My first music article is about a completely new music synthesis technique that I invented and developed years ago; I have recently refined and tuned it even more, getting it ready to start tracking.
Whenever someone launches a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), a sequencer is called up on the screen. There is an empty track on the side and when you arm it for recording, normally there is silence. However, if you leave the track monitor on and then open or close the track while the track is still armed and being monitored, a certain feedback loop remains. I still don't know what goes on inside the software when this happens... maybe the same thing is happening inside the computer that happens during a hardware feedback loop (this happens with real hardware and real wires in an analog studio if a device's output is being fed into that same device's input simultaneously, causing literally ear-damaging distortion).
Anyway, one day completely by accident I had my virtual routing inside Reason Studios Reason software routed in a certain way so that the distortion was musical! So I expanded on this and added some plugins and inserts to sound even more musical. I eventually added a mono software synth with the Attack parameter all the way down, the Decay parameter all the way down, the Sustain all the way up, and the Release all the way down; all on the amp envelope. This creates a very short and abrupt, solid sound. I routed this sound to the sidechain input of a noise gate so that any time I trigger this sound, the gate closes, causing a stutter.
Outside "the box" (which is what us musicians call when we talk about signals outside the computer), I routed a Korg Nanopad2, which comes with an XY pad, so that whenever I touch the square XY pad, 'X' determines space between repetition of the same sound, and 'Y' determines length of each repetition. I did all this with two desktop computers and two Nanopad2's. Each desktop screen is displayed in front of me just above my big screen tv that you can see pics of in the Archives section of my website SawCeeJack.com
The trouble with this setup is that because the sound is already playing when the project is opened, it can't be recorded or sequenced with the piano roll... you must send the computer output to an external A/D converter recorder. This could be another PC or a hardware recorder. So one of my goals this week is to run a wire from my mixer to an audio interface to another computer. When I have done this I want to try using a pitch correction plugin inside my software to attenuate the sounds or 'glitches' into musical notes. This is how I came to call this new sound synthesis technique "Glitch Synthesis"!
Thank you for reading and I intend to imbed all of these discussions with many screenshots and photos! So follow along at www.SawCeeJack.com!