New Track: Blush
Apr 23, 2009 tracks
Still feeling quiet / insular today, so a soothing one for you folks today. Lora picked the name, but I think it fits:
Blush: (download)
What do you folks think about the concept of albums in this day and age? Should I try to pull all this solitary stuff together into an album sometime? Should I do some albums and some solitary stuff? Should I just continue making little markings on the wall for now? I’ll decide for myself in time, but I’m curious what all your thoughts are (as well as thoughts on the track, of course).
Dork-tastic!
Apr 23, 2009 Uncategorized
If you want to know just how dork-tastic I can be, I haven’t even received the chassis for my synthesizers.com modular yet, and already I’ve been spending ages planning out all the modules I’ll eventually buy. (This will probably take until at least the end of the year to assemble fully, and as they say, no plan survives contact with the enemy — I’m sure I’ll discover that what I need and want is totally difficult from what I expected once I get it up and running.) This morning, I went and grabbed images of them all from the web, cropped, de-skewed and colour matched them (very roughly) and put together a sample view of what the completed system that I have in mind at the moment might look like.
If you’re curious, you can take a gander at it in all its glory here.
New Track: Gestar
Apr 21, 2009 tracks
Another short one-off. No real commentary on this one at this time, partly because I’m feeling a bit insular today:
Gestar: (download)
Feedback is always welcome. 
Focus
Apr 18, 2009 Uncategorized
So last night, my friend Lora, who is visiting from New Jersey, and I got home around 111pm, and I was pretty exhausted. So did I go to sleep? No.
I stayed up until 4am making a 16-part additive synthesizer with individual amplitude controls over each part and four envelopes you could assign to each of the parts arbitrarily (in Reaktor).
Then I went to bed. Then I got up at 6:30am to feed the cats. Then I got up at 10:00am when the phone rang. Then I got out of bed at 10:30am to make sure I was up to see Lora off for her visiting jaunt and be around for when our mutual friend Max arrived.
I found out that plans had been changed and Max wasn’t looking to arrive until later in the afternoon, so I said to Lora, “Okay. I’m going back to sleep,” and she agreed that that was a good option.
So did I?
No. I partly checked e-mail and surfed a little as my superficial, “I’m not going back into this!” tactic, but actually I’ve just spent the last two hours thinking about how to put together the next step, which was my original goal for the synth that last night was kind of a test for: a 64-part additive synthesizer with 16 sets amplitude controls you could assign to the parts, scaling to allow a typical linear drop in amplitude proportional to harmonic number, and 16 envelopes that could be assigned to any of the parts.
I haven’t quite started on it, but I know basically what I want the UI to look like, and I’ve been gradually hashing out ideas on how to arrange the back-end wiring.
Seriously, folks, this is pretty much all I think about these days, and is a big source of why I’m even more worried than usual about being totally boring when people choose to socialize with me.
This video is awesome
Apr 17, 2009 Uncategorized
This video is a simple product explanation / demonstration of an analog synthesizer module that someone’s made. It’s basic and dry (but pretty thorough / informative) and vaguely sounds like it’s being narranted by Philip Seymour Hoffman, so it’d be hard to describe how much I dig this stuff, but check it out if you want to look at nifty pictures of sound and listen to a guy talk about what’s going on with them.