The Cattlestops ride again!

I have had a busy but very enjoyable weekend playing with The Cattlestops - a 5 piece band (acoustic gat, electric gat, bass, drums, fiddle) playing a range of styles from Western Swing to Bluegrass to Country Rock. We played in Wanganui on Friday to a booked-out Lake View bar and restaurant, on Saturday to a booked-out Wellington Bluegrass Society crowd and on Sunday to an almost booked out Winemaker's Daughter in Te Horo. All three gigs went really well and we had a huge amount of fun!

Here's a poster I put together a few weeks ago for the Saturday night Bluegrass Society gig.

 

Tribal Blood

Here's another cd cover I created recently. David Antony Clark is a local composer and audio engineer who has released a number of albums in the neo-primal genre, several of which I have created artwork for.

In this release he has combined his neo-primative grooves with Maori singing and chanting written and performed by Rawiri Toia, a lecturer in Maori issues at Victoria University. The lyrical content explores the feelings and experiences of the first Polynesians who arrived in Aotearoa/New Zealand around one thousand years ago.

I like this cover. It's distinctly Maori, but doesn't feel cliched. I chose to use the oft-used Trajan font for the subtitles as it adds an air of historical authority and makes it feel like a bit of a museum piece.

I just heard yesterday that this album has been accepted for release by a world music distributor in Germany, so this week I need to make a new version with new barcodes and logos etc for that market.

Previous albums I have designed for David include 'Shaman Dancing' and 'Songs of Magic, Sex and War', both of which are featured in my gallery. Also check out his website, where you can hear audio excepts from all of these and more.

Pentatonic scales

This post is related to my latest C-365 post. I've been tripping out a bit lately on the power of the pentatonic scale. There's something about the way our brains are wired that really 'fits' this scale. Not only does the entire human race seem to intuitively know how the scale works, we also consistently hear any number of notes from a pentatonic scale in any combination as a pleasing and harmonious sound. Thus, it is a very useful scale for something like my Reaktor autoplayer.

To see what I mean, watch the clip first and then go and have a play with this Tenori-inspired web instrument.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

C-5 // Reaktor building - autoplayer modification

This evening I spent a bit of time modifying a Reaktor ensemble I built earlier this year. It's kind of like electronic wind chimes - you hit play and it happily generates an endless stream of notes. I have designed it so that you pick the key and the kind of scale it chooses notes from (major, minor, pentatonic etc.) Tonight's modification was adding the ability to choose randomly between different note durations.

Future modifications will be adding the ability to set the probability that any particular note in the scale will sound, so that I can weight the scales towards certain notes. I'll also do the same with note durations. I'd also like to be able to interact with it via a Kaoss Pad or similar so I can 'play' it more intuitively. I might use Moldover's smart knob idea, but mapped to the x and y parameters of the Kaoss Pad so I can manipulate more than 2 parameters at once.

Also - it only uses a pretty boring sounding triangle oscillator at the moment, so some tonal interest is also on the cards for the near future. For now, I've just put a bit of delay and reverb on. Here's what it sounds like.

autoplayer output 1-9-09

Here's the duration circuit I built tonight.

Best cd packaging I've seen for ages

Check this out. The cd artwork is made from a custom designed circuit board with a built in theramin, so the packaging is actually a playable instrument. The guy's name is Moldover and he describes himself as a 'controllerist' – like a turntablist but using whacked-out, modified, circuit-bent midi controllers instead of a turntable. He's a bit too cocky for his own good, IMO, but his cleverness can't be denied.

Here are a couple of clips describing his approach to 'controllerism' and his working processes. Well worth a look if you're interested in that sort of thing (like me!) He uses a bunch of very clever Reaktor macros combined with Ableton Live and his custom-built ex-Novation midi controller...