Yehoodle
Yehoodle -- Music
Dates:
31-Dec-2022 (inception), 07-Jan-2023 ( music finalised), 31-Jan-2023 (music video finalised), 2-Feb-2023 (released)
Artists:
Music composed, performed, produced by Norman Freund
Artwork by Norman Freund (video and effects) and Zachary Freund (stills)
Description:
A New Year's Eve party was coming up this evening where I was going to play live on my harmonica, time to get in the mood and prepare. Threw a few tracks together and started to improvise on the harmonica. As it usually goes for me, a new composition was born.
Starts out with some Fuzz distorted synthesiser keyboard lines, a mellow bass line comes in, then let's hear what happens when the Lee Oskar F major diatonic harmonica improvises along. Only bought this harmonica recently and loving how well the notes can be bent.
Drum kits were played on the Ableton Push2 along with some of the melodic parts, with the remainder played on a standard piano style midi keyboard.
The basic time signature was 4/4 at 136 bpm, but the various melodic tracks used simultaneously a mixture of 9/4 and 4/4, whereas the drum kits simultaneously 6/4 and 4/4 time signatures.
The title of Yehoodle is a mash of the origins of the music: "Ye" from New Years Eve, "h" from the harmonica played and "oodle" from the noodle (improvise, jam, not the noodles you eat ;) ) session on the harmonica.
Most of the melodic and rhythmic ideas were developed in the session view of Ableton Live, assembled to the arrangement view for final tweaks and structure.
The harmonica was recorded using the Shure Green Bullet mic, closely cupped, then fed to a LR Baggs Para Acoustic DI (pre-amp) before being sent to the computer/DAW with the Native Instruments Komplete Audio 2. The harmonica was played cross harp style, harmonica in F, other instruments a blend of C, C minor blues, Eb major, Gm, D minor pentatonic.
Next came the music video, which took significantly longer to develop and produce. My son Zachary, took some photographs of the instruments I used to perform the tracks, the harmonica and Push2. Photographs were a mixture of traditional stills and long exposers plus simultaneously twisting the camera about the lens barrel axis. From here, I took those photographs and edited them in Affinity Photo for standard processing and effects.
A total of 12 still photographs were collected, with each being assigned to one octave of a standard midi keyboard for the first layer, next octave up for the second layer. These layers were then combined using the various Max (Cycling 74) jit.op object matrix combinations methods, (1 pass, 2 !pass, 3 +, 4 +m, 5 -m, 5 %, 7 !%, 8 ||, 9 &&, 10 ^, 11 !, 12 !=, 13 >p, 14 >=p), i.e. layer 1 only, layer 2 only, add them together, addition modulo, subtraction modulo, modulo, right modulo, logical or, logical and, bitwise xor, logical not, not equal, greater than and greater than/or/equal. Which operators to choose was assigned to controller knobs in the custom programmed Max patch I developed, which in turn appeared in Ableton Live automation lanes.
A third layer was based upon the procedural basis function graph (jit.bfg object *(1)). The last layer was assigned to the third octave of the midi keyboard plus some random noise (jit.noise). So the images, random noise and bfg graphics synthesis could be played and orchestrated just as music instruments. The visual ideas were developed through a combination of improvised "playing" and synchronising the rhythm to the instrumental tracks. The choice of layer combination methods was experimented with by assigned the patch knobs to the 8 rotary encoders of the Push2, plus purely programming them in via the Live automation lanes. Opacity controllers were also used.
The bfg object here offered a wide variety of graphics synthesis using fractals (more than you can poke a stick at, only scratching the surface with this composition). It was a case of twiddling the dials to see what I liked and what I felt matched the feel of the music. Very much a case of not really knowing what you are about to see until you turn those dials and experiment.
A small preview window of the graphics was provided on the patch, with the resolution sufficient to prototype the visual art. There was a small amount of lag due to the processing demands, but not detrimental to the visual composition process. Once the visual instructions were recorded and finalised, it was time to update the Max patch code to incorporate a video file recorder -- this is where the challenges began. I needed undetectable lag and high resolution 1920x1080 pixels at 60 frames per second! My computer could not keep up with such demands, so I took the approach of recording all the midi keys presses and knob continuous controller messages into the Max mtr (multi-track recorder) object, with video resolution set to a crude 320x180 pixels, recording the instructions in real time. The mtr object can replay the instructions it recorded at any speed you like (unlike Live which only allows you to slow the bpm down to a minimum of 20 beats per minute), which was played back 0.2x the original speed grabbing a graphics screen at full resolution every 83 milliseconds -- now the computer could keep up wth no detectable lag and record the video to a QuickTime video format in it's full glory. The Max jit.record object was used for the frame grabbing. The programming was not without it's hiccups, not all the Max objects had call backs (when the function finished), so to ensure proper sequencing of events, time waits had to be inserted along with the slowing down of the replay. Finding the replay speed factor and time waits was a process of trial and error.
**Virtual instrument:
Either VST, Sampled, Synthesised, or Physical Modelling based instrument.
Instruments:
* Fuzz Synth 1, Electric Tubes (Virtual instrument) (Francis Preve, Ableton Live), (composed and performed by Norman Freund)
* Fuzz Synth 2, Fuzz Clav (Virtual instrument) (Francis Preve, Ableton Live), (composed and performed by Norman Freund)
* Synth 3, Basic Pluck Keys (Virtual instrument) (Timo Preece, Ableton Live), (composed and performed by Norman Freund)
* Keyboards 1, Lush Roads (Virtual instrument) (Francis Preve, Ableton Live, wavetable), (composed and performed by Norman Freund)
* Keyboards 2, Dirty Back Roads (Virtual instrument) (Francis Preve, Ableton Live), (composed and performed by Norman Freund)
* Synth Bass 1, Basic Fine Line Bass (Virtual instrument) (Huston Singletary, Ableton Live), (composed and performed by Norman Freund)
* Harmonica, Lee Oskar 10 Hole F Diatonic harmonica, (composed and performed by Norman Freund)
* Drum kit1, One Hit Kit (Virtual instrument) (Mic Checkmate, Ableton Live), (composed and performed by Norman Freund)
* Drum kit2, 24_7 Kit, (Virtual instrument) (Mic Checkmate, Ableton Live), (composed and performed by Norman Freund)
* Drum kit3, LD Core Kit (Ableton Live), (composed and performed by Norman Freund)
Visuals, NOF_StillsMidiReactive Rel03 (programming by Norman Freund (1)), (composed by Norman Freund)
*(1):
The graphics synthesis portion of the visualiser used the graphic engine of
The BFG code, courtesy Max (Cycling74) library.
* 2011 by Ashima Arts (Simplex noise)
* 2011-2016 by Stefan Gustavson (Classic noise and others)
* 1994 F. Kenton Musgrave, Ridged multifractal terrain model,
* 2003 Ebert, D., F. K. Musgrave, D. Peachey, K. Perlin, and S. Worley.
Procedural multifractal. Texturing and modeling: A procedural approach, 440.
Third Edition. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
* 2003 Ebert, D., F. K. Musgrave, D. Peachey, K. Perlin, and S. Worley. 2003.
Heterogeneous procedural terrain function. Texturing and modeling: A procedural approach, 500.
Third Edition. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
* 2003, Ebert, D., F. K. Musgrave, D. Peachey, K. Perlin, and S. Worley. 2003. Procedural fBm .
Texturing and modeling: A procedural approach, 437. Third Edition. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
* 2013 2014 Inigo Quilez
// http://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/voronoilines/voronoilines.htm
* The MIT License
2017 Jan Forst
Music Video at:
Music audio file -- Yehoodle -- original music by Norman Freund