I am working on a piece of music that is coming along slowly. I am creating "phat" sounds (to my ear anyway) with a hardware drum machine and sampling them, one hit at a time as well as in loops. The samples are then being loaded into various samplers as "drum kits" which can be played with the same MIDI notes used to trigger the original sounds and loops, in addition to any new notes I want to write. What this is doing is dramatically expanding the range of the drum machine. Besides being able to play polyrhythms it can now treat the drum hits as "pitched material," meaning I can write tunes for the tom-toms and flexible "multi" channel (used to synthesize cowbells and such). When raised or lowered in pitch these no longer sound like drums, but rather unusual synthesizers, which can be further modified with a bevy of effects (compression, phasing, resampling) built into the samplers. My plan is first to write a piece consisting entirely of sounds from the original machine, and then to use the sampled kits as rhythm instruments on subsequent tunes. Slow work, but I'm learning a lot.

- tom moody 9-03-2006 6:18 pm

right on Tom, looking forward to hearing that
- Thor Johnson 9-04-2006 12:57 am





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