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Andy

Tue Oct 08 2013, 08:27AM

Registered Member #4266 Joined: Fri Dec 16 2011, 03:15AM
Location:
Posts: 874

You could possible play some pitchblack, but I'm not sure its that high of a party :)

Ash Small

Tue Oct 08 2013, 10:18AM

Registered Member #3414 Joined: Sun Nov 14 2010, 05:05PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4245

Steve Conner wrote ...

Yeah, let's work to make this a Nickelback-free zone.

+1. My car is already a 'Stickleback free zone'.

There's always 'High Voltage Rock and Roll' by AC/DC, 'Overkill (long version)' by Motorhead, or what about 'Purple Haze' by Jimi Hendrix?

Steve Conner

Tue Oct 08 2013, 10:52AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Yeah! That's more like my taste in music.

I programmed "Dakota" by the Stereophonics a while ago, it was my first experiment with drum sounds. The drum track kind of disappears once the rest of the mix gets going. I think the coil was running into its duty cycle limiter.

I think my next goal is to get a Tesla coil to play the Amen break.

nixie

Tue Oct 08 2013, 02:09PM

Registered Member #3908 Joined: Tue May 24 2011, 09:40PM
Location: Gilbert, Arizona USA
Posts: 68

For those that have a larger DRSSTC and might be interested in producing louder low bass notes:

A piano roll section is pasted below, showing a "Pulsed Octave Multiplex" (for lack of a better name) polyphony trick, having a short duty E2 synchronized with the intended note of D0.
E2 will drown D0 if it's note length is too long, so some experimentation is required.
The object was to achieve a note frequency well beneath what a DR should normally be able to produce with any volume.
I tried it with The Scientist to produce that "helicopter blade wash chop" at the 31 second mark, and have applied it to three other dubstep pieces since.

We should be able to improve on it with additional tweaking.

Lowbass

Jeff

HV Enthusiast

Tue Oct 08 2013, 02:47PM

Registered Member #15 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 01:11PM
Location:
Posts: 3068

Hey Jeff,

Are you familiar with Conlon Nancarrows player piano studies? These were extremely difficult piano pieces that no human was able to play, so he wrote them for player piano in the mid to late 20th century.

They could be very interesting pieces if ported to a DRSSTC and since written for player piano be very easy to port to a MIDI timeline. Real bizarre atonal pieces.

Check some of his things out - i think you'll like them.

Aragorn

Mon Oct 14 2013, 02:28PM

Registered Member #18516 Joined: Sat May 18 2013, 09:09AM
Location: Lancashire, UK
Posts: 38

nixie: What software do you use for your Midi composition/sequencing?

nixie

Mon Oct 14 2013, 09:25PM

Registered Member #3908 Joined: Tue May 24 2011, 09:40PM
Location: Gilbert, Arizona USA
Posts: 68

Aragorn wrote ...

nixie: What software do you use for your Midi composition/sequencing?

Good Question!
I'm mostly mac based, and use a paid app named Intuem. Along with some freeware add-on's that expand the functionality.
I refuse to admit it, but Intuem is dead. The author has not updated it's compatibility beyond OSX 10.6.4, and it's latest revision is very much bug-infested. It indiscriminately locks up for nearly any reason.
(Eric will attest to my abnormal "twitchyness" when someone pulls a plug, or changes a setting on the laptop while Intuem is loaded and running).

In spite of all that, I'm genuinely proficient with it's composition tools, and found ways to squeeze every morsel of MIDI goodness out of the coils with only two-note polyphony at hand.
Instant patching allows me to record a MIDI track, or add to one in realtime from a MIDI keyboard, in sync with the original audio track. Improv, as Eric calls it.
I work mostly with flac files, but the same is true for mp3 or other compressed formats. Afterward, I go back and "snap" the notes in bulk to the BPM spacing of the tempo. Achieving professional results by a rank amateur lagging the beat. But honestly, Eric is a true music talent among his other skills. He can improv ad-lib to others in realtime to the tempo. I wish I could do that.

I also use a "cheater" tool to decode more complex electronic music compositions into separated instrument MIDI tracks. That is Melodyne Studio, another paid app. An amazing piece of software. Although it does have a steep learning curve before you can decode an audio file, and assemble a multitrack MIDI file that you'd not be embarrassed to show in public.

I recently purchased a copy of Logic Pro. I played with it for an afternoon... and sat it aside. It appears to support the same features touted by Intuem. Unfortunately the interface and tool list is completely different from Intuem, so in desperation I'll likely stay with Intuem until I can't any longer.

We had another rehearsal on Saturday night, and Eric played his Tesla Coil MIDI overlay of "Fade into Darkness" by Avicii. Unfortunately my camera recorded it completely blurry out of focus, so maybe he'll have it on youtube in a week or two.

Hope that covers it all. Jeff

Uspring

Tue Oct 15 2013, 09:32AM

Registered Member #3988 Joined: Thu Jul 07 2011, 03:25PM
Location:
Posts: 711

Jeff wrote:

A piano roll section is pasted below, showing a "Pulsed Octave Multiplex" (for lack of a better name) polyphony trick, having a short duty E2 synchronized with the intended note of D0.
E2 will drown D0 if it's note length is too long, so some experimentation is required.
The object was to achieve a note frequency well beneath what a DR should normally be able to produce with any volume.

I've been trying to understand, what you're doing here. A D0 has pulses with a period of 54ms. They have a power spectrum containing D0 and lots of harmonics to D0. When you e.g. double up these pulses you'll get about twice the power in D0 itself, but depending on the spacing between the double pulse, you'll change the spectrum of the harmonics. An E2 has a period of 12ms. Does that mean that you have double pulses with 12 ms spacing and 54ms repetition period?

Steve Conner

Tue Oct 15 2013, 09:44AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Nixie, you might want to try Ableton Live Lite, or Reaper. Both have a decent "piano roll" MIDI editor.

The "pulsed octave multiplex" is an old psychoacoustic trick, what would have been called "synthetic bass" in a radio handbook of the 50s.

If you generate 2f, 3f, 4f and so on then your ear says "Ah the harmonics of f" and infers f.

Uspring

Tue Oct 15 2013, 10:13AM

Registered Member #3988 Joined: Thu Jul 07 2011, 03:25PM
Location:
Posts: 711

So you would play a D1, which contains only the even harmonics of D0 and add the odd harmonics by extra pulses. I can't fit that to Jeffs description, though. What I'm missing is, what the pulse train really looks like.

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