Archive for the Pianoscape category
Grant
August 2, 2016
Day 340: Tuesday 2 August 2016
Relentless:
Another minimal piece.
This time a relentlessly simple (hence the title) beat from Patterning is overlaid with an equally simple electric piano bass line which is echoed by simple chord voicings. Korg’s Module is the piano app.
Grant
July 26, 2016
Day 333: Tuesday 26 July 2016
Mousterian Renaissance:
A slow, sparse, and minimal (so what else is new) conversation between an electric piano and a beat. Each part evolves slowly as they listen to each other over a cappuccino in a quiet middle paleolithic cafe.
Nothing but Gadget was used and no animals were harmed in the production of this track.
Grant
July 25, 2016
Day 332: Monday 25 July 2016
The Antihero Relaxes By The Fire After A Hard Day Antiheroing:
The electric piano is emerging as my favourite sound lately. It began featuring as an element in several tracks and is slowly becoming the main compositional and sound factor. I’ve always favoured it and it occasionally has featured in this blog before but the current fascination has surprised me; arising of it’s own accord from within the daily process, and perhaps therefore from my subconscious.
One of the reasons for maintaining a daily practise is to allow room for just such happenings, so I’m joyfully embracing the moment despite the fact that my keyboard skills are limited.
Gadget was the one and only app used here but I have now used my midi keyboard to play the piano part which leads to very different results from just using the touch screen.
Grant
June 16, 2016
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.
Grant
April 3, 2016
Day 219: Sunday 3 April 2016
You Remind Me:
A Pianoscape today 🙂
An Ambient all piano track. A slow bass ostinato made with Korg’s Module, imported to Auria where I added two tracks of improvised electric piano using the inbuilt Lyra sample player.
Simple. But I like it.
Grant
March 27, 2016
Day 213: Sunday 27 March 2016
Cat Gut (Your Tongue):
Something a little different today, a piano based track that feels to me like a movie soundtrack.
I began today by experimenting with YouCompose, a generative music app that you can set to give you either a classical or a jazz form. I must admit I’m not too sure if this sort of thing is up my alley, but I thought it might be a good learning tool, or at least provide some material to build from or to pull apart.
So I set it to generate a 3 movement classical piece and then I fiddled with the instruments and parameters until I got something I kind of liked. Then I exported the midi files into Auria and assigned each of the 4 parts to a piano sound, because it sounded best that way.
Next I slowed each movement in TwistedWave and then added Dedalus and Crystalline.
The second movement was working the best so I decided to concentrate on that. I reversed it and added the three variations into Auria ie the uneffected slowed version, the effected slowed version, and the reversed effected slowed version.
Once I had these three in place I did some cutting and pasting to fine tune the composition a little more to my taste.