This is compiled from sessions recorded in 2016. Bob and CeMeGo had things scattered all over the hard drives. It has taken a while to compile all of this together. Some you may recognize from this blog, others were created and never posted.
Track List
Oh It’s a Harold Budd Start (2:36)
Start The Reactor (3:11)
The Surface (7:07)
Overmodulated M F’er (3:45)
The Big Test (0:52)
A Serious Dialogue (Noise Your Dick Off at 300bpm) (4:24)
Breakfast Project (1:56)
Chob Gives Up (1:14)
Our Own Girls (7:20)
That Darn Delay Thing (4:42)
It Builds to Something Special (3:44)
Chobwahwah (3:57)
Oh It’s a Harold Budd Ending (1:16)
Personnel
Bob & CeMeGo (and occasional Nguyen Chaney).
Tools
Ableton Live (The great learning curve)
Adobe Audition (too useful unfortunately!)
Korg Mini-KP
Korg Kaossilator Pro
Korg MicroKey
Korg MicroKorg
Sony Acid Pro 7
Korg Volca Bass
Korg Volca Beats
Korg Volca Keys
Teenage Engineering Pocket Operator PO-12
We still don’t make money off of this crap. We do it for fun! The best compensation would be a comment or review right here on this blog again. Chob thanks YOU for your junk!
Nguyen Cha’ney came by last nite and we collaborated on this little bit. I’m not sure if I’m done with this song yet. I think there’s more that could be done/added/rearranged. Either way, I wanted to post it so I could hear it in the car.
Things used:
Korg MicroKorg
Korg Volca Bass
Drums from a phone app
Random audio bits (the “Start The Reactor” and “Play That Funky Beat” voices).
Korg MicroKeys
Ableton Live (also known as “the great learning curve”)
Thought about playing with tons of Ping-Pong delay and chorus today. I hate working to a click or tempo at all. I like letting the spirit move me for timing. This is obviously not a good way to work. Once again, I went for that heaving breathing tempo I love so much because it’s in my head and it’s slow enough that I can follow it.
No drums/percussion here. Just 2 melody lines from the Microkorg ping pong’d delayed. Then crap thrown on top. There is a little odd alias’ing on the first melody as I have it washed in some digital chorus plug in that makes it ‘tinny’. I dont mind this. It may bother some.
Either way, this was fun to make. I’ve stopped making it, and you get to hear it. Enjoy.
This is my first attempt at true digital multi-track recording using Ableton Live software with my new digital audio interface (Focusrite Scarlett 18i20). This interface has replaced the hummy, hissy, crackly old analog Behringer Mixer I’ve had for 13 years. I am by no means an expert at this, and I am still not a musician. Here’s what I did:
I played a couple chords using a preset grand piano from Ableton’s instrument selections. (Cranked up the “hardness” and “brightness” of the piano to give it that Tony Banks/Genesis “Heathaze” kinda sound). Then added a bunch of digital reverb (also from Ableton effects racks) to create a ghostly big piano.
I played the root keys of the chord sequence with one finger using the Volca Bass with a little cut off release at the end (a little knob twiddling).
I played the same chord sequence using the MicroKorg on a retro strings synth setting.
I played the same chord sequence using the MicroKorg on some waffle-esque arpeggio setting through the Red Box (Korg Mini-KP) with a stereo channel panner, with digital chorus (from Ableton effects racks) to make it pan a little harder.
This is by no stretch a musical masterpiece. It is, however, something to be heard simply on the basis of clarity. I like how the opening piano just emerges from silence. No hiss, no hum, no crackling, just clean audio like the true black of an HD TV. This makes me EXTREMELY happy.
It can’t get much better than this at this point. This was seriously considered as a viable song, then we just gave up and moved the BPM up to 300 just to see how it sounded. We went to IHOP for breakfast at 4pm and came back and finished this. I blame IHOP !!
Starring:
North Korean news anchors
A young Arnold Schwarzenegger
Jim Bakker
A Cattle Auctioneer
And a guy teaching Algebra
Anonymous Montgomery County Maryland Police Officer
This is a song played on all black keys. I wanted to work a little harder on creating with the MicroKorg and Kaossilator alone.
There are still some minor time issues, but HOLY CRAP THE SOUNDS ON THE mICROkORG ARE AWESOME. So many presets and this is with little to no variation of these stock presets. The quality and variety of the sounds are amazing. I went through as many as I could.
Geek Notes:
Kaossilator holds the time (at 100 bpm) and handles the loops and some studio sounding drums.
MicroKorg plays the initial stomp beat, all the solo sounds, screw ups, arpeggios, and vocoder crap. ALL ON THE BLACK KEYS of course.
MiniKP (red box) added some much needed reverb and absurd delay to anything the MicroKorg put out including loop source material.
Note: This is terribly long (12 minutes and 23 seconds)… bump it around if you get bored. I think the last 2 or 3 minutes sound the best (thanks to a bent, reverb’d, and delayed string chord I liked and it notably ends in this). There’s a really loud over-modulated bass bit in the middle thats hilarious and may destroy your speakers.
Once again, no sense of time or self control. This is just too much fun to make! I couldn’t stop myself. 🙂
This is a bit I made called “Fugue You”. Let us now define the “Fugue”. There are two definitions. First one musical, the second one psychiatric.
Fugue, [fyoog], noun
In Music.apolyphoniccompositionbaseduponone,two,ormore themes,whichareenunciatedbyseveralvoicesorpartsinturn,subjectedtocontrapuntaltreatment,andgraduallybuiltupintoa complexformhavingsomewhatdistinctdivisionsorstagesof developmentandamarkedclimaxattheend.
In Psychiatry.aperiodduringwhichapersonsuffersfromlossof memory,oftenbeginsanewlife,and,uponrecovery,remembers nothingoftheamnesicphase.
Either of these definitions seem appropriate. I thought the image above suited the musical concept the best. At least this is how I felt while performing it, with middle fingers everywhere.
There is a four note simple melody that was banging around my head from The New Deal song Navidrome. I reproduced this as best I could on the Volca Bass (at the very beginning), then just built crap on top of it. The final turned out to be 10 and some minutes (originally 12… I deleted some off the top before I was done).
Geek Notes (All are Korg products unless noted):
Volca Bass does the 4 note bass melody at the beginning and throughout.
Volca Beats carries the beat the whole time.
Volca Keys is played live then eventually I give up and sequence it. It provides that Moog Modular mono sound that solo’s over top of the mess and finishes the song. For those of you scoring at home, Volca Keys has it’s own delay/reverb effect used heavily in this song.
Kaossilator Pro is (once again) the master clock used for looping MicroKorg sounds (poorly) and provides some studio drums near the end that go out of timing for unexplainable reasons (so I fade them under the mess). I apologize for the stumbling around with the MicroKorg arpeggio near the front of the song. I need more arms and hands. This was looped (safely thankfully) into the Kaossilator then NEVER TOUCHED AGAIN. This, unfortunately, is how I work with the Kaossilator looper in my rig at this point. I need to figure this crap out a little better.
MicroKorg provides some soloing and (as usual) bitchin’ arpeggios. There’s also some neat techno metal noise arpeggio on the MicroKorg that goes kling klang ping pong pang in there that I thought was cool.
MiniKP (red box) provides reverb (setting 62) on most MicroKorg sounds.
Tempo is a BPM of 80.
Let’s play the game, “see if you can hear Chad screw up in 10.5 minutes”.
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