Category Archives: Cool stuff

Hozpitality – EpiPen

EpiPen and Peanut at candle light dinner

Funky 70’s TV Bumper Music: Evening/PM Magazine Theme

Evening/PM magazine logo

If you are old enough you will remember this theme.  I mixed it together with really bad audio bits from youtube.  The opening theme is sewn up with the ending synthesizer funky theme.  As a “bonus” (I guess) it reprises the opening at the end.

I just heard this out of the blue and remembered how funky it was.  Crank dat shit (in the middle at least).

CHOB: A Serious Dialogue

serious dialogue


Still at it! You were warned!

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:

    1. North Korean news anchors
    1. A young Arnold Schwarzenegger
    1. Jim Bakker
    1. A Cattle Auctioneer
    1. And a guy teaching Algebra
  •       Anonymous Montgomery County Maryland Police Officer

CHOB: Our Own Girls !!

our own girls

Bob showed up in North Barfthesda and we educated and learn’t each other to make this thing.

Used:  Volcas, MicroKorg, Kaossilator Pro, MiniKP, Phone

We have made and are making more of the best you have ever heard.  You will have so much more you will ask for no more more. Believe me. Stay tuned.

Tired of This Yet? This is The Black Keys Thing 1

bk1

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. 🙂

Big Build Up. Fugue You!

Fugue You!

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
  1. In Music. a polyphonic composition based upon one, two, or more themes, which are enunciated by several voices or parts in turn,subjected to contrapuntal treatment, and gradually built up into complex form having somewhat distinct divisions or stages of development and a marked climax at the end.
  2. In Psychiatry. a period during which a person suffers from loss of memory, often begins a new life, and, upon recovery, remembers nothing of the amnesic phase.

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”.

“Did you hear it?”

“I HEARD IT!”

“All right Janet!”

Mike O’meara Show – Nitrous Oxide Poops

This was in the “News You May Not Need” section of The Mike O’Meara Show on May 25, 2016. I hope it’s OK to post a clip like this but I just had to because I spit up my soda at the end.

I’ve been listening and subscribing to this show for years and I’m going to start plugging it more with my own clips here since I don’t use bookface.

Go to their site and smarten up!  Ya Shart!

Volca Waves

volcawaves

Since I did the (Overmodulated) Jamola Number 3 yesterday and left out the Volca Beats, I thought I would do one real quick INCLUDING the Volca Beats.

Here’s a bit called Volca Waves. It started as an atmospheric “hearts of space” thing and then I decided to put the driving Kaossilator studio drums in the middle. I admit everything is a little “make it up as you go”. Lately I haven’t been really arranging anything. I’ve been striving to do things without any arrangement and just spew it out live. This was the reason for the little errors throughout. I have been trying to learn the “one man band live experience” by playing everything live in real time with little to no preparation. There are some things done ahead of time. Obviously the sequences and SOME selection of sounds are done in advance of pressing the record button. I have literally been writing MicroKorg presets I like on scrap paper to remember them. But I will admit, that a lot of times, I start swaying in time and stabbing a setting with my finger and biting my lip as I hit a key. Results can be bad, some can be good. You, the listener, get to hear BOTH the good and the bad which is my gift to you.

Either way here are the geek notes:

  • Kaossilator Pro is master clock, studio drums, a string chord and an arppegio.
  • Volca Beats has a simple electronic drum sequence that I build up along the way.
  • Volca Keys plays the main melody loop.
  • Volca Bass has 3 bass lines that chain together. The first one starts alone.
  • MicroKorg does the atmosphere and solo strings through the MiniKP (red box) with heavy delay.
  • Tempo is a BPM of 56.

Hope you find it interesting.

PS Thanks to those who bother to comment. It means a lot and it makes having this blog worthwhile. I dont want to use facebook for this, because if one of these little bits IS really good, I would prefer to own the rights to it (which wouldn’t be the case if I posted them to facebook).

(Over modulated) Jamola Number 3

jamola3

Well…..

I wanted to take this rainy, do nothing, Saturday and have a little jam session with myself. I made a 14:30 whopper. The object was to get the Electribe synced with the set up. I got it synced in the chain and it’s TOO MUCH FUN. Here’s the geek details.

Kaossilator pro is the master clock (still). The master clock (tempo) MIDI signal is split and fed down 2 chains.

Chain #1: Sets the tempo for the Volca Bass to the Volca Keys and then to the Electribe.
Chain #2: Sets the tempo for the MicroKorg whose audio is output through the Mini KP (red box for effects… mostly heavy delay) where the tempo is set manually (matching BPM to the master clock, Kaossilator Pro).

My levels are really bad. For this I am sorry and hang my head in shame. It seems these bad levels are coming from my mini mixer that couples the Electribe and the 3 Volcas. I have since adjusted this and will make sure next time this doesn’t happen. This was so much fun I may take another shot with a different spin.

Most of the drums come from the Electribe however there’s a little bit of a conga loop in there from the Kaossilator pro. There’s a small bass and key sequence from the Volca bass and keys respectively that I drop in and out. I didn’t use the Volca Beats on this as there are enough drum devices working on this thing already (and you will find it gets mighty busy).

In the words of Todd Rundgren, “Yer gonna wanna get yer headphones out… Cuz they’re really gonna help you on this one…”

This is done in the “Key of Yo Momma” in the “Scale of my Ass”. Time=14:23. Filesize=13.5megs. Hope you enjoy as much I did making it.