home studio up and (nearly) running

thanks to Pablos help (who spent the whole day with me, working in my room) i’ve been able to start the setup of my homestudio. removing mountains of “elektroschrott” (electrical scrap) mixed with dust and ashes that i’ve been collecting on my second big desk, literally for years … now the machines are in place, nearly ready to run:

there’s missing the cabling and i realized, that my mixer didn’t like the years without mixing (and the dust, of course) … but a start is made, and my motivation is still high 🙂

i had to check out my new sound toy: a lumanoise v.02 (a light controlled synth):

aside from that i did a little research concerning playing music together live and online – which could be a nice highlight as you suggested to keep the motivation high for the 1000 tracks … i found some starting points to free software that could be explored further:

ohmstudiosource nexusjamulusjammr

8_1000_170417

I got one idea for a way of collaboration – inspired by the work of Conrad Schnitzler. I had the idea to take one of his basic principles on which he has been working his whole life: in his early works in the seventies he started to work with several simple cassette players. Each one served like a track in a mixer. It was possible to influence two basic parameters: play/stop and volume. In his walking performances alone (as 3-track mixer) or together with another musician (another 3-track mixer) or with several musicians (each one playing one track), as you see in the stills from the videos:

He was working in producing 1000 different cassettes (= tracks) to be played in this way in a concert (but didn’t finish the 1000).

So my idea is to work (with digital means) in a similar way: produce 1000 tracks that can be played together. I did some work in Ableton and prepared 8 tracks, mixing them (with some more parameters than just play/stop and volume) and recording this mix:

It would be very easy to create a setup for a lot of tracks (basically this can be done in each sound editor who is able to handle multi tracks).

Jamming Again

A post shared by @vVvA (@vvva_) on

Improvising with multiple devices is always useful for creating dynamic and complex atmospheres. After many months without playing with music devices this year I have started to jam again, playing with a mix of digital and analogue devices. Making music is an essential part of my creative life and I was distancing from it due to the other projects I have to handle at work and other pressures from professional life.

Fortunately I have been able to reconnect with the music practice. I created a mobile set-up at my home studio that I can arrange and disassemble pretty easy in a couple of minutes. I have been also recording the different sessions, and with less regularity, listening to them and finding excerpts and interesting pieces. I am uploading them to Soundcloud so they are easy to reproduce and stream online but I could also upload them to a server so they can be downloaded. It would be interesting to reactivate the sound of elektrodomestika and experiment with some collaborations across the Atlantic. I wonder what would be the best way to do that kind of creative exchange between music recorded in Boston and Berlin.

Below is a piece tentatively called Janus. It has already many layers of sound but perhaps can also be remixed again.