57 Results for : sequencer
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Travel in Silence
If you enjoy artists like Massive Attack, Royksopp, Thievery Corporation, Enigma, Vangelis, Café del Mar, Buddha Bar etc., you will love this album from the Norwegian music project Homeless Balloon! The CD has more than anhour of acoustic and electronic pieces inspired by ambient, world fusion, chill out and experimental electronica. A highly eclectic album to ease your soul! A limited stock of the CD comes with a nice Digipak cover. A digital booklet with images, information about the recording, the instruments and the artist, can be downloaded free from the official artist page of Homeless Balloon. Homeless Balloon is the music project of Norwegian composer and artist Helge Krabye, who was born 1953 in Oslo. He has composed music for more than eighty television documentaries, radio plays, fantasy stories and art projects as well as more than a hundred signature melodies and musical jingles. In his music, he is known for combining acoustic instruments with experimental, electronic sounds, and for building strong melodies. Helge Krabye's first instrument was a small, wooden zither that his grandmother gave him when he was four years old. At six, he started taking violin lessons and later began playing first violin in Nordtvet Skoles Strykeorkester in Oslo. His teacher Peter Hindar (well known for his performances with Hindarkvartetten) encouraged him to practice more, but he didn't have the patience. One day Peter Hindar caught him in cheating, he didn't read the music, he played it by memory and by ear... That was the end of one era, but the beginning of another. When Helge Krabye was 15, big boys were supposed to play guitar, not violin - and he quit the school orchestra. His grandmother gave him a violin, so he never really got rid of it... He took up the violin again after high school, encouraged by his friend Vegard Brenna who played piano. Since then, he has often used violin in his recordings. With the Tandberg 1200X tape recorder he bought for the money he received at his Confirmation, Helge Krabye started composing music and creating new sounds. Very much inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen and the Beatles, he developed an ear for sound. He was able to dub his guitar with noises and voices from the radio. One of the first compositions was 'Song of the world', a montage of acoustic guitar, radio tuning and voice samples like Mr. Richard Nixon announcing the end of the Vietnam War and an overexited radio dj announcing the (terrible) movie 'Song of Norway'. Music meant a lot to Helge Krabye as a teenager, and he bought a lot of LP's and even made his own listening charts every week. He discovered 'Astral Week' by Van Morrison, 'Inner Mounting Flame' by John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, 'What's going on' by Marvin Gaye, the experimental music of Karheinz Stockhausen and Terry Riley, as well as Mozart's 'Symphony No. 40' with the great conductor Carlo Maria Giulini. After high school, he went to technical school in NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Cooperation) to become a sound engineer. Here he was able to use professional recording studios and instruments, and he played guitar with his classmates. With a class mate, he was responsible for the innovative radio program 'Lydbåndmix' ('Music Tapes') where amateur musicians were invited to send in their own musical compositions. Several later to be well known, musicians and singers were among the artists who were discovered through the program. Later, Helge met Arnfinn Christensen, who became a close friend, and who jumped in as program host with Helge in the next series of 'Lydbåndmix'. Arnfinn also played instruments and made his own music. He owned a Tascam Portastudio, and they made several songs and instrumental tunes together. (The cassette 'Spillopper' is still available). Arnfinn has contributed by playing recorder on many of Helge's pieces during the years, and the compositions 'Order and Chaos' (fantasy story for radio) and 'Beatie Bow' (a popular Radio Play) were highlights. When MIDI arrived in the late eighties, Helge Krabye purchased his first Macintosh SE (in 1987) with the MasterTracksPro MIDI sequencer and a Roland S-10 sampling keyboard, as well as the first multitimbral synthesizer: the Roland MT-32. He was working close with radio pioneer Lars Lønne who was program host in the successful youth program 'AB 8-12' in NRK, and he invited him to make jingles for the program. Helge also composed illustrative music for the program, and when he started receiving royalties from airplay, he was able to upgrade his studio and instruments and purchased the very first hard disk recording system for a personal computer, 'SoundTools' from Digidesign (later to be named ProTools). He used his equipment for composing jingles and creating original sound landscapes when he became responsible for the next youth radio program in NRK: 'ABRS'. In this program, that was broadcast every working day in the afternoon, Helge also programmed various interactive games in HyperCard, with sound effects and musical pieces built into the applications and the Macintosh computer connected to the radio mixer in order to create a rich sound design live on air. Helge Krabye first started to work as a technician in the Radio Drama department in NRK in 1986, and director Kyrre Haugen Bakke allowed him to compose music for the fantasy story 'The Magician's Nephew', one of the great books in the 'Narnia Chronicles' by C. S. Lewis. Being in control of both music and sound design, was a nice responsibility! He enjoyed this a lot, and he later wrote his own story with music and sound effects for children, 'Herr C og bestevennen som ble borte'. Arnfinn Christensen also worked in the Children's Department in radio at that time, and Helge composed music to several of his great fantasy stories. In 1997, Helge Krabye realized that the budgets for the radio got lower every year, and it was time for him to move on. He started to work with post production (sound) in NRK Fjernsynet (television). Soon after, he was responsible for doing the sound design for the documentary journalists in 'Brennpunkt', and they invited him to compose music as well. Since then, he has composed original music for more than sixty television documentaries, both within and outside NRK. Helge Krabye also has a great interest in interactive media and computer games, and he programmed a special interactive HyperCard game called 'Nysgjerrigper' for Norges Forskningsråd in 1990. He also programmed the 'Midt i Planeten' ('Worlds apart') with Arnfinn Christensen - a computer game where the alien Gorx is guiding us through our solar system. The game was included with the new Macintosh Centris multimedia computers that Apple started selling in Norway in 1993. 