It’s 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 improvisation in the room and then add the synth to it after the fact. Maybe a small amount of filtering and a reverb to give the organ a fake “space” in which it can exist like the prior improvisation.
Well, in preparing for this particular improvisation, I noticed that the 2′ Principle stop on the Great was REALLY out of tune. Not a little, A LOT; to the point that playing a chromatic scale does not result in something resembling an equal tempered chromatic scale. What particularly intrigued me were the notes that were slightly out of tune with one another, some of them being nearly unisons and even then, they weren’t aligning with A=440 tuning! The acoustical beating between two notes that are not in tune is something I LOVE to play with – that in part is the premise of this Organ + Synth improvisation series.
In the moment, an improvisation usually feels like applying metrics, tropes, techniques, things that I have done hundreds or thousands of times before. Every once in a while though, an improvisation feels fresh and new and this, for me, was one of those times. Unlike the previous one, this improvisation has no edits: it is presented as I recorded it in the moment. I tried adding a second improvised synth track to it but it never really added anything that wasn’t there already or simply detracted from the improv. Here it is, an improvisation with a bunch of out of tune notes, no edits, and an added acoustic!