Music
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Background
I started creating electronic music on the West Coast of the US, in the West Coast Style, long before I knew that there was such a thing. My musical tastes have always been outside the mainstream. The first album I purchased with my "own" money was a vinyl recording (there were no other commercially significant recording media for sale in the mid 1960's) of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony which I had worn the grooves out of by the time I turned 7 years old. When I was studying formal linguistics and teaching myself to program computers in my late teens and early twenties, I did so to a personal soundtrack that featured Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (yes, the album consisting of 4 LP sides of electric guitar feedback and effects pedal noise that literally ended his career just as it was beginning to take off in the mid 70's and then went on to become the stuff of legends decades later).
My favorite composers include Tallis, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Glass and Byrne as well as hard-core mid-century experimentalists like Stockhausen and Subotnick. If you have never heard any of my own stuff, consider the combination of those influences as fair warning. You will find strong hints of all those influences - classical and experimental music together with mathematics and a love of algorithms - throughout my musical oeuvre. To me, an analog synthesizer is a device for translating what are essentially mathematical formulas into acoustic impulses, which are occasionally and serendipitously esthetically pleasing (at least to someone with my extremely idiosyncratic tastes). Computer software makes that even more literally true.
Over the years I have used a variety of traditional instruments and electronic gear to make, er, um, "music?" Yes, let's call it "music."
Approaches & Techniques
My process for creating music has evolved as new technologies have become available, but conceptually is not all that different from how I started out as a composer.
Mostly Analog
The majority of my pieces are created using a process not very different from how I worked in the 70's. I usually begin with a concept for a modular synth patch. These are usually pretty basic notions of ways to connect (and sometimes cross-connect) modules in the signal and control paths, such as "use the interference pattern of two low-frequency oscillators to create a rhythm," "use pitch sweeps driven by an envelope generator on the inputs to a ring modulator to create dynamic timbre" and the like. I then simply play around with such patches -- changing the underlying wave forms, inverting the phase of some of the low-frequency oscillator signals, changing the base frequency relationships when using FM, and so on -- until I find something that appeals to my very idiosyncratic tastes sufficiently to be worth recording. I then repeat the same process to create multiple layers of sound for a given composition. Where I used a multitrack analog recorder back in the day, I now use Audacity to record each sonic layer. Finally, I align and trim the tracks, add fades and similar basic editing in the DAW to produce a final mix as a FLAC file.
Most of the time, when I "play" a piece during the recording process it is by adjusting potentiometers to alter the patch in real time. Often I don't do even that during the recording but, instead, allow the "logic" of a given patch to play itself out over time. When I use a keyboard at all when working this way, it is usually to provide trigger and gate voltages rather than to play "notes" in the traditional sense. One characteristic of modular analog synthesis is that small changes to a given patch can produce dramatic differences in the resulting sound. Multiple tracks on a given album may be the result of the process I just described, using relatively minor variations of a single patch.
An aspect of this approach is that there usually is neither a musical score in the conventional sense nor any way to recover the exact combinations of settings and initial phase relationships of the various modules contributing to a patch. Once a track is recorded, that recording is the only representation of that exact "composition" and there would be no way for me or anyone else to perform it again and get the same result. This is one of the features of "West Coast" analog electronic music that I find conceptually attractive. There is a complete break not only from traditional tunings, structures and forms but the totality of a musical composition created in this way is represented entirely by its acoustic signature and nothing else.
But More Than a Little Digital
All of that said, I have increased my use over the years of tools and techniques that simply did not exist when I was young. Some of the sounds on my albums were produced using completely digital synthesis. These are often in the form of digital audio samples or the output of VST plugins using software like Ableton Live and Sonic Pi. Using Ableton Live, I can play a keyboard (to within the very narrow limis of my skill) to produce more conventionally tonal music. Some pieces consist only of tracks recorded in this way, while others combine analog and digital sound sources in various ways.
For example, the two versions of Farandole Lamentoso on my album The Modern Temple of Amusement were created using a single Sonic Pi program generating output in two ways: the "8-bit mix" consists of a digital audio file generated directly by Sonic Pi using some of its built-in digital synthesizers. The "2600 remix" uses the Behringer 2600 as the sound source, driven by the same Sonic Pi program, but by sending a sequence of MIDI commands rather than generating digital audio directly. Because the 2600 is monophonic, the latter version required running the program multiple times with slight modifications each time to produce the MIDI sequence for each voice separately.
Another piece, Ghostly Reminiscences, on the same album as the Farandole, was produced entirely as the output of another Sonic Pi program. Even when using digital tools like Sonic Pi, I tend to use randomization and sonic layering to produce unconventional timbres, rhythms and harmonies that will vary endlessly no matter how long they are looped. These Ruby source code files are the closest I am likely to come to writing "scores" for any of my music. This is my "West Coast" approach applied to using "East Coast" inspired gear and software.
Studio Setups
Yesterday
Here is the setup I used when creating tracks in the 70's and 80's, a few of which eventually were published as the album Undecidable in 2011, once self-publishing music started to become a thing:
The Knabe piano I had as a kid was built in the 1930's and sounded far better in real life than it sounds in the recordings made in my childhood bedroom or various apartments I had as a college student and young adult using decidedly consumer-level microphones and recording technologies of the era. The jankiness of the audio quality appeals to me as an artifact of the period of my life and the circumstances in which they were created, but I cannot argue with anyone who finds it less charming than I.
Today
The albums I have been publishing more recently have been created using variations of this setup:
Hardware
- Akai Pro MPK261 keyboard
- Behringer 2600 modern clone of the ARP 2600 I used as a kid
- PreSonus Studio 26c Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC)
...plus various Eurorack modules that change embarassingly frequently
Software
- Audacity Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)
- Ableton Live real-time digital synthesis and effects
- Sonic Pi Ruby dialect and runtime platform for creating digital music and controlling MIDI instruments
...running on an infuratingly overpriced, poorly designed and implemented iMac due to lack of support for anything else by the manufacturers of audio related hardware and software
