Do My Eyes Look Scary?: Recent Episodes
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The title of this post was a running joke a friend of mine had on a chat forum. You’d say something to him, and his comeback was “you’ve upset me, and I’m not easily upset.” But really I want to talk now about Lee Scratch Perry and the Upsetters. I finally ripped the 3 CD […]
Satisfying music balances predictability and surprise. Our minds are trained to know what event comes next in music. If you listen to 100 folk songs, the sequences of chords and rhythm all have a logic that sounds good to the ear. When someone writes a new song, they’re essentially starting with a chord and then […]
The rioters at the US Capitol are not people to be admired. They’re deluded, they’re racist, they’ve gone absolutely wrong in a violent and disturbing way. But there is one thing to admire about those Trumpist seditionists: They are soaked head to toe with a peculiarly American attribute: cussedness. American cussedness os rooted in our […]
This was kind of accidental VCV patch in combination with a twelve string guitar piece on archive.org. I’d been experimenting with variations on the Quad Drum Destroyer, combined with the Confusing Simpler from NYSTHI, and this just hit a nerve. There is something about filtered delays that is addictive. That and the original sample just […]
Patch file: http://cornwarning.com/xfer/VCV/QuadDelayDrumDestroyer.vcv Bonus patch file (melodic) http://cornwarning.com/xfer/VCV/QuadDelayMelodicDestroyer.vcv http://cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-QDDD.mp3 This is a demonstration of the utility of parallel repetition of the same basic signal chain. I like to think that it mirrors the musical idea of harmonic relatedness and modulation. Instead of affecting pitch, this patch affects time, in a rhythmically interesting way. This patch […]
PATCH FILE HERE: http://cornwarning.com/xfer/VCV/GenerativeDrones.vcv Audio Example: http://cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/ChairCrusher-GenerativeShapedSines.mp3 http://cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/ChairCrusher-GenerativeShapedSines.mp3 This is a more complicated patch than with my previous tutorials, but I think it uses some techniques that might inspire VCVRack users in other contexts. Note that I use many paid modules, that you’ll have to have bought to load the patch intact; but there are […]
Making drones is fundamental to modular synthesis, as it removes pitch from the equation, and makes piece all about timbral texture. This started out as a simple test of various waveshaper modules. The patch is here: http://cornwarning.com/xfer/VCV/ShapedDrone.vcv The core of this patch is using waveshapers to generate harmonically rich distortions of the original sine wave. […]
The patch file: http://cornwarning.com/xfer/VCV/TuringMachineExample.vcv Audio Example: http://cornwarning.com/xfer/VCV/TuringMachineExample.mp3 The two implementations of the Turing Machine Sequencer — in the case of this patch, the one from the Skylights plugin — are not immediately understandable without doing some reading of manuals, which is never anyone’s favorite activity. Turing Machine sequencer have a property that is one of the […]
This is a method of patching and modulating delays I find so compelling I felt moved to write about it. This is all done in the software modular system VCVRack, and assumes you have a basic working knowledge of it. It involves the VCV Router plugin, which is non-free plugin from the makers of VCV […]
Derek Piotr and I were discussing mixtapes, so I decided to bodge one together. This reflects what I’ve been listening to over the past couple of months more or less. This isn’t a DJ Mix; it’s like a good old “John Cusack in High Fidelity” mixtape. I overlapped tracks without regard for beatmatching, and applied […]
This is something they were doing on Facebook — the ’10 albums 10 days’ challenge, where you were supposed to just post the album cover without comment. I’m terrible at following instructions though. I actually did 11, and I took a couple of weeks to finish it. I’m collecting them here as a more coherent […]
Every so often I discover a piece of music software that makes me giddy with the possibilities it presents. That’s what I feel about VCV Rack. It presents the on-screen equivalent of a Eurorack modular. It has a large number of useful modules, some actually based on popular Eurorack hardware modules. It has a community […]
https://ziurmusic.bandcamp.com/ Ziúr is a woman who lives in Berlin who identifies as an “earth citizen,” and Deeform is the first 12″ release on Lara Rix Paradinas‘ Objects Limited label. The label’s mission is to release music by “female identifying/non binary electronic producers.” Ziúr’s gender identity is orthogonal from her music; the label’s sexual politics matter but […]
Here they are: http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/MR10.zip Single Hits of each sound. Sampled the toms at a few different tunings. One longer wav with all the 4 bar loop patterns. Mono 24-bit 44.1khz files. There’s another, more exhaustive set here, but they’re asking money for them: http://www.dubsounds.com/mr-10.htm And another from the venerable Music Machines collection: http://machines.hyperreal.org/manufacturers/Yamaha/MR-10/samples/index.html
I got the chance to play the regular Mixology night at Gabe’s in Iowa City, and for the past few weeks I’ve been collecting tracks I wanted to play and fiddling around with a DJ setup for them in Live. I had two impulses — play current and current-ish music that I like, and to […]
By now, people who care about the music of Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin, know about how he dumped 175 (and counting) unreleased songs on Soundcloud. Like everything he’s done its a body of work that is at turns beautiful, frustrating, and obtuse. The majority of the tracks seem to be Aphex-esque techno and […]
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-2015-02-20-Live.mp3 http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-2015-02-20-Live.mp3 The idea of I Hear IC is to gather people from Iowa City to present brief performances in a local coffee house. Peformances were in the range of 10-20 minutes. Other performers on this night included Jazz singers, an improvisation from two Iranian musicians and a small ensemble improvising a new soundtrack for […]
[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-TestPercussionGroove.mp3|titles=test percussion groove|artists=chaircrusher] http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-TestPercussionGroove.mp3 This is a recording of two loops playing in Ableton Live. One is a percussion drum rack, the second is the U-He Bazille instrument run through several effects. This loop plays the same notes, but will never actually play the same one bar sounds twice, for two interlocking reasons. First, both […]
This ad has been carpet-bombed on TV, and vexing me for weeks: The music is Billy Idol’s cover of Tommy James & The Shondells’ hit Mony Mony: That they used a cover rather than the original is the first thing that pisses me off. My favorite Billy Idol song is “Dancing With Myself” which, while […]