Category: Electronic

Ha! It has once again been a while since I have been back on my webpage doing anything, but I’m hoping to change that this Fall. Couple of personal things, my position at Duquesne as a full time professor seems secure and I have taken on a part time church job at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Highland Park. The latter position just began this month of September as I was only the interim. In fact, I was interim for a year and half, which is a long time, but not Widor length.

I’m back with another insight into my Aria with Nine Variations; the third titled “Ostinato.” Obviously, there is an ostinato, or repeating figure, in the piano part. It was taken from the final notes from the previous movement titled Pattern. The final pitches were created using a plugin called Krush: without getting too technical, the pitches were created from the harmonics of the notes and chords being compressed. Rather than use some tool to help discern the exact pitches, I used my ears, which is why the piano plays those pitches at the end of the 2nd Variation; in ascending order: C, D, F#, and B.

Two things about this movement, the first, is that formally the movement should not go general consonance to dissonance. The Aria and first two Variations have done that. Which leads to the second formal question, then where should the piece go? In the planning or composing vs. improvising-as-I-go, this one fits somewhere in between. The Ostinato offered the opportunity to change things up a little bit by also including an antiphonal response to the pitches from the previous movement. Put simply the pitches also allowed me to also have the antiphony switch between a major and minor tonality.

Second, I really wanted a chance to do something more with the piano: those two antiphonal synths are broken by when the Left Hand of the piano comes into the texture. And what seemed to me to be an obvious choice, they combine at the end to set up the next movement with a low G on the bass synth. One small note: like much music made on DAW, I had the opportunity to quantize that Right Hand ostinato and I’m here to admit that I did not. As a seasoned keyboard player, it only took two takes to get the feel of playing the same thing for five minutes straight. Enjoy and see you all soon for the next post!

The first Variation, Progression, is a development of the opening progression. At it’s core, it simply moves pieces of the chordal progression around, first with the piano and later with a plugin. It is also in 3/4 rather than 9/8 and introduces the use of piano that will be present throughout most of the work. It’s also the first time I use some non-instrument plugins, again informing what is to come in the work. The first one that is the most notable is Krush, a down-sampling plugin that is freaking amazing. The other is Raum, a Native Instrument’s reverb plugin that was free for a brief time and is really high quality.

What I love about this movement is that it really helped me develop a technique for how I moved forward with the writing process in this project. For me, the work lies somewhere between composition and improvisation. It’s been a while since I have posted an improvisation, but I still improvise regularly in liturgies and try to keep improv in my fingers. In this movement, I took the chord form the ending of the previous movement and slowly adjusted the chord one note at a time until it was something different. One fun thing I have learned about improvising is how to mess with time or rather the perception of time. There’s an aspect of misdirection with the noisy synth in the first minute, but that allowed me to shift the chord in the first minute and a half or so. That allowed me to change up how things progress in comparison to the first two movements.

As I was formulating the entire work, the first and most obvious choice to me was to simply start messing with that circular progression used in the Aria. This is also the movement that introduces the use of the piano which was somewhat improvised. I’ll come back to that part, the improvisation in a moment – I just want to address on formal element that I carried over from the Aria. Each of the movements are variations on the previous movement and the general form of pretty chordal progressions to distortion and dissonance is how the Aria ends. I like the idea that each variation changes in some manner from the previous movement rather than variations based on a single musical idea.

Back to the piano improvisation as I want to speak to an element of the creative process. As I was completing the album, I found myself contemplating my interactions with my various ideas and the end result. I have had this interaction between composition and improvisation that is not a usual part of my creative output, meaning they don’t often directly mix into an end result. While the end result here is a fairly coherent piano part plus a few extra (HELM) synth elements, a movement like this one is more improvisatory to my ears than something specifically planned out. To be clear, it was planned out, to some extent, but with room for improvisation, the the progressions were certainly chosen on the fly.

Last weekend I released an album! Unlike most of the posts I make here, this music is not related to the organ, improvisation, or any kind of choral music. This is not outside of my ballpark per se, but rather something I have wanted to indulge in for some time. The basic premise of the album, from my perspective, is an etude, a study work to teach myself several DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) plugins. The plugin limitations start with these instruments: HELM and two piano sounds, Addictive Keys Studio Grand and Spitfire Audio LABS Soft Piano. HELM was at the forefront of the project. The piano instruments were used generally by me as a tool for improvisation and I did a very small amount of quantizing to keep it feeling human (a.k.a. click tracks = metronomes). I also used Izotope’s Ozone 9 Elements on all of the tracks for LUFS (loudness unit full scale) and this really cool stereo imager thingy. I’ll get to the other three plugins when we get there.

Today I present one single track “Aria,” that sets the general tone of the whole work. I have said in this blog before that a piece of music, no matter what genre, geographic area, time period, etc., will tell you, the listener what is about to unfold in the broadest terms. This being an aria, I wanted it to be pretty and pleasing before it becomes something else. The progression is pretty simple, the meter is in nine, which makes for very un-square cycles, and only uses HELM. It’s all fairly straight forward!