No Ghosts - Just Fear - Cutting Edge Controllerism

One of the pleasures I have had as a musician has been getting to know other artists musically and personally. I met Mark Mosher first on Twitter but then personally at the Electro Music Festival in Heugenot. It has been my great pleasure to get to know him. Mark is not only a talented artist but very dedicated to developing a fresh perspective on Controllerism utilizing the latest cutting edge technology such as adding his own visuals with Resolume and further developing a carefully constructed rig by trimming a few pieces of gear but adding Native Instruments "Machine".

Mark has produced several albums including his sci fi series "I Hear Your Signals" and "Reboot" as well as appearing on many musical collaboration albums. He has been a favorite of the Electro Music crowd with his visual approach to music making and Controllerism.

"No Ghosts. Just Fear." is Mark's first foray into the darker side of music. What I have always liked about Mark's music is that it's concept based, it tells a story.

Here is a link to the album:

http://markmosher.bandcamp.com/album/no-ghosts-just-fear

Each of the pieces in his latests "No Ghosts. Just Fear" seem to encapsulate this as I imagined myself placed in the spiders web, plunged into utter darkness and marooned in the cold and vast expanses of space.

"Primeval" is one of my favorites". Mark is not only musician but sound designer. I know that one of his creations can be found in Rob Papen's "Blade". "Primeval" reflects Marks talent with sound design as the listener is treated to a blend of synthetic strings, bells and bass. I loved the mix and variation of timbres here.

"Alone in the Dark" reminded me of those old gothic horrors wandering around dark hallways and dark basements. The sense of anxiety and fear (no ghosts) is striking here.

"In Fight or Flight" I found myself tossed about by a sea of sound in constant motion. One of the aspects of Mark's style in this album which is a noticeable departure from his beat oriented sci fi is a shifting of time speeding up and slowing down which is most effective.

"In Under the Spider's Web" we find this time shifting put to great effect. I could sense the web, the spider lurking in the web waiting to strike and then it's spindly legs translated as musical notes rushing to meet it's prey.

In "Orbiting Miranda" we move from the web to space. The wonderful blend of noise and metallic tones here provide a sense of the vastness and coldness of space. I really liked the use if noise here in non percussive ways, very complex and musically effective.

As always, listening to Mark's music has been a pleasure. Getting to know Mark as musician, sound designer and especially friend had been my great pleasure and I look forward to Mark's future work as he continues to expand the boundaries of Controllerism and music.

Pythagorus

It may come as a surprise but my first instrument (excluding my early years) is a guitar. I got away from it for a long time so I could play synths. Despite the fact that I bought a Moog Guitar with MIDI I am really not a big fan of pitch to MIDI. Eventually I would love to buy an Eigenharp Tau but I also line guitars because you can touch the oscillator (the string) and through muting and harmonic techniques change the timbre in more complex ways then are possible on a synth.

What I never really liked about a guitar is it is almost a percussive instrument especially an acoustic. It has a short decay. So all those nice modulation techniques you can do on a synth, are limited on a guitar.

Now after a quick read of the Internet chatter on the Moog Guitar I can see it has been met with much criticism.

Some say it's just a better EBow. Well, first I despise EBows. I never could master using one effectively. EBows also can't take energy away from a string or shift energy between the bridge and the neck shifting harmonic content.

So for me, the Moog Guitar is a very complex oscillator I can touch and has a ladder filter built in to boot. Ok, I realize the filter is a bit gimmicky but I personally like ladder filters and having one built in is a plus and more than window dressing.

Now for the reason I bought one. In a word, sustain. On a guitar there are some tricks to get harmonics but the sustain is limited unless you want to stand in front of a Marshall stack (aka Hendrix). But, if the strings have infinite sustain then a whole world of possibilities opens up based on direct contact with the string. Add processing as you have something unique and with vastly expanded musical girth than a regular guitar.

And since harmonics form the basis of scales and harmony as can be seen from the time of Pythagorus who made his own scale that developed into the western one we us today, it just seems to me that there is rich territory for musical inspiration here.

That, in a nutshell is what I an calling Pythagorus.

A Warehouse Full of Instruments

For a while now music therapists have been providing me with a steady series of interesting instruments to find samples for and play. In fact, I have an entire set on SoundCloud dedicated to music based on these instruments.

http://soundcloud.com/lux_seeker/sets/music-therapist-inspired/

For example "Swamp Echoes" uses a frog croaker sample. I got the idea on a video about instruments from Vietnam from Kat Fulton. Natalie Mullis has inspired be by here demo videos of various percussive instruments to experiment with these instruments (in sample form) and more.

I know that Music Therapists often never venture past Garage Band" but I would like to suggest that a world of sampled instruments exist that don't take up any real space just hard drive space.