2001 was in a way a highlight in Helge Krabye's career as a composer for television, since the five part documentary series 'Det gåtefulle Kina' (Mysterious China) was a success and was shown in several countries around the world the following years. (A remix of the best music pieces from this series was finally released on CD in August 2007.) In 2004, he composed original music for nature documentarist and fotograhper Arne Nævra and his nine part television series 'Villdyr og Villmark' ('Global Safari'), an adventure and wildlife series shot in Russia (Wrangel island and Kamchatka), Rwanda, India, Borneo and Alaska Helge Krabye has contributed to other artist's projects as well. He contributed on acoustic guitar for Øystein Ramfjord (Amethystium) on his CD project 'Evermind' (2004), an album that climbed high in the ambient and new age charts around the world. He also played electric guitar (with Ebow), Alembic electric bass and some percussion on the track 'Moths Drink the Tears of Sleeping Birds' on Kit Watkins 2006 CD album 'SkyZone'. In 2005, Helge Krabye began working as a video editor in NRK, a profession that made it possible to combine all his experience from drama, storytelling, sound design and graph- Shop: odax
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Dead Lighter Cemetery
Words and Music by William Mallory Produced and Engineered by William Mallory Additional Engineering and Production by Loy Verrone and Tom Hammer Performers: William Mallory - Piano, Guitar, Rhodes, Synth, Bass, Vocals, Drum Sequencer Lou Verrone - Bass, Electric Guitar Tom Hammer - Keyboards, B3 Organ, Drum Sequencer, Backing Vocals Jessica Licciardello - Backing Vocals, Percussion Bruno Corbo - Electric Guitar Mastered by William Mallory Art & Graphic Design William Mallory & Jessica Licciardello *Gonna Get What You Gotta Do - additional lyrics by Steve Oswald.- Shop: odax
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Pno Suite 7
A SHORT DISCUSSION OF MIDI In the beginning there was chaos and confusion. Each manufacturer prided itself on the uniqueness of it's musical instruments. No two could be connected up to work with each other. Yamaha synths would not work with Kawai or Buchla or Kurzweil. In order to get a different set of sounds, musicians had to carry large numbers of keyboards to their venues, and with the coming of digital instruments, it looked like things were going to get worse. Then in October, 1981, Dave Smith and Chet Wood of the California based company, Sequential Circuits, read a paper on a Universal Synthesizer Interface at the annual meeting of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) Over the course of the next year discussions took place among the American and Japanese representatives during which the name was changed to Musical Instruments Digital Interface. (MIDI) The first MIDI synthesizer, the Sequential Circuits Prophet 600, shipped in December of 1982, and a month later the first coupling of two different synthesizers took place at the annual meeting of the National Association of Music Manufacturers. (NAMM) It was a Prophet 600 and a Roland Jupiter 6, American and Japanese. The official Midi 1.0 Detailed Specifications was published in October of 1983, a little over twenty years ago. It has never had to be revised, although it was expanded. It is voluntarily followed by all the musical instrument manufacturers in the world. There are two organizations that oversee the Midi specifications, the Midi Manufacturers Association (US, Canada, and Europe), and the Japanese Midi Standards Committee, and neither will act without the approval of the other. What we have here is an almost unique cooperation between competitors. It's almost as if all the automobile manufacturers were to get together and standardize parts! But the amazing thing is that Midi has gone way beyond it's original purpose of standardizing interfaces so that different instruments can talk to each other. It has become a tool for composers that rivals the development of musical notaion, many centuries ago. It is the elegance and simplicity of Midi that makes it so attractive. Much like a word processor, it takes very little computer power to make it work. A Midi message consists of a command to start, a number that designates a note, a number that indicates how loud the note is to be, and a command to stop. Along with that is a number to designate it's position in the song, and a tempo map to determine the speed of the music. That's about it! The actual sound is made by the music module, like notation, Midi makes no sounds. It's just numbers. Midi can do many other things, of course. It can record a sustain pedal, it can control a reverb unit. It can even turn the lights on or off. But without a sequencer, it's use would be limited. A sequencer is a machine that records all the Midi numbers in their proper places, usually first into RAM, then when revised to suit, onto a floppy or hard drive. What a sequencer really does is allow you to change all those numbers around until you finally get what you were looking for. Can you think of anything more useful to a composer than that?- Shop: odax
