Category Archives: Music

Vetinari Clock Rock

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Lord Vetinari also has a strange clock in his waiting-room. While it does keep completely accurate time overall, it sometimes ticks and tocks out of sync (example: “tick, tock… ticktocktick, tock…”) and occasionally misses a tick or tock altogether, which has the net effect of turning one’s brain “into a sort of porridge”.

That is from the discworld books by Terry Pratchet. Ofcourse the nice guy’s over at akafugu made this into reality, and sells it, in a kit. http://www.akafugu.jp/posts/products/vetinariclock/

I had to buy one, and one thing lead to another and I bought three. This is what they sound together, with a bit of extra instruments added, and a lot of moving things around in time so that they swing.

I hope you enjoy this, I enjoyed making it.

30 songs in 30 days.

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http://30songs30days.com is an initiative I’ve joined. The quest is to write 30 songs in November. This is both hard and easy. Writing 30 songs is easy, but with the awesome other musicians participating I’m feeling the pressure of  stepping up my game. I have not really succeed in that, but I think I will become a happier musician after this is done. If  you want to check out my songs you should look over at http://30songs30days.com/mp3s/larsby/

Binaural beats and Atari Punk Console followup

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Long-time reader of this blog may remember me having an idea of creating a binaural beat generator based on 2 APC. real all about it here http://www.larsby.com/johan/?p=67.

Well so, I made it. I was going to make a few APC’s anyway so I might as well test the idea.  I used http://www.electro-music.com/forum/phpbb-files/thumbs/t_apc555_129.gif so I could try and make a stripboard.

So yeah, the pot’s have a little bit of a glitch in them, kinda ruins the experience, and that is why I had to edit the video so hard.

Listen to it in headphones and tell me you don’t get dizzy.

Here’s a zipped wav-file in case youtube doesn’t do stereo properly. binauralbeatAPC.wav

If you want to make one yourself do 2 of the above APC, connect the pot’s to stereo versions of it. On of the cables between the pot’s add a new 10k pot between. Also if you don’t connect the batteries at the exact same time you will get strange phase’s. Very nice!

Music I did ages ago: The Ost

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About fourhundred years ago, when I was still living in Lund with a girlfriend instead of a wife. I used a music program called Buzz. I made loads and loads and loads of songs in it. Everything really was in my fingers in that program. It’s a long time abandoned from me though. I thought I should try and make a few songs that fitted together in a way bigger then that you could just hear that they where made by me. That was the birth of “The Ost”. You see, there are many Swedish puns available to that name. And I really cant remember if I made the album just so that I could use those puns excessively or the other way around.

I made a few songs, removed the ones that did not make the cut. I made album art and I did one t-shirt with the logo on. I also sent the CD to ten or fifteen labels. Using the pun excessively in the English companion-letter that I sent with. You see ost in Swedish is cheese. And record and slice is the same word. You are intelligent ppl, you already figured out a lot of those puns by now.

I received exactly zero replies on that CD I sent to the record labels. This where for the most non-Swedish companies. But anyways. I listen to the songs from time to time and I still like them so they are good to me.

here they are:

A - The Ost
E - The Ost
G - The Ost
H - The Ost

Friday night, glitchnoisefight

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I’m sitting here, home with the kids sleeping. After riding my exercise bike for a while I decided I should make some sort of song. A little laid back glitch thingy I though. but it became a little more noisy then I though it would. And not very melodic.

I’m off to bed soon, and it’s probably a mistake publishing this song before it have had a little time settle. I mean, a good rule of thumb is not to play a song to anyone until you’ve slept on it.

Tomorrow I’m going to make a present for my kid sister.

Glitchnoise-experimentation1

That VST idea I had

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Do you remember this VST idea I had http://www.larsby.com/johan/?p=187 ? Well I tried it out. Not fully, but close enough.
In Ableton Live I added a beat, then I recorded midi of me banging to it in different variations. Then I put that through the Live randomizer and then the scale plugin. The scale plugin was fixed so that notes could not clash with each other. Then I recorded the output of that midi data into a few tracks with softsynths. It sounds pretty art musicy, but still good. I wonder if I should program the VST or just wait for max 4 Live.

Anyways here is the mp3 you’ve been waiting for: testing the melody generation idea

Idea for a new VST, a little helper for creating melodies.

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Yes yes yo.

I had  this idea when traveling to work. The train was super crowded and that got me thinking of circuit bending. A lot of the devices I’ve bent have a “press only one key to play a melody that you probably heard a gazillion times before”  that combined with me reading up on Arnold Schoenberg’s 12 tone matrix melody composer thing gave me a new idea! What if you could type in a couple of notes that you know are in a good scale, or fits your mood. Then press a key on your keyboard or similar to add play these in order. And if you make the VST output MIDI then you could connect it to any VSTi and have it play the sound’s of your liking. You could even record the output and edit it. I was thinking that this would be a nice little tool for creating melodies (which I suck at programming in) but editing or fiddling them out is much easier for me.

Perhaps I’ll do this and put it up on http://www.shuriken.se one of these days, it will mostly be UI work though, which I find a bit tedious to program in VST GUI.  Thought’s ideas suggestions are welcome.  Name suggestions also.

Digital rust, creating a feedback-loop to destroy audio.

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So I was not at ease after creating Decompression glitches for sound generation but needed to explore this more. I was thinking that if you could feed the glitched sample back into the algorithm over and over again it could create something nice. something noisy, something full of love. So I did do the necessary changes after the perfect phrase had come to me during almost throwing up while taking the train home from work. You see, I think I had some sort of food poisoning, but the whole time I was thinking left,right,fight out loud in my head, with the sound coming from first left, then right, then both, but overdubbed. So naturally I had to use that for the digital rust test you are about to hear. So without further ramblings here it is in it’s shiny mp3 form.

digital rust example – Left Right FIGHT

Listening to new music every-day.

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When I was a teenager I read or got told that your music taste stagnates when you reach 22. That is, you wont listen to anything new, atleast not anything in a new genre when you grow older.

This scared the shit out of me and I promised myself that that would never happen to me.

It hasn’t, but I wonder if it is because of this fear that has made me expand my views or if it is because even though the genres are the same, it is the same type of music I listen to?

Don’t get me wrong, I used to listen to blackmetal and the likes, now I’ve been into breakcore for a while with small doses of grindcore to supply my appetite in distorted guitars.  And I listen to brand new music on my way back and forth to work. I’ve been streamripping from breakcore.free.fr for a long time so I have a lot of music that is totally new to me. And I have like 2h of traveltime every workday.  While that radiostation isnt as rigid in it’s specification of breakcore (but there are some noice, gabba, digital destruction,  booty bass etc) I have a feeling that there is something in common with all the genres and music I like. I have a feeling that there is nothing new, just disguised in different ways, and that I have not moved a bit forward at all since I was a headbanging teenager.

How about that?  Wouldn’t it have been awesome if Pandora could have told me what tag’s I have been listening to over the years and try to get a fix on my taste?