geek Attitude

    The attitude thing is about flexibility, portability, creativity, sociability and jamming (ran out of suitable “ity” words!). It’s about improvising – in the practical and musical senses of the word; not getting tangled in boundaries and the “right” way to do things.
    Definitely the only way to travel.
    Martin Delaney – “Laptop Music”.