maxi-minimalism: live improv set

controlvoltage · Post by **controlvoltage** » Sun Dec 02, 2007 9:20 pm

repetitive funky beats and bouncing bass drones take you on a 45min journey through a slowly evolving groovescape. put it on your iPod and listen on the train...

all constructed and tweaked in realtime.

Somasen - A Journey Through Configurational Space [45 min. 240k mp3; 84MB]
click here to download

controlvoltage · Post by **controlvoltage** » Wed Dec 05, 2007 3:02 pm

hahaha

let me try your patience with my repetitive grooves...

seriously, just find a fun craft project or something to work on, and throw on this set in the background... or smoke a bunch of hash, space out and listen to it on headphones... good for either purpose.

love_chemistry · Post by **love_chemistry** » Fri Dec 07, 2007 3:24 pm

So this is a pure impromptu set? or did you have some kind of direction planned? i am interested in how you worked the direction. As this is something that i am trying to move into. do you have a template that you used for it.

I must say though i do like this a lot and it sounds pretty funky through the board.

Cheers!

Si

controlvoltage · Post by **controlvoltage** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 12:05 am

love_chemistry wrote:So this is a pure impromptu set? or did you have some kind of direction planned? i am interested in how you worked the direction.

Hi Si; thanks for listening!

This was pure impromptu with a slight amount of prep work - basically I had set up a simple hip-hop beat and the chain of plugins that I wanted to fuckitup with, and I set a simple arpeggiator on a compressor to be gated by the kick.
Then I smoked a bowl, hit record and went to town.

So as far as the direction is concerned, it was an evolutionary process... although ironically it would have gone a lot quicker with the changes if I had remembered to map my evolution X-session knobby controller to some of the parameters I was tweaking. As it was, I was working with the mouse only, so I could only tweak one parameter at a time.

So the process went sort of like, tweak the rhythm track to bring in or out different elements to define a groove... then tweak the bass synth to work with it... changing the envelope on the pattern filter to morph between percussive, crisp bass or more flowing, pumping drones for example...
when I felt like a certain pattern had gone on for too long, I'd try changing the notes of the arpeggiation, or killing the delay and making the beat more minimal... then this provided a launch pad for a new musical direction, so all the parameters can get tweaked off into a different zone of sonic space.
Sometimes I would count beats and try to bring in an obvious change after an obvious number of bars, or tweak the filter for a 16 count and then bring in a different kick... stuff like that.

So, a lot of it is just variations on the starting theme, but then variations on the variations take you into new territory. Eventually I dropped in some new drum samples and programmed patterns with them while it was looping, and also a second synth line when it seemed like there needed to be one.

I am also working on the live/impromptu set concept, and this is a start but I would like to move in the direction of more coordinated, timed changes so that it flows better for short attention spans

and can incorporate more variety. What I'm planning to add is some hardware, like a 303 and a drum machine, that will let me program for example a bank of patterns in advance that I can flip through live. Then I can have more flexibility for quick changes, while still having the ability to improvise the mix. Hardware means dedicated buttons and knobs for hands-on tweaking, so I am not limited by mouse-only mixing.

Cheers!