Notescast

I wrote a web app (sorry, barely had time for the bare minimum; it’s rough) for this Junto prompt that represents plants in a garden as players in an ensemble.

Each plant has, among other things, these characteristics:

• voice (a timbre)
• age
• peak age
• amp (volume)
• pan
• riff
• base rate (the pitch that its riff is based on)
• death chance (a periodic roll is made with a die with this many sides; if it’s under the plant’s age, it dies)
• repro chance (its likelihood of having offspring)

Every tick, each plant in the active frame (which slides down the garden slowly):

• Plays an event, if its riff says it should.
• Sometimes reproduces.
  
  
  • When it reproduces, it will create a copy of itself in an empty neighboring space and mutate some of the characteristics of the copy.

The user can do the following things with each plant:

• Kill
• Fertilize
  • Make it more likely to reproduce (let’s ignore that fertilizing doesn’t exactly work like that)

Here’s a video of me performing this piece.

I’m out of time, so I can’t evaluate whether this sounds the way I want and whether I should do a few more runs, but I think this tool has some potential for certain kinds of projects.

After doing a couple of weird attempts for this reverb prompt, like putting an amp in the washing machine that didn’t sound nearly as interesting as I’d hoped, I picked up a free smoker someone gave away on Craigslist.

I got it for the purpose of smoking food, but then I realized that it’s a giant metal canister with a sidecar on it.

So, I put a mic inside of it and hit it with a mallet, which yielded a great reverby ring, but singing into the smokestack sounded even better.

This piece is those recordings with some EQing and Bitwig’s Luxverb 300 for the extra verb.

Samples from Zelda and Angel of Death, together at last! (This week's Junto prompt was to remix something.)

I started out by remixing the original Legend of Zelda, focusing on the tenser riffs in that soundtrack. Then, I started making beats for it, at which point I thought I’d adhere to the spirit of the prompt more closely by remixing another track to get drums. I landed on Dave Lombardo’s drums from Angel of Death. And that is how I ended up in mashup territory.

I found myself trying to recreate the Angel of Death break riff by chopping up bits of Zelda, at which point I decide to back off because it felt more like musique concréte than remixing. Plus, I thought it’d be fun to let more of the Zelda music just run instead of altering it. It’s therapeutic to listen to.

I felt a little guilty about using these monumental drums for a video game mashup at first, but then I realized that track cannot be harmed by anything I can do. Absolutely invincible stuff.

I had read that Dave Lombardo never recorded to a click track. (All of the South of Heaven album was recorded in live sessions with the entire band. All of the other instruments were then re-recorded.) While trying to fit NES machine-played riffs to them, I realized that there were more tempo changes than just the major section ones. Furthermore, Dave did not play metronomically; some beats drift. But he was right to play them where he did. Things sound worse if you try to move them into the proper ticks. Dave was right; the metronome was wrong. This is where a lot of the Slayer magic came from, I’m sure.

So, I tried my best to fit the square waves and triangle waves to the drums.