works of wanderlust

I think I may have alluded to it in a previous post, long ago and last year, but I have been casually dabbling in audio and digital music.

About a year ago now, feeling a little flush from working some part time hours at a local retail gig, I put a couple hundred bucks into a little digital synth setup. Clearance sales were my friend and I was able to get a helluva deal on an Arturia Microfreak synth.  If you have never heard of that particular toy be kind and don’t consider yourself too uninformed. It is a very niche product, a kind of mid-range digital synthesizer that is neither really a keyboard nor a pure synth box, obscure and  rather a weird sort of mash up of electronics and transistor punk meets musical instrument. There is really nothing else that looks like it, and I got one for about half of the MSRP at a blowout sale.

I love that damn thing. I think the last time I fell so in love with a piece of electronics was when I got my first dSLR camera.  The potential of a tool for creative exploration uncouples itself from the constraints of the dreams of others when you have enough knobs and dials to turn that the variety becomes nearly infinite.

I have been roughly learning to play the piano since. Sure, I already know how to read music and am coming up on the ten year anniversary of taking up the violin as a middle-aged student struggling through beginner music lessons and up into member of an orchestra, but those are musical skills… where often, the synth feels a lot more like creative play.  

I feel like it’s music meets a lego set.

But another bit of recent financial flush with some side work has opened up an opportunity to add to my musical set up. Not exactly striking gold, but a spare couple hundred bucks from a gig over the month of December allowed me to buy a couple bolt-on musical tools. 

First, I bought myself an effects pedal. Technically it’s a guitar pedal, but audio-in is audio-in and if my audio-in happens to come from a digital synth then that’s not a fault so much as a creative choice and a musical opportunity. I had been doing very little structured musical exploration with that to date, but I had plugged in and passed through it’s distortion and reverb engines almost everything that makes a sound in our house, including voice and playing my aforementioned violin into a microphone.

But then second and just lately I bought a looper pedal. Again, it is a guitar pedal, meant to be operated with a foot and an amp on a stage for groovy live performance, but again audio-in is… yes, audio-in, and those are not limitations so much as creative choices that I get to bend and musical opportunities I get to explore. I plugged it into my synth and have been loving the result. Loopers allow you one to record a bit of sound and then layer more and more sound over it on a loop, adding a bass line then a chorus, then rhythm and vibe and twinkles and song, building into something more than one can describe.

I made this last night on the looper, layering about six different tracks in real time with a shimmer effect run through the effects pedal, all of it synth and sound and a mix of wet and dry mashed into a weird chaotic burst of noise and groove:

I have been dabbling with all of it for the last week or so, recording tracks and loops and sometimes just sitting in the basement for an hour making dreamy soundscapes with it all.  My piano skills are not great, but they have vastly improved (practice with anything will have that effect, I hear) and I have even started some light composition. None of it is great. Some of it is channeling my inner-Ross. A lot of it is chaos of noise and lacks any resemblance to what you probably consider music, but there are pieces starting to emerge from the effort of learning the tools that is more than any of those things.

And see, the thing about all this stuff is that these quasi-gadgets are all more than simple devices. They are musical instruments. Its not like buying a new computer or a game console. It’s not like nabbing some hot new phone. It’s not like upgrading your speaker system.  Yes they are all electronics and batteries and wires, but they are tools of audio creativity and would probably vastly prefer to be on a stage in front of an audience than in my basement.  They are meant to perform, in the literal sense of that word.

I may be a long way off from live performance, but at the end of the audio-in chain is the last part: a recording system, one button to press to capture anything in the last step before the sound erupts from my headphones or speakers.

That’s audio-out, and it’s the most exciting part of all.