So this is the first in a series. First, I would like to explain some of the history of sampling, what it is, suggest some samplers to try and then some MIDI controllers they might use with clients.

I know that Music Therapy tends to be a bit of a closed circle but I just ask that any music therapists that read this stay open to new ideas.

More to come

Criss Cross

I just wanted to quickly mention a little secret that perhaps some have never thought about. If you own both Absynth and Alchemy and Kontakt (some 3rd party instruments) you have entire libraries of useful sounds you can use.

On a Mac you can find all these nicely organized under Library/Applications Support/Company Name/Samples

On a PC you should go to the directory for the plug in and I presume look under samples.

Secret - Nothing prevents you from using the samples from one plug in in another.

I know many people just tweak presets but if you are adventurous enough to build from scratch or change samples in a preset your sample library is a big as all the collective samples from your plug ins.

Happy Hunting!

P.S.

If you own IRIS you can also import all these into IRIS.

The Matrix

Who can forget the shock of Neo who followed the white rabbit, took the pill and discovered that the world he thought was really was nothing more than a computer program and he was no more than a battery.

In some ways I think as an electronic artist I can get trapped into another kind of matrix. The one that tells me that all music has to come from a computer. Well, I have been living in two worlds for some time now. A few examples:

The Korg Wavedrum - no MIDI but very flexible. Ok, technically there us a computer running to control it but it's in the background. The sound is processed not MIDI triggered.

Moog Voyager.

Well, it's got MIDI and a computer but you don't need the MIDI to make music with it and the computer only controls analogue circuits.

Moog Guitar

Only MIDI if you want it. I suppose it may have chips but no real controlling computer here. This is why I bought one.

Mics

Yes, that amazing invention of yore, the microphone. No computers and there is a whole world of sounds to record.

Just a few suggestion here on how one might leave the matrix.

Breathe

I have been creating music now for a long time and I am no neophyte with a synthesizer. From my first album, Morton Subotnick's "Side Winder" on the Buchla Music box I have been seeking a kind of holy grail of synthesis. That is, to be able to create any sound.

Now, decades after that 1st album and many many hours using just about every method of synthesis I now yawn when anyone talks about waveforms. The truth is that what I find really interesting about sound is the wrapping paper.

Confused? Ok, consider a violin. What makes a fine violin sound so good? People pay more money than they would pay for a house for a Stradivarius. So, is it the fretboard, the strings, the bow that create the magic? No, it's the wrapping, the body of the violin.

In the same way why are certain Cathedrals, recording studios and concert halls coveted? Tangerine Dream used to play in Churches why? Simple, the wrapping, the acoustics.

Even consider the language of synthesizers. We speak of envelopes. The wrapping for notes. Every note that a musician plays breathes. Like our lungs are filled with air notes will the space around them and breathe. Even our words are breathe. Music is rhythm.

But with the advent of the computer we have reduced that breath, that wrapping of a note to a 1 and a zero, a pulse, a trigger. Notes on drum machines and sequencers become boxes. Sound is in your face and yes, without breathe and soul. We give our musical gifts but we forget the wrapping paper.

So, I guess that is why I am interested in acoustic wrapping paper. Be it the body of a violin or the acoustics of a great cathedral as I look not for waveforms digitized in 1s and 0s but breathe.

Reverb

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about reverb. Much of my music has two effects, delay and reverb. I often find flange and even chorus a bit to heavy for my tastes. Even with delay and reverb I tend to back the mix down. I see it more like a soft filter on a photograph. Enhancing but not so much so that it draws attention from the picture.

For a long while now I have been using Guitar Rig's Reflector for reverb. It's a decent impulse response modeler and I can just drag it into a rack. I also use Spirit Canyon Audio's impulse responses because I am always looking for more exotic sounds.

Ok, that's the background. Now I come to the dilemma. When I use these they are either to little or to much. I have Waves IR-1 but it's a CPU crusher. Perhaps it would work better. When I get to much reverb, it becomes it's own sound. It sounds disconnected from the sound I am applying it to.

Now this appears to me to be a problem with impulse response. Your kind of stuck with the space. You can back the level down but what I want is more like backing diffusion down.

Here is where I see an advantage to algorithmic reverbs. You get control over parameters like diffusion and, on the EQ side high and sometimes low frequency damping with crossover frequencies. Also other parameters that control the acoustic space they emulate.

So my hope is that by doing some tweaking and using algorithmic reverb I can get closer to wear I want to be. I can also mix in the exotic reverb but I am thinking of doing that with post production automation if the mix so that it can fill some quiet passages with more exotic tails. I think EQ and compression are also useful tools here.

So I am just throwing this out there in the hopes I get some comments. Do you use reverb? Which reverb do you use? What techniques do you use? Why?

Hope to hear from some readers. I really would love the feedback.