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Water
Let's start with some questions. What came first, the chicken or egg, or did the theme song come before the movie it's about? Films have soundtracks, but have you ever heard the soundtrack to a novel? In the fast paced music industry, it seems like once you become familiar with artists, you never hear about them again. Rarely do you hear about anybody who is ground breaking or trend setting. So take a moment to be introduced to Gary Holmes. Unlike almost every artist you are already familiar with, Gary Holmes is unique in a number of ways. First, Gary's songs are a musical journey. Like the soundtrack to an imaginary film, the songs tell stories that take listeners into the movie theater of their mind's eye. In other words, something like radio theater before the invention of television, it's an audio drama experience. Some of his songs musically project selected cinematic images. For example, more than reading the novel, watching the David Lean film version of Charles Dickens' 'Great Expectations', inspired story re-telling from the movie as the songs 'Miss Havisham and Mistress'. Other selections explore spirituality, challenges to the world status quo, and Gary's life experiences. Amid sincere songwriting, Theater for the Blind, the fictional coffee house band struggling to survive, lends the element of humorous fantasy to a musical stage wealthy with literature based songs, double meanings and metaphors. With this debut CD, 'Water', Gary Holmes invites you to put your headphones on, turn the lights down and the stereo up, close your eyes, and visualize the sound. Like the days of radio theater, there's no television screen to look at. The Songs: Water-A CD with 10 Selections 1. Only Until I have concluded that only until opening up to the possibility of failure, there is no probability of success. Are we living our own dreams, or the dreams that someone else has in mind? 2. Mistress In the pages of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, Miss Havisham had a broken heart, and she raised her adopted daughter, Stella, to break the hearts of others. Her very much enamored admirer, Pip, became the brunt of this upbringing, but he kept on loving her just the same. On the topic of Thanksgiving in the United States, Dickens criticized Americans as having a backwards concept. Rather than thanking God just one day out of the year, we should be thankful on all the other days, and take just one day to complain about every thing else. 3. Hazy Sunshine This song could be about many things. It is the most common term on local T.V. weather reports in Los Angeles. To me, Hazy Sunshine, is about the twelve tribes of Israel on their way out of Egypt. Here they are, delivered by the hand of God from Pharoh and tyranny, and on their way to a promised land. All they can do is complain about everything they see as missing. 'There is no water here, have we been brought this far to die of thirst?'. God brings them water from a rock. As slaves they could see that their next meal would come from their Egyptian oppressors. With God, they are learning to live by faith. In the mean time, nostalgia for security in the old days of bondage hazes, or makes less clear, the miracle of their new deliverance. I hate when I make that same mistake. 4. Water We live in a world where an abundance of 'isms' rule much of how people treat each other. We have racism, sexism and ageism to name a few. There are times that we assume things incorrectly, and we hurt each other when we really don't have to. I wish there were no cliques, de facto segregation, or secret society demographics to consider in the world equation. As God once flooded the Earth with water, so should we too cleanse away discrimination, hatred, and unjustified judgementalism. 5. Everafterforevermore I wish I had written all of this song, but I didn't. The narration and verse lyrics are from an anonymous poem titled, 'The Letter in the Night'. The final line of the piece says 'pass this message on to others', so that's what I am doing through this song. I added instrumental music from sequencer patterns, and contributed the words to the chorus: Everafterforevermore, I should have known this fate before My soul could have been to heaven sent but to this fire pit it went 6. Thank You Jesus This song tells about who Jesus is, and why I thank Him. 7. Cross House Night So many people and so many stories all in one place. My older brother Darryl was an all night security guard at an apartment building one summer. Sometimes I would follow him to work. The people who lived there were like clockwork--same people, same place, same time. I was never there to see what happened in the day light . I guess that would be a different story and a different song. That place existed for me only at night. 8. Miss Havisham A broken heart takes a long time to heal, if at all. For a long time I took a very condescending position towards this Dickens' character (Miss Havisham). I later realized that getting past a monumental disappointment is easier said than done, and I have never even been jilted at the marital alter. Miss Havisham was. It takes time, good friends, and most importantly, God. Still, we are better off counting the today's blessings, rather than focusing on the disappointments of the past. 9. Short Edit-Everafterforevermore This mix is the same as the longer version minus the spoken narration. Nothing deep, just a shorter version to listen to. 10. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah (Thank You Jesus Remix) Yeah, yeah, yeah are fun words to sing. At the elementary schools where I have taught, my students take a liking to this song when they hear it playing in the background. It's flattering to hear requests for, 'Yeah, Yeah, Yeah'. The name stuck, and I had something new to call this remix of 'Thank You Jesus'.- Shop: odax
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Are You Going To Stand..
