I’m back again with another Organ + Synth improvisation but this one is a bit different than the first. I’ll explain the details in a moment, but the short explanation is that I needed my practice time at St. Andrew’s for more pressing things and I instead recorded this at Duquesne. I also wanted control over more parameters than the first improvisation, which led me to cheat on this one.
Yes. That’s right, I cheated. First, the quite excellent practice organ that is next to my office at Duquesne has, well, terrible acoustics. It’s a practice room after all! I also, as mentioned above, wanted more control over more parameters, meaning more than two knobs that I can twist with one hand in the moment. I like to think of this as me continuing to figure how to use Pigments along side a live instrument. For this particular improvisation, I recorded the organ separate from the synth, spliced the recording, and then improvised the synth over that recording. It was a lot of fun to imagine the synth part while I was recording the organ part!
With this improvisation, I was trying to blend the synth with the organ in a way where you could not hear where one starts and the other ends. When I was playing the organ part, I discovered a really cool “periodic beat” in the pedals that set the stage for the rest of the improv. From there, I built up a series of composite sounds that I knew would work well with a synth later. To be clear, where I cheated with the organ part is that I cut up the recording to create an arc and then added the synth to those composite chord. It helps that they are both put through a reverb filter together, giving the impression that they exist in the same space. This project was a lot of fun and has definitely given me some ideas for the next one!
[…] funny: last week I improvised on the practice room next to my office and I thought the outcome was pretty cool and interesting! I enjoyed the process so much that I decided to try to replicate the process where I record an […]