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COMPLETED
PROJECTS
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With Winter Solstice I tried to
capture the experience of being alone under a starry sky on a cold
winter's night. Music, and finally fire and companionship keep us
warm. This piece has taken fifteen months to finish, including
seven distinct sections totalling over 21 minutes. I'm happy to be
joined by my old friend from Barcelona, Terence Butler on flute...after
many years we reconnected on SoundCloud! This piece is dedicated
to my sister Marilyn. We wish everyone peace and contentment
for this holiday season. This recording is almost exclusively
Spectrosonics Omnisphere. The wind, wolf, campfire and partiers
are audio files, and the three flute tracks were recorded by Terence
Butler separately in Barcelona, which I later mixed together here in New
York. Other than that, everything is Omnisphere except the piano,
which is Native Intruments Alicia's Keys (my favorite piano).
Effects are all U-He Uhbik (echo, reverb, EQ, phase shift,
tremelo). The phase shift and tremelo (autopanning) on the three
flutes are a great example of why I love U-He Uhbik effects!
Special thanks to http://Freesound.org and Bogus (http://www.freesound.org/people/bogus)
for his campfire and people (http://www.freesound.org/people/bogus/sounds/104632),
and to Spandau (http://www.freesound.org/people/Spandau)
for his hot coals fire sound (http://www.freesound.org/people/Spandau/sounds/40699
).
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Ocean Night Drive was a collaborative project I did
with Merdance, a
Portuguese group of two musicians
I met on Soundcloud. Merdance wrote the music. They asked me
to play a "Jan Hammer" type solo at the
end, so that was my part in it. This is the only piece
on this page which isn't mine.
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Pink Jam was thrown together in two approximately one-hour sessions of playing and mixing. This
is the sort
of thing that's easy to
do quickly, which fits with my current physical limitations! Update: this
is a new mix with new synth programming and a
new ending added. In spite of it's simplicity, it took me 2 months
to finish. (March 29, 2011 mix)
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Across the
Distance was recorded in October 2006 after being asked to record a new piece
as a "tribute" to a forum I frequent. A piano solo performed on the
Alesis QS8 synthesizer was the easiest way to do it. I just sat down
and played the one track so what you hear is unedited (and full of
mistakes) and that's the way it should be! I do wish it could have
been a real acoustic piano. When I sit down to
play the synth-piano I feel like an alien and you might hear that I'm just
getting warmed up toward the end of the piece! I am thinking about
perhaps trying to record a solo on a grand piano at work one of these
days, though that might pose challenging with my
equipment.
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Chicxulub - You may own one of the copies of
Late Night Report that
includes the bonus track Chicxulub, which was the first
track recorded for the next CD. It's a sort of rambling Spanish
"guitar" solo, which made me think of the location of the
Cretaceous-Tertiary asteroid impact site at Chicxulub. This track
contains a style of synthesizer playing which emulates guitar
intonation. Ah, but guitars only have 6 strings!
;)
UNFINISHED STUFF
(none of these tracks are in their final state yet):
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Acid Eats Metal
started out as a seconds-long demo of
a "guitar" sound I created for a bunch of
synth players I know online. After listening to the demo myself, I decided
to expand it into a tune, but I'm not yet satisfied
with the instrumentation (bass) or the mix.
To my amazement, the tune has gone
sort of "viral" on Soundcloud, Twitter and Facebook (and
I'm not a member of Twitter or Facebook). What happened is I was voted "Soundclouder
of the Day" in October, and that brought me some notoriety
:)
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Bali (Take 2)
is a "soundscape" piece of a sort imagined while
playing a shakuhachi bamboo flute sound. Imagine looking at the
beautiful coastline from the ocean, along a stretch of beach on a sunny,
breezy day. It starts out with the wind and waves, created with
a synthesizer called Space Drone. The gulls are a
separate recording. Besides the flute melody melodies and
harmonies are being played on native Balinese gamelan, and deep
mallet drum percussion instruments. I have begun to add strings and brass, but these first takes are
quite different than what I plan to do. (June 17, 2011
mix)
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Activate was a little demo I did in
about 20 minutes literally. I did it just to demo for a few
musician friends a sound that I created called "Activate" (based on an
old Jan Hammer sound from his tune "Rum Cay." Both the bass and lead use
this sound, which is a soundfont made from an old DX7
patch.
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Manic's Swamp
Sans SE is a remix of Manic's Swamp that loses the sound
effects. This way you hear the keyboards only. This was my
friend Chris Sharp's
idea.
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Manic's
Swamp is a soundtrack I started for
a writer friend of mine who lives in Belfast, Ireland. The main
character of many of his stories, Manic, is a recluse who lives in such
a swamp, and on this occasion he's enduring a night of listening to the
sounds of a city he despises. The whole thing so far is entirely
an audio recording. No midi, editing, or even mixing was
done. It was all played on the Alesis exactly as you hear it
(through a Lexicon MX200).
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Hipradahay is the first tune
I ever constructed from loops. The rhythm track is entirely composed
of pieces of loops that I constructed myself using
a freeware program called Hammerhead. The sound quality of the percussion loops
is pretty bad, but it was fun and different. On top
of that, I've recorded a single track - an "acid rock" synth
solo. So the tune is nothing but a single improvised solo on top of
the rhythm track. The current version is improved slightly from
the original, with a smoother synth sound (using two MXR analog
flangers) and some reverb on the loops to finish out the tune.
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Fusit is another very simple improv on top of a rhythm track, though here the
Roland drums are of a higher quality. I improvised a Rhodes piano
track and a Minimoog bass track. Totally rough and unpolished at
this stage... |
