Whenever I release an album, I experience a sort of sadness. In some sense it’s disappointment in the lack of attention — even knowing rationally that I make weird soundscapey ambientish drone music and I do zero actual marketing. I also know that the person who cares the most about a piece of music/art is nearly always the person who actually made it. And every time, any insecurity I might feel about it is immediately shut down when I remind myself, I like it and know it’s good, at least to someone with my particular tastes; I’d truly rather listen to my own releases than most of what’s on the radio.
This time I was a bit extra worried, since I kept it at the recommended minimum price instead of setting it to $0, and it had the trans rights message. But I’ve sold a few copies (including some that don’t show up as “supported” on Bandcamp, presumably because of users’ privacy settings) and every comment I’ve gotten on both the music and the message has been great. So overall I’m pretty pleased.
I think for my next project I am going to feature the bass guitar. I’m not a great player by any means, but I can noodle a bit and can certainly process the sound, using the strings as oscillators in a weird hybrid modular synth. Since I’ve featured other kinds of gear in the past, why not this too?
Bitwig 5.3, long in beta, was released while I was finishing the last couple of tracks of the album, and I didn’t want to install it and disrupt things.
Now that the way is clear, I went for it and played with the new features. This is the “Nice Drums!” update but I’m indifferent to the new drums.
There’s also a new master recorder, which just records everything live to a file independently of the transport, which is (theoretically) right up my alley. I’ve been using a goofy workaround to record live audio. I think there may be a slight UI bug if you don’t have the browser panel already open when you start recording, but I figured out workarounds.
The really cool things though are three new Grid modules: Freq Shift+, Pitch Shift, and Dome Filter (plus a Freq Shift+ device outside the grid). A frequency shifter is inharmonic, creating ringy new textures and behaving similarly to a ring modulator (this is what Xaoc Koszalin does). The pitch shifter here is granular and can be MIDI-controlled, making it trivial to create the EXACT thing I was wishing for the other day: a software synth that can take an audio signal and polyphonically repitch it in real time.
In this example I’m letting Braids drone in VCV Rack, using Poly Grid to split MPE notes to as many voices as I like, pitch shifting each and using the pressure to control a VCA. There’s no reason I couldn’t route a hardware sound source to it instead though. Also, the Voice Stacking feature works, so I can layer multiple Pitch Shift instances using different grain rates for instance. It’s pretty magical, and a distinctly different sort of modular patching than Eurorack. It absolutely does color the sound a lot, but it’s pretty interesting nonetheless.
The dome filter (or Hilbert Transform) is an odd one. The math is well beyond me, but somehow it splits an audio signal into real and imaginary number versions of itself, along with (in this case) amplitude and phase signals. All I know is, I can mess with the phase signal, then multiply it back with the amplitude signal and get some kind of waveshaping as a result. Or use the phase signal to modulate another filter or something.
I’d be writing about that Nearness module I ordered too, except the day after it arrived in St. Louis, it got sent off to Los Angeles instead of my neighborhood post office. Typical USPS incompetence.