What powers Hat Day, al.

Weather in the ones! At least once.

Here's The Wizards' Enlightening Conversation. (The name of the song is The Wizards' Enlightening Conversation.) It's a version of Two Robots Loitering at Guitar Center from before I figured out I could get a decent guitar sound in there. I still like it, too.

This is Two Robots Loitering at Guitar Center.

I wrote it via this script, which picks progressions, then modes, and fills them out with riffs and lead phrases that fit those modes. (I tried out sometimes doing some Slayer-style chaos soloing, but I learned you need a human to do that. Or better programming.) It took way longer to get working than I expected, derailing my Synthruary a bit.

Once I had the midi files generated to my liking, I put them in NanoStudio with guitar and bass virtual instruments on them. Even though I know all synths that try to sound like guitars with distortion are terrible, I gave them a shot.

Then, it occurred to me that clean guitar synths are OK, and I could use renderings with those synths as direct input to an amp modeler. It worked! It doesn't sound totally human (but I could get closer with some changes), but I now have a way of making generative guitar music.

The difficulty of figuring out what matters and what doesn’t.

I got a small mixer partly so that I can play my guitar through an amp modeler on my computer. I like the mixer so far and was able to get a few amp sounds that I like better than what I can get on iOS, but there are issues with it working at the low latency I need it to work at (hence the pops in this recording).

I had to do a lot of poking around just to get sound going. So, I see why so many people prefer traditional hardware devices to software.

This is Winding Down. I didn't use the Synthruary prompt because I was short on time. Basically, I wrote a tool to graph this into midi. Fun fact: It does not actually slow down.

My second Synthruary song is Message from Afar. It's another low song. I made a simple instrument that shifted the pitch by amount depending on the note in the sequence. It also delayed by an amount based on its position in the sequence. So, it was quite chaotic, though I didn't feel it was completely unrelated to what I was playing on the guitar. I did want a more complex sound than some offset sinusoids, but I had enough trouble as it was.

This is Energy Ladders, a piece that I recorded by triple-tracking myself playing an FM synthesis patch (the "twist" being that it has an extra cosine applied to the modulated signal) written in Pure Data.

I need a push to reactivate the music writing after having to spend all of my time on other things, so I'm doing this as part of #synthruary, one of those things where you wear yourself out trying to do a thing every day of the month.

Mild garage caper