A score for Kapotte Muziek 2

Have been tweaking the setup yesterday. As usual I also twoke the score. I was listening to the OST of The Shining (awesome work by Wendy Carlos and others!!) earlier yesterday and heard a little motive that will fit excellently into the score. More still: it fits excellently as a second leitmotiv for the performance.

I rehearsed and was able to add to the whole thing. Also streamlined the controller settings. Had some troubles with that old tape recorder, which at first refused to record......After disconnecting and reconnecting several times the thing did what it was supposed to do. That's one of the charms of working with ancient equipment! :)

Let's see if things go well tomorrow and on Sunday.

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A score for Kapotte Muziek

Working for the live performance (I had a new invite to come and play in the South of the Netherlands late March), it's been a long time ago. And I don't want to be a guy behind a laptop (alone) but also use different material. That's why that old timer of a reel to reel tape deck came in handy. I;ve prepared it for more creative use and started freaking around.

Now I've got several things ready for performance. I've worked on a score. This is basically it. It works around a single composition of 20 minutes that I worked on late 2009. It offers various possibilities for further treatment and additional instrumentation.

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It's been quiet this week. I am finishing up two projects. And I'm preparing the live session. I want it to be a misture of tape manipulation and a presentation of new material. In Nijmegen and Amsterdam the session will be some 20-25 minutes and I am setting up a score for it. What I want to avoid is that the music will just be a blast of noisewith a lot of incidents happening. Just like with my studio work I want to work with a defined structure in a live situation.

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Mixing and mastering ambient

Am currently mastering a work for a client who had two tracks. Both were dreamy, ambient pieces with a definite subaquatic feel. The first track had a lot of bass, which enhanced the total atmosphere but also inhibited a good sensation of the frequencies on top of that. Plus, I didn't really hear anything higher than 4 khz. The client liked what he had done but somehow had the feeling that it wasn't good enough.

I set to work and first cleaned the bass and after that enhanced the sound in the higher frequencies. This opened the sound up without pushing the bass away too much. Actually that was that and then I opened up the stereo field more. It sounds easy but it takes a lot of listening back and forth to get a grip on these things. I also used [ Schwa's Spectro ] to see the sound image. That helps to see where frequencies are excessively present.

The second track is a more difficult one. It is also of the same atmosphere but there is a loud sound at 500hz, a synth with a really round ringing sound. The problem is that it is out of phase. That is the reason that it is so loud and actually not sounding as good as it might. I have, again with the use of Spectro, cut this frequency out of the original track and manually set the phase straight. Now I can place it back and make a new mix that sounds much better.

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