Translate

Sunday 12 February 2012

McFalls Electronics Project II

Today I am writing the MAX/MSP patches for my piece Chapels with Splendid Glass Windows, which will be workshopped by Mr McFalls Chamber on Thursday this week. I'm feeling pretty lucky to have another opportunity to work with these amazing musicians. My part of the project last year focussed on my piece Sea Longing, with Gaelic poetry by Sophia Dale.

Chapels with Splendid Glass Windows has several layers of electronic wizardry which we will explore throughout the workshop. The initial layer of electronics can be achieved through the use of pedals, phasers, delays, octave drops and reverbs achieve a sense of space and texture. The next layer of wizardry involves routing the signal through Logic and using the automation of plug ins to achieve the effects. Should this prove successful this is the point at which the patches will be tried.

The patches will connect a series of usb gadgets and toys to the automation in Logic. The idea behind this is that the musicians will be able to control and manipulate the effects on their sound. In practice this may be more complicated than is sounds, as the musicians will be using several of their limbs and a fair amount of their minds to control their instruments. Luckily, I've left a fair amount of free play in the bass part so I'll be enlisting the technical talents of Mr Rick Standley while he's counting those rests.

I've also made another one of my gate trigger patches for this piece. These gates will open for a given time frame and listen for the audio cue, as long as we are reasonably on time and in tune, the samples should automatically trigger.

So, I must move on and pull all this technicality together. I'm sure the McFalls website will bring more blogging as the week unfolds. Louise Rossiter and Malcom MacFarlane will also be working on pieces so there will be plenty of new music and experiments. Don't forget to check in and see how we're getting on.