I went to Guitar Center this week and looked at guitars. This is funny because for years I have snobbishly insisted that I don't like "guitar music." This is still largely true, and not all music that features guitars is "guitar music," but I know it when I hear it.
I was looking at guitars because I am still on my journey for Expressive Musical Performance. My music from this past weekend was I think some of my most sonically interesting yet, even if some of that sonic interest was quite harsh, but I feel like I'm getting more comfortable with exploring timbre at the same time as I'm exploring rhythm and melody. A big lesson from my inspiration for the week was also to let everything breathe. Often I fall into a trap of thinking that I have N synthesizers plugged into my mixer, so I should have N sounds playing at all times. N was very low for this performance (2!) but even more importantly, I stopped myself from just constantly hitting keys.
This was also one of the first times I managed to play two parts at once. My hand independence is not very good, but it kind of worked in my favor, because from moment to moment I'm only really able to focus on the bass in the left hand or the melody in the right hand, so I accidentally created a nice call-and-response. I also started this one with some live finger drumming, shout out to the month I spent practicing with Melodics. The "single take" you see in the video was actually attempt four or five, because I kept messing up that very first pattern. I'll keep trying this and getting better!
For next week's music I want to keep things mostly the same. The new expression pedal felt good even if I wasn't using it to its fullest strength. I'll play with a new patch on the lead synth that gives me more sweet spots in the combo of velocity + mod wheel + expression pedal. (The big keyboard doesn't have aftertouch, but the full-size keys are much more comfortable and I really like the physical mod wheel, so I'll probably keep it in place.)
One other new gimmick I'm considering is inspired by the trumpet experiment from two weeks ago. I want to add something that uses my voice/breath but isn't singing. I was thinking maybe I could hum into a vocoder, but I like the idea of preserving the pitch of my voice so that I don't need to dedicate a hand to whatever that sound is. The obvious answer is a kazoo. I bought a kazoo. It might not make the cut.
When I moved the music from livestream to pre-recorded video, I gained some more flexibility in camera options. I intended to keep the footage ingestion-editing-rendering pipeline really simple, but I've found that I kind of missed post-production, so I'm letting myself do more. Two additional cameras emerged from the clutter of my miscellaneous electronics drawers, so the next music performance might have as many as three different angles!
I am continuing to neglect the diorama. I think about it every day but I have not done anything to bring it into the world. I feel bad about it so don't ask!