After another late Summer hiatus, I’m back with a non-evening recorded Evening Improvisation. Actually, I’ve had a hiatus due to a number of personal life things including our car getting hit while being out of town. I have also been preparing a series of audio songs from all my travels this summer. A draft of one of them can be found here on Soundcloud. (I had a flight canceled and it wasn’t pleasant or fun.) I’ve punched that one up since that post and it’ll be a pretty fun release when I get there.
It took a moment, but now that the new semester has begun I had a moment to sneak into the awesome practice room next to my office and had a recording session with that instrument. I have posted a few other improvisations including this banger, where the instrument got horribly out of tune. Boy do I wish this sort of thing would happen more often! Micro tonality is not usually a musical element of the organ and I relish it when I have the chance to play with it.
As I pondered these things, it occurred to me in this session to set up two recording devices instead of one. In those other recording done in this practice room, I’ve added reverb to make it feel like it exists in some kind of real space, instead of a totally dry room. My logic in using two recording devices would be to pit them against each other in my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) or at least have my phone recording be a background to the better recording device (it’s TASCAM portable recorder that I love).
And that’s what I did! In this series of recordings where I am testing things out with how I will potentially move forward with a more concise recording project involving and organ, synths, and audio manipulation, this was one of those tests. And I think it’s pretty understated – deliberately so; I will always err on the side of making things understated than over the top. “LOOK AT MY WEIRD STUFF!!!!1!” Generally, I’d rather these performances be up front and anything manipulated be in the background to the performance and that’s the case here.
Finally, this will all eventually end in some kind of album similar to the Aria with Nine Variations. I have a few other ideas to play around before I go forward with a 60 minute album. It’ll be coming soon though! Organ + synths + audio manipulation is something I want to get out there and this is one of those trials. Enjoy!