No, I am no musician by any stretch of the word. For many years, in the meanwhile even decades, however, I have had an interest in synthesizers, patch programming, digital synthesis and the resulting music. And I happen to be the proud owner of two of these fascinating machines. So, if time allows and if I find myself in the mood, I sit down at the keyboard to doodle and toot. Sometimes the resulting sounds even resemble music. You can find a few examples down below.
But please be aware that, as much as I do know about the creation of sythesizer patches and digital audio programming, as much do I still need to learn about music theory, composition, production, mixing and mastering. Furthermore, no DAW was involved in the creation of these hits and misses. The following is definitvely not for the faint at heart. Or faint at ears. You have been warned.
In autumn 2022 I had the sonic idea for a Halloween song – which I then managed to finish right in time for Christmas. Duh. Recently my home music server deigned to lay that very song onto my auditory passages. What atrocious horror! The mix was really – and I do really mean really – bad. But I still like the funky rhythm and the melody (as far as that piece even does have something like melody). So, I sat down and spent some time debugging, rearranging, cleaning and polishing that musical concoction of mine. Padestrian as I am, the piece is still far from perfect. But I think it sounds a tiny little whee bit better than before. Now even the treble troubles have been resolved. So, here it comes, again perfectly failing to match the season:
More than 25 years ago, when MP3.com, Napster and Gnutella were where people got their music, an MP3 with a pityful bitrate of 128kb/s and the title ‘Unconditional’ by someone who called himself ‘Icicle’ found its way from the vast shallows of the intarwebz onto my spinning magnetised platters. This little piece of dance music is nothing much in terms of harmony or melody – but rhythmically it gets the things moving. I still remember being envious and asking myself what it would take to come up and make such a piece of music. 25 years later I finally decided to try my hands at a cover version, as the original can no longer be found on-line. So, here it is: my interpretation of Icicle's Unconditional:
In the year 1990 the Japanese producer Korg introduced a new synthesizer named ‘Wavestation’ to the market. One of the most famous preset sounds of this machine is the so called ‘Ski Jam’ which has been also installed on all subsequent models capable of wave-sequencing under the name ‘Ski Dance’. Recently the Youtuber AudioPilz reviewed the Wavestation on his channel ‘Bad Gear’. He mocked the Ski Jam preset by stating that he does not know of any song making use of this sound. Today he upped the ante. Okay. Challenge accepted. Here comes my piece of music using the Ski Dance preset created by Peter “Ski” Schwartz:
Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth. Unfortunately it seems that it is the most unhinged people that currently make the Earth move – and not in a good direction, methinks. Here is the matching sound track:
Recently I tried to recreate the famous 'Pizzagogo' sound of the Roland D50 synthesizer. All I knew was that this sound consists of four partials: one pizzicato sample, one TR-727 agogo sample and two differently pulse-width modulated pulse square waves. At the same time I was reading the manga 'Love Bullet' and was in which the cupids use guns rather than bow and arrow to make people fall in love. I wondered what kind of sound such guns would possibly make. Out came this litte tune mixing one sampled and one recreated version of 'Pizzagogo':
Another space themed little piece of music. Noirée serves as the musical basis for Goodbye Gaia, the latter of which actually uses sonified attitude rate data of the now retired Gaia satellite.
Ashes to ashes, funk to funky. We know Major Tom's a junkie... And I want to know whether I can reproduce the sound of that funky piano created by Toni Visconti in the song's intro. You judge yourself:
Supposing Mozart was alive and kicking today, what kind of music would he make? This question kept me tossing and turning in my bed for the past few weeks -- while good old Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus was very likely rotating in his grave in view of the possible dire answers with which I would come up. But here we are: Mozart goes K-Pop.
I am not yet happy with this version. The mix still needs some more clean-up and definition...
Is there a wolf in the house? Probably not. But still here we have a piece of 90s style house music. Upon listening to this more than one person claimed that this ditty evokes within their mental cinema the image of one heck of a crazy litte spaceship flitting from one planet to the next, sometimes leisurely slow, sometimes blazenly fast. If they think so...
The Korean pop group ITZY published their latest song Kill Shot. I am not so much a fan of this kind of wannabe rap. But the song is carried by a nice synth-bass riff. Can I come up with something similar? A coral riff... erhm... reef maybe? With deadly mermaids practising their musical kill shots?
For the first time I used a side-chained compressor to make the bassline duck under the bass drum. And I am using the ducky lead. And I finally managed to bake a convincing Pizzagogo on my Kronos.
I watched too many dragonboat drift race videos.