116 / Astraea / Modular + Matriarch & OB-6 / Berlin School
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- Опубліковано 12 жов 2024
- A big Berlin School jam with ambient intro building into a Phaedra-inspired wall-of-sound-travelling-through-the-stars aesthetic. Astraea means "Star Maiden." Patch notes below ...
ASTRAEA
#Modular #Moog #Matriarch #Oberheim #OB-6 #synth #synthesizer
INSTRUMENTS:
Moog Matriarch
Moog Minitaur
Oberheim OB-6
Roland SP-404mk2
Roland MC-101
Pittsburgh Lifeforms
Buchla-Tiptop 200t
Black Corporation Deckard's Voice
Seymour Duncan Polaron
AMT ADG1
Meris Mercury 7 (x2)
Strymon Deco
Strymon Volante
UA Golden
NOTES:
There's so much going on in this jam, but I think this is all the elements. A looping bass snippet on the SP and bass sequence on Minitaur. A main arpeggio on the OB-6 and main sequence on the Matriarch. A higher secondary sequence the two Deckard's Voices + Rachel. Buchla C/G drone. Buchla percussion to drone effect. The ambient patch at the beginning is the Double Helix going through some pedals, including the amazing Ashville Music Tools ADG1 delay. The played pads/lead is a sample-based Jupiter 8 patch on the MC-101.
*Star travel video is AI generated.
RECORDING
Everything is recorded live and direct with no post production aside from normalization and limiting.
Nice performance,nice sound
Thank you! Very much appreciated. Thanks for listening. Cheers. :)
Bliss.
Thank you for listening and the great feedback. Very much appreciated. Cheers. :)
really nice
Thank you! Much appreciated. :)
😌
Thanks for listening. Cheers. :)
Your songs are like stories, full with subtle details that reward the user when listening with complete attention. I see you studio is ever evolving, what gear would you say is crutial for your creative process? Thanks for sharing! P.s. love the Hawaiian postcard.
Thanks, JP! As a writer, this is my favorite music comment ever. I've been writing way longer than I've been making music, and I've used my understanding of stories in learning music. The studio changes are slowing as I have more gear that I wouldn't consider selling, but there's still some things happening. Recently I got frustrated with my Doepfer row and traded it out for two Deckard's Voices + Rachel (I love ring modulation!). So far really enjoying them, but whether they are the long-term bottom row on the modular has yet to be determined.
Really great question: Most pieces start with patching the modular, and I find the modular really inspiring, so I would have to say that's the most crucial piece of gear. It's really the center of my studio. After that, Delays and Reverb are super important. Sequencers are obviously central to the music I'm making and having more than one keyboard to control different sounds is great when improvising. Finally, I love analog synths, but I have say the MC-101 is an unsung workhorse, a sort of swiss army knife in the studio, so many decent sounds and a good sequencer delivers some nice pads and leads that just work when I need them.
I've been trying to learn the SP-404mk2 more for samples and sound mangling, but it's not really integral to the process yet.
Would love to hear your answer to the same question. What gear is most important to your process?
@@MatthewLowes My process has evolved over time. About 5 years ago, my music was centered around the piano.
I used to play piano with one or both hands and a synth bass or lead with the other.
When I got the Matriarch, it immeadiately became central to my process. It was the starting point for every piece I made.
Soon after I paired it with a Synthstrom Deluge, which I used as a drum machine and sequencer for other synths (I had Behirnger Model D,
Moog Slim phatty, and effects pedals like the strymon nightsky).
Then I got into the modular. I got a bunch of erica synths modules and discovered new sounds and modulation alternatives, it was exploration heaven!
That went on for some 2 or 3 years. I regret letting go of deluge, I replaced it with the Black Sequencer (crucial), but the deluge is so much more capable as hands on performance sequencer.
In modular, I almost always started creating sequences on the matriarch and recording them to the Black Sequencer and asigning them to a voice in my system, like erica synths fusion system (not crucial),
moog mavis (crucial), behringer system 101 (not crucial), 2hp pluck (crucial) and 2hp vowel (crucial) [these two are just excepcional pieces of gear], and others. Then to delays like the black stereo delay (crucial, it is superb),
reverbs (I love the Strymon Starlab), and analog effects like plasma distortion . I have a TempsUtile module (crucial) that I always use to add euclidean sequenced filter envelopes to my sequences, to add nuance and carve out
melodies out of simpler sequences.
I had a very fun (and exhausting) dynamic in which I got a new module, then reassembled a 4x104hp case to create a new architecture and a new piece around it.
This which allowed me to explore (to some degree) each new module's capabilities and stay creative for each new piece. I think this was a prime moment.
But at some point modular presented me with so many creative options, that I became overwhelmed and stopped playing for some months.
This year, I ve been using the desktop synths way more and using eurorack from drums, effects and mixing. Currently I almost always reach out for the Moog Voyager RME and Moog Model D.
These two are fantastic instruments. I've been focusing on ecnountering new sounds withintheir fairly limited arquitechtures.
For example, taking the time to explore subtleties of the interaction of the filter resonance with a an oscillator, moving the filter freq and enjoying the harmonics.
Or challenging myself to create non trivial modulations with a single LFO and OSC3. It has been very enriching.
What I would like to do next is retake the complexity of eurorack (complem modulations and architectures, and more tracks) and integrate the desktop moogs into as well :).
The only thing missing (to me, anyway) are modulation(s) to another key (or keys). Like Klaus Schulze did in the mid- to late 1970s. Otherwise, no complaints, just bliss.
Thanks and great point about key changes. That would have provided the variation needed to get a piece like this up into the 20 min range as well. I have a new master sequencer coming that should make key changes easier to do. Thanks for listening. Cheers. :)
@@MatthewLowes I look forward to see what you come up with next. What I sometimes do when I'm improvising is ask myself, "Okay -- that's good -- now what?" It's when I get close to the end of a side of audio tape that I start to panic (mentally; apparently not obvious from the music I'm playing) and ask myself, "But how in the world do I end this without ruining it?" Thankfully it's less of an issue when it comes to poems and short stories (where I can go back and reread and think about what to do to improve them). With live improvised music (unless you can go back and edit them; which I couldn't; what was on tape was what I was stuck with, whether I liked it or not), you get one take. Don't like it? Start a new take and hope it's better than the last one. My one UA-cam upload ("A Bremerton Christmas") took four takes, as I mention in the comments to it. The final take went far longer than I expected it to (a little over 47 minutes). Almost 18 years later, it seems to hold up pretty well. Without the later slide show, it was my final Christmas gift to my father (who died from cancer in late May 2007, a week before his 73rd birthday). I hope he liked it.
Thanks, Phillip. Yeah, I'm often already thinking in the middle "how can I make it to then end without ruining it." lol. But I do think there's something magical about improvised or semi-improvised performance. The mistakes and all attitude brings a liveliness and realness to it that just doesn't seem to happen with overly produced music. I'm listening to your Bremerton Christmas right now and it's absolutely fantastic. Wonderful playing, and the story about your dad brought a tear to my eye. This is going on my Christmas playlist this year. Thanks for sharing on UA-cam. Peace, my friend. :)