Forgery League

Two recent song-a-day pieces, the latest in celebration of my new monitors. Of course, it was recorded at one in the morning when civility required I keep the volume down, so I haven’t yet heard it through the new monitors, but hey.

(And of course, now that I’ve got everything assembled, I’ve discovered that the Mbox2 emits a soft, high-pitched whine on its monitor outputs whenever it’s getting a digital audio signal from the computer - the data stream, presumably. Grr. I’ll have to see if a better-shielded USB cable helps.)

mobile (3’51”)

This one got me some dubious looks from my SO. Investigating the possibilities of Logic’s bundled FM synth - run through delay, reverb, EQ, filter, compression, trem and distortion, not necessarily in that order. Partway through it started to remind me of a bass clarinet piece by Evan Ziporyn, which plays with intervals and distortion in a similar sort of way… but in a purely acoustic way, by playing and humming simultaneously, so it’s much richer and more organic. (It’s called “Tsmindao Ghmerto”, if I recall correctly, and it’s on an album by the Bang On A Can crew.)

It felt good doing something that’s all textural, without any beat to it. When your recording software is always thinking in terms of bars and beats it’s sometimes hard to get out of that mode of thought yourself. I find it’s usually hard to combine the two methods of working - especially so since piling on all those effects eats up practically all the processor time.

If I do more like this I’ll try different tunings too.

awning (1’32”)

I still don’t totally get the Environment screen in Logic, but I’ve figured out enough to run my external MIDI devices (gosh, that was a fun day, let me tell you). Unfortunately, I don’t have the right cables to run their audio back into my computer yet, so I had to use all softsynths again.

The drums are picked out of Apple Loops (shhh, don’t tell), then distorted, compressed and gated all to hell, as seems to be my thing lately. Mostly it’s a quick and easy way to unrecognizableize a beat. And similarly, I like sounds with really short release times, that you can play like you’re sending Morse code. Ended up sounding a bit like a ‘90s remake of an ‘80s song, really…