Any info you'd like to share about the process and gear would be really appreciated.
sure . . . i'll try to be succinct (fingers crossed). edit: that *failed*. (lol)
as an overview, each piece has at least four percussion parts, four modular parts and four digital synth parts—often more. none of this stuff is referential to a click in abelton—there area a lot of places where i have sequences in different tempos going against each other. all the synth parts are played by hand; the midi stuff i played by hand and then edited a bit—sort of in a improvisational way (kinda going for feel/ambiance).
process:
the inception was that i decided to start working with some "ethnic" instrument sample libraries. i used percussion and some string instruments and started putting some ideas into midi on abelton. i was working on two pieces concurrently, but i got kind of stuck and realized that the string stuff was too referential or normal sounding. once i got rid of that and rewrote that beginning of that piece, work flowed much more easily. (basically i defined the sound world i wanted to use.) after that i'd finish one piece and try to come up with contrasting answers that became other pieces; sometimes i was experimenting with ideas to clear my palate and realized that it would work on a new piece or complete the part of a piece that dissatisfied me. later i thought i was done on the sixth piece, but two more crept in that i felt completed the overall "suite." (i feel liek there's a narrative feel to it?)
a lot of what i do is start with an idea and get it into live. then i start making a rough form: let's recap this section here and have two contrasting or bridge sections here; maybe i'll repeat one of those; hmm, that's too long , what else can i do. then it's either creating a new section if i already can hear the basic vibe/idea or fleshing out the original idea. from there it's just a lot of listening to what i have to see what needs (what i want to hear) to come next. for example, i want to hear some pulsing action: what's the tempo? what's the timbre? which sequencer might do that best? okay that sucks; take two. sometimes i like the idea, but it's too present/obvious: how do i obscure it, but still have it be there?
i fine-tune transitions, entrances and volume levels.
i listen to my pieces a lot (my 40-50 times each?). i ask myself a lot of questions.
the biggest (and most important) part of my process is that i work on this stuff pretty much every day—i figure i probably averaged at least 4 hours a day when working on these eight pieces.
gear:
the digital synth stuff in all hydrasynth desktop being driven by a linnstrument. all the patches i made/repurposed/edited use the microtonal scales in their voice menu. so there's a lot of quarter/19/31/43-tone scales. (almost?) all of the stuff is done as clusters; my goal was to have clouds of timbre/close tones rubbing against each other.
the modular stuff comes under the motto of "too much is never not enough"—i an embarrassing amount stuff (or do i).
the percussion samples are pretty much the same: too much stuff. the basic idea was to use either "ethnic" percussion, invented percussion (mercury/solar by the late, great chas smith, who made a lot of weird stuff for hans zimmer, etc., but was also a visionary pedal steel guy) and extended techniques (resonate by evelyn glennie) or things like glass instrument orechestras. [some of the percussive stuff is actually modular stuff.]
if you made it to the end, congrats! (too many words!)
