Tag: music

New Music: Duration and Unknown

I somehow managed to create two new songs over the last week or so, both instrumental but with, um, slightly different feels to them.

The releases are:

This will nearly round out a release I’ve decided to title “Oevre,” just because the name sounds cool. (An “oevre” is a reference to the works of a composer or artist; a single album is not an actual oevre, I’d think, but a selection from it. I title things rather ironically; the titles of songs I write tend to be things that annoy me or frustrate me, although there are certainly counterexamples.)

Unknown is the most recent; it’s recorded with a guitar tuned to Gmaj7, doubled for harmony and reinforcement, with a piano, drums, bass, and a set of synthesizers (an OB-X emulation, a Minimoog emulation, and a Moog Modular emulation).

Duration is much the same, except with no guitars, and very different synthesizer patches.

I hope you enjoy them.

The LinnStrument looks awesome

Geert Bevin pointed out the LinnStrument this morning. Color me jealous – that thing looks awesome.

It’s basically a MIDI controller built on a pad, largely on a grid – much like a stringed instrument’s notes are, except providing expression and note control and you move your fingers around. There’re demos of using it to play slide guitar, expressive saxophone, violin – I can imagine it being workable for drums but it’d probably be underusing a lot of the LinnStrument’s power for expression.

And it’s based on the Arduino – and the software is open source, at that! (Or the site claims – I didn’t see a reference offhand to the source repository. Geert told me it’s going to be available when the instrument is available, which makes sense.)

At $1500, it’s not cheap (nor has it been released yet, as of September 9, 2014) but it looks really nice – it’s a little like the Eigenharp in providing a different and unique control surface, while being a little less intimidating for people like me.