Weekly Post: Sunday 18th of November 2018

Ha ha, I forgot to post on Sunday and today is Tuesday. Oh well never mind, I obviously haven’t developed the habit. Better late than never.

Novembeat is going well, 20 tracks in 20 days and no sign of flagging. In fact I do find this sort of intense work on one app or one idea very fruitful. I’m still using just Korg’s Gadget app for this project, and mainly the Bilbao Gadget loaded with my own samples, concentrating on beats and vocal snippets.

Using primarily homemade samples is a great way to develop a personal sound and feel. In fact the kind of sounds I try to make are influenced by the use I make of them. It’s a sort of feedback loop.

Before this week the vocal snippets have been either my own voice or my ‘Trudi’ character which I make with a combination of the apps Text To Speech and TwistedWave. This week I have been including samples from the Beatles movie ‘A Hard Days Night’ specifically George’s solo scene. I doubt it’s legal but since I won’t be making any money I hope it counts as fair use or something.

The interesting thing that comes up with this way of using voice and text is the question of meaning; is the voice just a part of the rhythmic layer, one more beat element? Can we separate our listening to words, even discrete or partial words, from our brains meaning and sense making apparatus. Should the random conjunction of words and meanings be embraced? Or should a form of sense, even just the appearance of sense, be sort after? All of these methods have emerged in the series so far, as well as in previous tracks. I haven’t made up my mind if one approach suits me more or not.

Speaking of intensely using one app, I have another ongoing series at the moment using the app Groovebox. It began in August and has developed into an almost daily obsession. This app does not allow me to include my own samples but uses included sound packs with the ability to alter those sounds but not to design and save your own. The sounds included are very high quality though and I have yet to purchase them all, finding lots of inspiration in what I have so far.

Each app has it’s own way of doing things and each takes me to a different place and gives me very different results. I get very different results in this series for example than my Gadget tracks and also from my series made with iMaschine. This is fascinating to me and leads me to reflect on what aspect of myself and my musicality each app brings out, and exactly where it is that I stand among it all, where the commonality is.

Thanks for listening to my ramble.

Here’s my Groovebox playlist for you to sample…