Das Duo aus Montreal mit weitläufigen und eindringlichen Klanglandschaften und bezaubernden Dream-Pop Elementen.Das Duo aus Montreal mit weitläufigen und eindringlichen Klanglandschaften und bezaubernden Dream-Pop Elementen.Aufgenommen und & co-produziert mit Alec Orson Presence Dippie (The Monochrome Set). Recorded & co-produced by Valleys with Alec Orson Presence Dippie (of legendary post-punk group The Monochrome Set), Are You Going To Stand There...? is dark, mysterious & cinematic in its scope. Longtime collaborators St. Louis & Perks put equal weight into Valleys, as lyricists, vocalists, & skilled musicians with Marc playing guitar, keyboards, drums & Tillie playing keys, guitar & sequencer. Both take turns on lead vocal duties, where Marc's baritone pairs sweetly with Tillie's soft approach. Though a twosome, their sound is big, loud, alive & visceral. Running parallel lives, St. Louis & Perks each experienced great loss & turned to their music & poetry to cope. For Tillie, her lyrics reflect the unexpected loss of close family members. Raised as a Shambhala Buddhist, Tillie's lyrics are riddled with references to the practice. Though dealing with weighty events, Tillie infuses her spirituality into the music, resulting in an added lightness that gives a sense of healing, an astounding sense of calm, & an outright mystical quality. For Marc, dealing with the loss of a different type of relationship, his lyrics touch on a twisted coming of age & late night hedonism, focusing on creating scenes for characters dealing with disillusionment & heartbreak. Though tackling cheerless subjects, the album comprises the funniest, sad music you will ever hear. TRACKS: 1. Micromoving 2. Hounds 3. Absolutely Everything All the Time 4. See the Moon? 5. Living Normal 6. Us 7. John, Meet Me at the Precipice 8. Before Fall 9. Exing Everything 10. Undream A Year- Shop: odax
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Holding on to the Air
Produced by Tom Hammer and William Mallory All compositions performed and written by William Mallory *There Goes Your Ride - Drum sequencer by Tom Hammer.- Shop: odax
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Cyber Jubilee
The composers who followed Beethoven writing symphonies did so at the risk of a failed serious comparison. Some managed to survive. But, Schumann has suffered greatly by comparison. Beethoven set the stage. Brahms forged ahead and gave four sparkling masterworks. Schubert was not to be outdone in his 8th (unfinished) and 9th symphonies. But what about Schumann? His symphonies (the 2nd movement of the 2nd symphony comes to mind) are weak shadows of the giant. I think he may have known this because he revised his revisions. But now let us set the record straight and give Schumann his due. Beethoven fathomed the depths of our psyche to the very bottom. He found suffering there. His reaction was to triumph over it with his music. We call Beethoven's music 'heroic' for this reason. I would add that his music is even therapeutic. His heroic temperament accounts in part for his universal appeal. On the other hand, Schubert did not have the courage to oppose the tribulation. So he did something just as good. He transformed it into something beautiful and therefore bearable. Brahms' reaction to it is somewhere between Schubert and Beethoven. Brahms can be heroic and poignant in the same passage. What about Schumann? Schumann seemed to want to create something uplifting and gay (that is to say uplifting in a not too serious way). In this he failed. If he could of ignored Beethoven (fat chance) and just been himself, he would of been better off. Well then, what is the result? Schumann plumed the depth of our suffering like the rest. He made something beautiful like the others. In this he compares favorably with Schubert and Brahms. And that is the answer. Take Schumann on his own and his music is worthily crafted and splendid. He wanted it to be delightful but the burden of suffering still shows through. Taken in this way, Schumann's symphonies are solid masterpieces. Always brooding and sometimes gay and often delightful and always wonderfully crafted. In concert, audiences usually spontaneously applaud the virtuoso performance of the violins for their speed and precision in this scherzo. Tip: listen for the dissonances. He occasionally has notes semitones apart sounding together. *** Debussy and the Tri-Tone Western music has some recognizable principles: The major scale of 8 notes and the associated chords called the tonic, the fourth and the dominant. The scale is the do-ray-me ... sequence or otherwise the notes c-d-e-f-g-a-b-c on the piano keyboard. The three chords are c-e-g and c-f-a and b-d-g. Only the white keys are used. These sounds are familiar to our ears because Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven used them extensively and inspired their followers to do the same. An excellent example would be Haydn's Clock Symphony, the 2nd movement. The C major chord c-e-g is, however, unbalanced. Unbalanced because the e is a major third above the c while the g is only a minor third