Day 293: Thursday 16 June 2016

Occasional Meanderings #1:

It’s been a while since I used my keyboard controllers and did a little electric piano stuff.

Not that I claim any real skills on the keys, but hey if I took anything from the punk/post-punk years it’s the idea that heart and passion and guts are more important than technical skills, you can accomplish a lot with a little. With luck.

You should certainly never let a lack of skills stop you moving, the skills will develop as you go if you give yourself a chance.

I began with Korg’s Module (my favourite iOS electric piano), I jammed it into Auria using the MicroBrute as a midi controller (the keys are small and it’s only 2 octaves but it will do in a pinch). Next I copied the audio to another two tracks, raising one by an octave and lowering the other by an octave, then panning them left and right and mixing them low, just to add a frisson of textural complexity.

I mixed this down to AudioShare and ran it through ApeFilter, reloaded it to Auria and mixed it in to add to the texture.

I had already cut out a few choice moments and added them to two different tracks with different echo effects, now I added a track with occasional hits that I had recorded with the MicroBrute earlier in the day (keep an ear out for more of these which I will be making to load into drum machines soon).

The final touch was the pièce de résistance which finally gave the track room to breathe and gave it life. I loaded it into my favourite Dedalus preset at 0.75 sample ratio.

Oh yeah, I like it slow. I always have a tendency to play too fast it seems 🙂

PS This is a nice example of how I like to work; a combination of jamming/improvisation and careful construction/collage. The balance between the two varying day by day and track by track.