GuruBlog

Yesterday it came to my mind, that in the last few weeks I've spent more time working on my music equipment than actually making music - I created a new stand for my Mother32 and my DFAM, I made a midi to trigger signal box based on an arduino, I wrote a controller script for my KMI SoftTouch2 so I can controll bitwig with my feed while jamming - all very important tasks that will help me focus on making music - but currently it feels like all those task are eating my time for making music.

So I recorded a quick synth jam using the repro1 plugin from uhe and the mother32 in Bitwig Studio. I also added some drums from the Volca Beat, the volca sample and the DFAM.

So - without further ado - here is my first syth jam of 2019

this is the recording of a SonicPi Livecoding session made from 2 sample loops sliced and rearranged in different ways

for the drum sounds I used a drumloop sliced it into 32 peaces each 1% the length of the original loop. Each click is chosen at random from the ring created by the line command.

n = 32
l = 0.01
s =  line(0, 1, steps: n+1).choose
f = [1,s + l].min

sample "drumloop.wav", beat_stretch: 16, start: s, finish: f

The samples are triggered at a given 16th slot with a changeable probability.

the e-piano loop is played back at different speeds chosen from an array using [1,-1,0.5, -0.5, 0.75, -0.75].choose and placed at a random position in the stereofield using a :pan fx

a repeating yet ever changing 10 note pattern creating a world for the melody to live in

I build the Erebus Lil DIY kit by dreadbox this weekend - after 6 hours of soldering estimated 100000 components on very very tiny solder pads on saturday, I spent 8 hours on sunday searching for the one cold solder joint :-/

But everything is working fine now and here is a first short jam with my new synth - enjoy!

A song starting as a simple arpeggio slowly evolving into a tune

Recorded and Mixed in Bitwig Studio drums are from a volca beats and sample, pads from streichfett and blofeld. The synth sound are from bitwigs polysynth and a 0-Coast

I have been experimenting with randomly generated drum patterns lately and found out pretty soon, that a totally random generated pattern isn't exacly what I was after, I wanted a pattern generator where I can specify propabilities for each drum hit to occure. So I wrote a ruby script using midilib that generates midi files containing patterns, which I can then import into bitwig and loop and arrange for my tracks.

Midilib is a nifty little ruby library that allows you to read or write midifiles. For my purpose I used the library to write the files.

the library can be installed using gem

gem install midilib

A midifile contains sequences, sequences contain tracks and tracks contain midi events. These events can be any midi event like noteOn, noteOf, controlChange, programChange, ... For each midiEvent in a track the delta time to the last event is stored.

in midi lib you can specify a time_from_start value and lets midilib recalculate the delta values before saving the track.

So here is a ruby script that generates a hihat pattern (channel 1, midi note 44 in my kit), where the notes are placed on a 16th grid with a random chance between 20% and 50%.

require 'midilib/sequence'
require 'midilib/consts'
include MIDI

seq = Sequence.new()

track = Track.new(seq)
seq.tracks << track
track.events << Tempo.new(Tempo.bpm_to_mpq(110))
track.events << MetaEvent.new(META_SEQ_NAME, 'Test Pattern')

track = Track.new(seq)
seq.tracks << track

track.name = 'Loop1'

s = 0
l = seq.note_to_delta('16th')
e = Random.rand(0.2..0.5)

16.times do
    if ( Random.rand < e ) then
    on = NoteOn.new(0,44,127,0)
    on.time_from_start = s
    off = NoteOff.new(0,44,127,0)
    off.time_from_start = s + l
    track.events << on
    track.events << off
    end
s += l
end

track.recalc_delta_from_times

File.open('pattern3.mid', 'wb') { |file| seq.write(file) }

An ambient electronic 5/4 track inspired by the -10°C we currently have outside

I made a visualizer for my track Walk in the rain using processing. I used a stereo autocorrelation function to generate the line drawing using the minim framework and added a glsl shader to create the lens distortion effect.

I generated some random drum samples using supercollider and selected 100 samples as my new main drum kit for the volca sample. This is the first track I used my new drum sounds one. The volca sample gets a little help from the volca beats kick drum. The Bass sound is from the MiniNova, The synth track is from the Blofeld.

a mix of analog and digital synths, plugins, samples, passion, fragments of half remembered dreams and an arpeggiator.

and yes - I'm in a slightly wired mood today

and also yes - this is the blender default cube - with beveled edges, floating slightly above a plane with a diffuse shader and a sun light with a size of 0.8 rendered in cycles