Another day recovering from bronchitis, another day making noise with various devices.
I made this using the Bleep Labs Pico Paso. Used it to create 4 loops in the Korg Kaoss Pad KP3, which are then manipulated with delay, reverb, and modulation.
I get you could call it Electro-industrial Noise.
Bless-ed are those who speak “BOB”‘s name over and over into electronic sound devices.
It’s rainy, so I’ve been playing with my sound equipment. More televangelist samples from youtube, played and tweaked via the Akai MPD26 midi pad device. Drum beats created with DrumBeatz app for Google Chrombook, channeled into Korg KP3 for distortion and then into Garageband. Two tracks — drums and preachers.
Oh, I passed my 1st kyu test in Aikido.
I had the morning off, so I took some time and grabbed a few more funny televangelist sound clips and imported them into the Ableton project I reference in the previous post. Lots of fun. I have solved a few little problems, and am gaining more understanding of the software — like maybe .005% of it. But enough to have some fun.
As you can see in the pic, the Akai controller has 16 drum pads, 6 faders/sliders, and 6 knobs. The drum pads can be used to “play” the software instruments, such as drum kits, synths, etc, that come with the software, or as I have been doing each pad can activate a sound clip you have imported. The knobs and whatnot can be assigned to control other things, like volume, effects, etc.
This is really pretty addictive.
And then there’s the controls of the Akai itself, that I haven’t even really gotten into. Apparently you can control the software from the Akai, if you know what the hell you are doing — as in calling up programs and profiles you have saved. It’s not a big deal since I will never be “performing live”.
So, here’s the really fun part. I’m running the software on my 8-year old 13″ MacBook. I got the 3rd party replacement battery from my mom’s old MacBook, and it will actually hold a charge. This machine has 2 gigs of RAM — the bare minimum needed to run this software. The software has crashed once, but overall I’m happy I can even run it. The 3rd party batteries are shitty. They aren’t quite the same material as the real Apple replacement battery, and they don’t fit as well either. But they are about $30 rather than $130. At this point I don’t think it is worth spending $130, or really any money, on this old machine, since a new MacBook Air is not that expensive. But man, given the bullshit we have dealt with on the broken MacBook Pro, I really really love this old computer. What a fricken workhorse.
I am finally spending some time learning to use the Akai MPD26 pad controller I got a couple of years ago. The device can do a lot, and I’m using it with the very complicated Ableton Live 9 DAW software. So there’s a huge learning curve.
My interest is simply using it to activate one-shot or looped audio clips, but as I learn more I get additional ideas for ways to use it for noise “music”.
Generally I like using actual hardware instruments rather than computer samples, but I can see where this could get very addictive. With the computer and a controller, the possibilies are really endless. I could even use my hardware instruments to record samples into the computer for use with the pad controller. So yeah — endless possibilites to may totally non-danceable sounds to offend the sensibilities of normals.
Here’s the first experiment — one clip on one drum pad, with some effects assigned to a couple of faders and knobs.