Another bogof deal… Crone / Of His Bones Are Coral Made

Svetlovska

The first of these sank (virtually) without a trace a couple of days ago, so 1) apologies for the bump, but 2) it at least seems fitting that the second, made earlier today, has a suitably subaquatic theme (!)

I won’t labour the point with either, so if you are interested in the story behind Crone, check out the SoundCloud. It was made from a live MIDI I made on my new piano recorded live into Atom, driving Pipa and Sopranotron, inter alia.

I used the same process on Of His Bones Are Coral Made, this time driving a whole charabanc-worth of Hildas. The piece draws its title from Ariel’s song in Shakespeare’s late masterpiece The Tempest; and its’ inspiration tangentially from two recent current events, the common yet contrasting human horror of which have been in my mind. More directly than those, it also draws from Lovecraft’s The Temple, a strange, first person account of a cursed statuette, and a cruel WW1 U-boat commander’s final undersea rendezvous. Read the full, very short, story here:

https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/te.aspx

Svetlovska

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senhorlampada

I listened to both yesterday but didn't drop any comments, sorry
Loved Crone... masterfully layered voices/vocalish sounds. When the deeper, bassier layers join in... woooow
Glues the end so well

Now "Of His Bones Are Coral Made", it's a Hilda masterclass. The melodic and texture elements really tell an oceanic tale of horrors from beyond. What a journey

jwmmakerofmusic

"Crone" is pure beauty. "Of His Bones Are Coral Made" is absolutely haunting. These are the types of pieces I want to make. I've done plenty of interesting beginner Ambient in the past, but this is a few steps beyond what I did last year. I read you used AUM, Hilda, Pipa, and Sopranotron, and Atom Piano Roll. However, could you further describe your process if you could please?

Svetlovska

Thanks, both, for your interest and kind comments. I felt pleased with the outcomes on these two, because I did do them differently, and I didn’t want them to slip away unheard, so again: thanks.

@jwmmakerofmusic : my method on both of these was identical, and differed from my usual (which is normally heavily dependent on midi generators/sequencers and purely random processes.) in that each began as a midi loop captured ‘live’.

This time, for both of these tracks, and in line with my principal of if I buy a thing I must immediately use it in a published track, I actually used my new Roland FP10 digital piano as the master keyboard, plugged directly into my iPad Pro via a USB A to USB C cable, and into AUM. In each case I set up an Atom instance of 32 bars, and then, um ‘jammed’, I believe the young people call it, against the AUM metronome. This is very far from my usual comfort zone, since I can’t actually play keyboards and I wasn’t even using Rozeta Scaler to eliminate bum notes.

What I was doing, more or less, was messing with the product of my first couple of how to play piano app learning sessions, plonking away at the C Major scale.

I did find the massive 88 note keyboard, velocity sensitivity and weighted keys encouraged me to explore shapes and rhythms I just wouldn’t have using the iPad or a mini key input device alone. I sort of get it now why so many proper musicians actually write their stuff on a piano, because it naturally encourages experimentation in expression, a dimension normally absent from my stuff.

Who knows if I will have the dedication to persevere and learn to play the instrument musically, but just at the level of an idea ‘scratchpad’ for chordal noises and patterns, I think I’ll be incorporating the FP10 in my process a lot more in the future.

Once I had a basic midi ‘performance’ loop recorded into AUM, I used that to drive the apps. (There is a slight irony in that in going for the simplest possible midi only connection to the iPad, I can’t also record the fairly decent FP10 piano sound at the same time, so the piano you hear in Crone, along with the pads, come from House, from LoFi Piano, Digitalism, and probably a couple of other pianistic apps I’ve forgotten.) As my process is so iterative, after two or three audio overdubs, whatever the source instrumentation was is lost…

After that it was business as usual, duping AUM channels, messing with gating the midi using, you guessed it, MIDIgates, audio recording the midi driven IAA only Sopranotron and doubling it with an offset half speed audio copy, live muting channels as I mixed down to AudioShare, and so on.

And for ‘Of His Bones…’ a lorra lorra Hilda’s, playing everything from percussion to pads. I drove them from the same midi too, duped and given a different probability, but also let the Hilda sequencer interpolate its thing.

Very pleased with how they both came out, a balance between pure randomness and the expression afforded by the FP10 which felt fresh to me, given a semblance of structure via an interactive live mixdown. New horizons etcetera…

jwmmakerofmusic

@Svetlovska What a beautiful, complex, intricate process, and you explained it so succinctly too. Thank you so much. I've learned a little bit from that. I may have to get my own MIDI keyboard controller I can hook up to my Mini 6. Probably a two-octave span in order so it fits in my flat.