Is this piece too weird? It came out of some free form experimenting with a free VST plugin called Delay Lama. It’s one of the most unusual synths I’ve seen. It simulates the sound of a human voice reminiscent of Tuvan throat or overtone singing. You have control over the pitch, the size of the vocal tract and the vowel being sung.

Of course I had to automate it in completely inhuman ways to make it clearly still a machine (am I threatened?)

What makes the plugin so unusual is that it also visually represents the singer. As you manipulate the synth’s output an animated monk’s face follows right along. It’s fun to play with and watch during playback.

It works on both windows and mac and should work in any VST host although I hosted it in Sonar. I used propellerhead’s Reason, in rewire mode, to do the percussion. I think the percussion options in Reason exceed that of Sonar by a good deal.

So I ended up with with a short, world-music inspired bit of electronic music.

Happy Listening: newage-sewage.mp3

A sensitive piano solo about picking one’s nose perhaps?

I can’t play the piano so this piece came about from just noodling around with a midi controller (M-Audio Radium 49, no longer available). I recorded the midi results of my halting, uneven playing into Cakewalk Sonar and through the magic of midi editing, I was able to fix it up and make it sound like it was played somewhat competently.

It was then rendered through a piano patch in Sonar’s DS864 software sampler.

Happy listening: Just Out Of Reach

This song was inspired by the printing on the side of a grocery bag from an Asian grocery store.

Check it out:

The lyrics are taken entirely from the text on the bag. Also, for some reason I tried to make the piece sound a bit like a theme from a TV show (from the days when TV shows had songs that introduced them) so it’s short. Of course, due to my stunted imagination, most of my songs are short, so it’s not like I really needed to make excuses.

While being short is not rare, me singing *is* rare. Most of the singing is heavily processed so I felt OK doing it. All the spoken parts are NOT me. They’ve all been synthesized from various web sources all of which I’ve forgotten.

Other than my voice the only other real instrument is my guitars. Everything else was done on the computer.

Elephant Family was recorded entirely in Cakewalk Sonar. The guitar was recorded through a Digitech GNX2 processor.

Happy Listening: Elephant Family

Every blog has to have a first post, so here it is.