I was just watching a Hainbach AMA and he said something that reminded me of his trip up to visit our man in Kent-something to the effect of the best way to spur creativity and find new ideas is to collaborate. That may not be as immediately feasible as Sam and Stephen’s amazing jam from a few months back for a community like this, but I did have another idea that I wanted to throw out there and see if anyone else was interested (an idea that admittedly borrows from a Ciani album title.)
The idea is to start with a sequence of 16 steps, posted only as midi notes/rests, and anyone who wanted to take part could take the sequence and incorporate it into any kind of piece they felt interested in doing. Any combination of repeats, augmentations, etc. would be “fair game.” Perhaps even pieces that eventually have no hint of the original sequence, only which began while working on or thinking about the sequence. The sequence could be transposed and used as a bass line, harmonized, negatively harmonized, reflected, etc. The main point would be to share the results in a thread so that we could all hear the familiar and yet novel realizations of the compositions.
Would anyone be interested in trying a project like this, and if so, would anyone like to suggest the first sequence? Or should we beg @lookmumnocomputer to “donate” one since we all came together around our support for him?
I’m terribly bad at contributing actual content, but I promise I’ll try to contribute to this.
If you people still haven’t settled on a sequence by (say) Friday March 13, I will propose that we adopt a tone row from one of Arnold Schönberg’s compositions. But I’ll stipulate that any variations published in The Well Tempered Klavier are permitted. So it won’t be all serialism all the time.
Sorry I missed Christian’s link. The thing that inspired my suggestion was this video by Rick Beato, in which he finds a way to smuggle harmonic triads into supposedly “atonal” serialist music.
Funny how much better music sounds when you have a context. This is what I miss from so much amateur analogue modular music: the composer probably had a whole heap of inspiration and experience, but when we listen to it quite often all we hear is the technical virtuosity of the circuit designers.
The trick with ambient i find is basically making a “wall of harmony” that makes a big fucking “space” to listen “in”. Also, you want to use chord inversions to mush the chord progressions closer together.
