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Weather: a proper early fall day,
able to wear long sleeves for the first time of the season.
Working on mastering the first of the mad river valley modular
tapes, though I have no idea what I'm doing. I know what sounds
bad, but not how to make it sound good. I'll hope that putting the
audio to tape will mask some of the shortcomings. Over in WWW land,
I added a page giving a bit of my experience with the synthesizer
and the kind of music I make with it. Here's what I had to say:
"I assembled the first iteration of my modular synthesizer shortly
after moving to the Mad River Valley. It was modest and rather
obsessively planned out on Modular Grid. At the time we were living
on the second floor of a barn that had been shoddily converted to
apartments, and the space available was limited to a desk in the
space between the kitchen and living room areas. It would be
disingenuous to talk about "early inspirations", the first months of
playing with the synth were just that: playing. Figuring out what
everything did and how they related to each other. It still feels
like that most of the time, which feeds into the name chosen for
this project."
"Expanding the synthesizer allowed me to add another oscillator/voice
to the mix, joining the legions of eurorack enthusiasts that use
Mutable Instruments' Rings module. I lean heavily on the gong/bell
type mode and the string mode, both of them scratch that itch I have
for sheets of sound, layered thick. Turn the damping all the way up,
set the number of voices to 4, any way you play it after that will
sound fantastic to me. Adding a reverb and delay pedal after that
landed me squarely in the land of ambient, Hearts of Space, new age
music, succulents, crystals, all that. I've always loved that music,
and it definitely brings me peace creating it."
"For the time being, etudiant seems to be the most appropriate hat to
put on this music. I can't say that I carefully compose the music
that is here, some of it is built off of a very simple sequence or
idea, adding to the patch until it is satisfying (or go past that
point to excess, shake my head, then start hitting buttons and turning
dials until it all decays into chaos). It's probably fair to say that
a lot of these pieces were "composed" in an effort to find flow state
in the synthesizer. If my approach changes, I don't think it could be
considered part of this project. Whether that flow state is found
around Betelgeuse or in the Enchanted Forest, it will be found here."
I have a couple options for tape recording, but neither of them are
ideal. My home stereo tape deck (left behind by the house's previous
owner) inputs are muted, likely due to some scratchy pots that one dose
of contact cleaner didn't fix. The other was a gift, a Walkman WM-D3,
but while the motor runs it won't spin a tape, so there must be a belt
or direct drive gear broken. I also picked up a recorder at the
Vermont state office equipment surplus warehouse, a hidden gem of a
place in Waterbury. However, that records only in mono. Mono is fine,
right?