above the e. Likewise, the corresponding c minor chord c-(e-flat)-g is top-heavy with the g being a major third above the e-flat while the e-flat is only a minor third above the c. One way to achieve balance is to make both intervals a minor third. That is, c-(e-flat)-(g-flat), and this is the tri-tone that attracted Debussy. He used this tri-tone sound whenever possible in his (only) string quartet. That is why this music sounds new to us. It sounds modern. It sounds convincing. *** Schubert wrote two trios for piano, violin and cello. Both are masterpieces. However, there also survives a single trio movement presented here. With this trio movement there is a problem of balance. The modern concert piano is much more massive in it's strength and loudness than the piano of Schubert's day. The challenge today is to prevent the piano from drowning the strings in it's sea of sound. It does no good to play the strings louder because then they lose Schubert's intended sweetness. No, the piano must be softer, but without losing it's strength. A good balance may be a distant dream in the concert hall but not so in cyberchambermusic's studio. Four separate channels are used one each for the violin, the cello, the piano right hand and the piano left hand. The four channels can then be combined in such a way that each can be heard for it's own part. The four voices are spread across the stereo spectrum starting with the violin on the far left, then the cello mid left, then on the mid right the piano right-hand (high notes) and on the far right the piano left-hand (low notes). However, there is also the problem of musical balance. What should be the natural role of each of the four voices? In the violin sonata, the role of the piano and violin duet had been firmly established. Beethoven and Mozart had been at it already. But adding the cello to make a trio means Schubert has something new to say. While he created something beautiful in this movement, it does not have the balance he sought. Each of the four parts seem to be in a secondary accompanying role. Nowhere does the violin (or cello) lead and the others follow. It is the piano that demands our attention throughout even though not in the usual leading way. The movement is a scene with four bit players and no leading man. Cyberchambermusic can in it's studio successfully attack the problem of volume balance but be assured we are helpless to improve Schubert's musical balance. *** Victor Borge walked onto the stage, sat, adjusted the piano bench, smiled at the audience and played his piece. When he was done, he rose, turned and accepted the audience's applause and said, "For my next piece, I would like to play all the notes I missed in this first one." Mr. Borge is a very funny man and also a good pianist. However, his amusing joke raises an interesting question that I would like to pursue. Another good story comes from an interview with a well-known concert violinist. He said that sometimes in concert he forgot Mozart's concerto score and had to fill in with some notes he just made up. He hoped Mozart would forgive him. Even studio performances do not always satisfy. When Toscanini was unhappy with a section of a recorded performance, the piece was fixed by his allowing the recording engineers to splice in the same section with a tape from another (years) earlier performance. So fine was Toscanini's art that such a fix could succeed. The advantage of a studio recording is that if any notes are accidentally skipped or altered while playing, it is a simple matter to discard the recording and redo it - as many times as it takes to get it right (assuming the players schedules allow them time). The disadvantage of the studio is that the soloist loses the interaction with the audience which may well have inspired him to a superior performance. Another concert pianist said that because of his interaction with his audience during the concert, no two of his concert performances of a piece were ever the same. Indeed, he went further and confessed that he even lacked the control needed to produce two identical performances. While it is indeed a thrilling experience to sit in the hall (and socialize) and marvel along with the others in the audience at the soloist's expertise, to be fair it must be said that the best place for the recording of many live concert performances is in the trash can. The reason for raising this point is because modern computer software gives us more control over a performance than ever before. The number of ways for the man at the computer to fix his performance is nearly unlimited. Let me continue with an example. I have in mind Chopin's piano Fantasy in f minor. Here is a place where the computer-controlled performance can excel. First of all the recorded "sound" of a piano is the same whether it is generated by the sequencer at the computer keyboard or by a soloist at the piano keyboard. That is to say, if one note is hit by the pianist and recorded, it sounds the same when played back even though the computer initiates the pla- Shop: odax
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