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tjporter wrote:I'm tired of dealing with the problems of others - three bands over the past 15 years, and there is always someone raining on the parade.

This quote, not to mention the subject in general, is something of a Pandora's box for me, so here we go (cre-e-a-a-k-k-k as I open the box )

After a disastrous all-talk-no-action (on their part) "garage band", I just decided to play melodica on random things, favorite tunes, acapella's, simple metronome, bonus beats cd's, and my sense of melody improved; decided then to look into and research basic sequencers and synths, purely as a hobby whilst continuing with more and more advanced arpeggiation on my melodica (heading in a dub direction, but with classical/soundtrack leanings). A friend of a friend heard me play, and invited me to "jam" (or so I thought) on the more electro side of his musical recording, and to play live on his dubstep project. This resulted in potentially fruitful sessions, although alarm bells started to ring for me soon after:

1) Blank expressions whenever I attempted to mix the visual with sound, i.e. narratives, songwriting, performance and presentation.

2) A lack of physicality in jam sessions; i.e him being constantly locked into Reason, and not even considering bringing his Microkorg, or even his MIDI controller into the equation much.

3) Being subtly ridiculed for writing and jotting down notes (literally: on musical staves), and him wrongly equating this with being a luddite.

4) A depressing lack of run-throughs and basic monitors ( I am no professional, but to hear yourself over the sub-bass would have been nice).

5) Generally feeling like a salad garnish to the tracks, despite endless talks of writing together.

6) Expanding my equipment to counter-act the tension and frustration, and having to listen to said person slate every piece of hardware brought to the table, slating occuring before power-up EVERY TIME

I now realise, in retrospect, that his mood dictated the tracks everytime, so any subtle nuances and colouring, musically speaking, was lost. I've learnt a lot over the past year, but sadly have had to distance myself from the friend that introduced me to this person, mainly because they co-habit, so I can spread my wings a bit more creatively, and technically (with the 'Tribes), but am sad to not see the friend, mainly because we were quite close platonically, and I can't deal with the negativity that seems to come out of nowhere when I go round.

Close but no cigar. Stylophone skiffle anybody ? (batteries included).

Regards, resonance, and real-time tweaking,

Andy Cooley

tjporter wrote:it seems a good place to mention the following: I don't know if you have tried running anything into the Monotron's AUX before, but if anything is plugged in (even a jack with no cable), it is dead easy to get it to self-oscillate. Turn it on to Cutoff & crank the Peak wide open. The Pitch knob is useless this way, but you won't care.

Just spent a good few hours (spread over a few days) running things through the Monotron's AUX - after much tweaking of the LFO to match an EA-1 song tempo (which has to be stuck at 100 bpm, due to some very tricky samples on the ES-1 track I'm building up), I finally got the results I wanted; starting with a pitch modulated sawtooth/triangular mix bass on the other EA-1, fed into the Monotron with the 100 bpm LFO running, then into the KP-1 Kaoss pad set on tremelo, THEN through the Boss DSD-2 Digital delay, to thicken the sound. As I'm staying with family at present, I have left big signs on the whole set-up "levels set - do not touch" Best thing is, it's the missing link for a track that's been lurking in my EA-1 for months now. It's even got a middle-8, which is a first for me
I even sampled the squeal the monotron makes when it's switched on (couldn't resist)
Will be sampling the whole thing to death tonight, in every key I need, and then some.

btw, I checked out your blog yesterday, very inspiring stuff, sort of irreverent and reverent at the same time. Keep up the good work. I'm soooo glad I joined this forum.

Peace

Andy Cooley

channelzero wrote:
your blog ... sort of irreverent and reverent at the same time.

I am very passionate about my fun