MarkRushton.com

Foghorns is a recording I made for the 20th Disquiet Junto at Soundcloud.

I bought Nodebeat a while back but never used it much. Why? I don’t know know. Too many toys? Too little time? I think I forgot I even owned it. I’m glad Marc decided to employ Nodebeat in this Junto as I was able to spend more time with it and appreciate it.

As far as the Nodebeat section was concerned, I decided I wanted to keep that relatively simple. My setup was what you see in the screen capture.

Node: All nodes “off”. Key of “F”. Lowest octave “1″.

Audio: Square waveform. Minimal echo. Slight attack. 30% decay. About 60% release.

Rhythm: tempo 137 bpm. I recorded three different variations based no different Node Beats. It starts off with the half note Node Beat. Then when it speeds up it’s the sixteenth note Node Beat. Then, in the final half, I add (I believe) the eighth note Node Beat.

All recordings were run out of my iPad, via my Zoom H2, into my desktop running Ableton Live Lite 8.2.5. The Live Set had a Chorus with Delay 1 highpass 22.2 Hz and 9.99 ms, and Delay 2 Fix and 14.6 ms. Amount 0.56 ms. Rate 0.54 Hz. Negative polarity. No feedback. 100% Wet. Also in the Live Set was Warm Reverb Long that would take all day to spec out, but suffice to say the decay time as 38.2 seconds, and it included another chorus. 55% wet. This was run out through my Tascam US-122L and into a noisy (in a good way) Zoom H1 where it was recorded. I used my Grado headphones for monitoring. The recordings were then edited using Sony Sound Forge and I used Acid as my DAW.

I knew I wanted to do a slow/fast variation with the arrangement.

An alto sax was my chosen second instrument. I have one that I use to play along with my fifth grade daughter, who started band this year and is also playing alto sax.

For the live recording of the sax, it was the same setup as how I did the Nodebeat, except I used the Zoom H2′s mic. All this was run into Ableton and through the live set I previously mentioned, and out the same way. This is also the same way I recorded my piece “Refactoring Dreams for the third Disquiet Junto (Glass) a few months ago.

Once I got the levels figured out, I discovered that through the processing that holding notes sounded a bit like higher pitched fog horns, so I just ran with that.

Then I did a bunch of cutting and pasting of alto sax sections and adjusting the rhythms into something I enjoyed. I hope you like it, too.

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This track employs the app NodeBeat, created by Seth Sandler, Justin Windle, and Laurence Muller. More information on NodeBeat at nodebeat.com.

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
Disquiet Junto

Bound Off #76 for May 2012 is now available as of May 15th.

12MB MP3 file at:  http://www.boundoff.com/podcast/boundoffshortstorypodcast76.mp3

Stories are:

• “Four Dustpans” written and read by Sarah Prevatt (2.5 minutes long, starts at 00:45). Sarah Prevatt received an MFA from the University of Central Florida. Her work has appeared in several literary journals, including The Chaffin Journal, Vestal Review, and Hawai’i Pacific Review.

• “The Question of Influence” written by Kristen Hamelin Tracey. Read by Mark Rushton (10 minutes long, starts at 3:50). Kristen Hamelin Tracey lives in New York City and works in education. Her fiction can be found in recent or upcoming issues of The Foundling Review and The Raleigh Review.

In addition to reading “The Question of Influence”, I provided the background music.  It is from my album 5512, available at Bandcamp.

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5512 is an album of minimal ambient techno headphone music.

It is available exclusively as a download at Bandcamp for a minimum of one dollar.

5512 was created on May 5, 2012 at The Bunker in Iowa City by Mark Rushton using Ableton Live, an Akai MPK Mini, and recorded into a Zoom H1 while monitored using Grado headphones.  A tiny amount of post-production was done on a PC using Sony Sound Forge.  It was mixed using Sony Acid.  Cover photo by Mark Rushton at Ellis Park, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

The album is 8 tracks and just a touch over 91 minutes.  The first track “5512 Mix” is a 45 minute and 30 second “megamix” of the 7 pieces that are later separated out in order of appearance with only minor fades.

Track listing:

1. 5512 Mix (45:30)
2. 5512-1 (7:48)
3. 5512-2 (7:27)
4. 5512-3 (4:13)
5. 5512-4 (9:40)
6. 5512-5 (5:29)
7. 5512-6 (3:07)
8. 5512-7 (8:09)

You can fully preview every track at the 5512 page at Bandcamp.

It’s meant to be listened to using headphones, and preferably the megamix, but I can understand why somebody might want the individual tracks separated out.

I make this music for myself.  If others enjoy it, great.

Nail It Down is a remix I made for the 17th Disquiet Junto at Soundcloud.

This morning I was hanging laundry to dry outdoors in my back yard and heard an interesting mix of sounds: the birds in the air were quite loud, and this was mixing in with the staccato nail gun rhythm of roofers working on a new house a block or two away. I went back inside and grabbed my Zoom H1 to capture a minute or so and I thought I might be able to use it with this week’s junto.

After editing the field recording, I listened to the pre-existing tracks and chose a 30 second segment in the first half of “Controlled Burn”.

I still use Sony Acid as my main DAW. I have for over a decade. Ended up loading 18 instances of the field recording and 21 of the sample of Controlled Burn, so I had 39 tracks. On many of the instances I take the clip and “loop” it (it’s not “looped” in the traditional sense in that it repeats) and then change the properties of the clip so that it’s pitch shifted down an octave or two and then I stretch it out by changing the “number of beats” from whatever the default is (16, 24) to the max, which in both cases turned out to be 151. I don’t have any grand plan, just whatever sounds pleasing to me. I employ the same sort of randomized approach to the arrangement.

This track includes a segment of “A Controlled Burn” by Tag Cloud off the album Named Entities on the Zeromoon netlabel, thanks to Creative Commons license. More information at:
http://archive.org/details/zero130
http://zeromoon.com/releases/tag-cloud-named-entities-zero130/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:  Disquiet Junto

Podcast #53 (Music For Really Concentrating On Things) is now available to download.

Get it directly at:  http://www.markrushton.com/music/podcast/markrushtonpodcast53.mp3

37 minutes and 21 seconds, about 52MB.  It’s a 192kb-encoded MP3.

Music For Really Concentrating On Things is 4 pieces, mixed together.  They range from 4 minutes to 15 1/2 minutes in length.  The general theme of this music involves sustained pieces that have randomness inside them.

You can listen closely, if you want, or have it as background music.

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To get the Mark Rushton Music Podcast feed, which syndicates my programming to your favorite RSS reader or music program, click on the feed icon here:  or go directly to iTunes:   – if you want an email everytime I make a new podcast then click here to subscribe.  You’ll only get an email when a new podcast is added.

You can also sign up to my new-ish email list in case you don’t want the RSS or iTunes thing to slip through the cracks.  If you have a smartphone with a QR scanner here’s all that jazz: