Healing

JWise Thoughts

The sun setting on the western edge of America

What is the purpose of a vacation? Adventure, restoration, discovery, learning, escape, and sharing are some of the things that come to my mind. Vacations nearly always seem to happen at key moments when the elixir of their magic can prove the most effective unless they are obligatory chores used for collecting marks on the trophy wall, of which I’ve met many people who could be wearing that mantle. The idea that these ventures into new experiences outside of normal living situations are able to maintain their novelty is in large part measured by the amount of discovery that is found along the way. Even those places I have visited before often hold an untold number of secrets that either escaped my purview on the first visit or maybe I wasn’t ready to see and understand them. Then, there is the discovery of things within ourselves that can also be had.

The very trip that almost didn’t happen for which this writing exercise is being undertaken was our upcoming expedition into the remotes of the Yukon and Alaska. The reason behind the near cancellation was the grim situation where the company I founded ran out of money which dictated that I lay off the entire staff en masse on July 5th. Our departure was scheduled for just ten days from that bleak day. Canceling with less than 90 days’ notice would have meant a forfeiture of the entire cost of the journey, a substantial amount of money that trip insurance would not have covered, seeing that my personal mental trauma did not constitute a physical emergency or death of myself or close family member.

Finally, with mere moments to go, our payroll situation was resolved, and our staff was paid what was owed to them. With the assurance from my business partner that we were on the path of repairing things and that we’d be able to hold on to a skeleton crew to maintain minimal operations, Caroline and I, after weeks of discussing our options to the point of ad nauseam it was decided that the cost of not going would be too great. Not the cost of the money lost, but the impact on our happiness due to the burden of crushing weight watching a 27-year dream that had accrued over three years of work and constant toil approaching the juncture of failure.

A glimmer on the horizon for me was that the nature of our vacation meant we would be fully off-grid, dampening my ability to dwell on or respond to the myriad issues that occur due to the messy nature of layoffs, bruised egos, pissed investors, and creditors who want to know your next step. For that respite from the fury that was upon us, I am forever indebted to my business partner for shouldering that burden.

The forensic examination of what went “wrong” is not ready for a telling, especially in light of the fact that the tombstone for our company has not yet been erected. Sadly, we lost some very talented staff who rightfully were hurt by the perceived sudden situation that apparently caught them off-guard though the rumor mill was rife with back-chatter from those who’d read our public financial filings half a year prior.

With all of this in mind and my confidence approaching an all-time low, creeping depression, and near overwhelming anxiety, I am trying my best to put a stoic face forward and take the next step needed to begin the process of allowing vacation to do the work it can be so effective at; healing.

Playing Piano

JWise Photo of the Day

Piano Keyboard

Today is the first time in my life that I played piano, of course saying I played piano is relative to the fact that I’m just coming to grips with the idea of where the notes are. Regardless of how poor of ability I am, I still was able to identify the keys, play the chords and strike the notes for a tune nearly anyone could recognize. Whole notes, half and quarter notes, measures, bars, tempo, keys, chords, these are my Lego’s that I’m trying to fit together.

Percussion v0.01

JWise Patch of the Day

Attack

I took a random clock signal from Ultra Random Analog into Pamela’s New Workout that was clocking the Stillson Hammer and the Eloquencer. The Stillson was driving the Mutant Bassdrum, BD9, Snare, and Hihat, while the Eloquencer ran the 808 Maraca, 909 Clap, DuKRPLS, and Basimilus Iteritas Alter. The percussion was mixed on a couple of Levit8’s and fed into the Expert Sleepers ES-8 on its way to Bitwig, where I added a tiny bit of reverb from the Fabfilter Pro-R.

Sequencing

JWise Photo of the Day

Stillson Hammer MK2

Let’s talk about DNA and sequencing though what I really want to discuss is rhythmic sequencing. It won’t be a deep discussion about genetics, just a note or two. While I certainly respect the work and have learned more than a little about our double helix blueprints from Kary Mullis to Craig Venter, a matter of fact they are icons in my book of people who have inspired me, there is nothing from their body of work that will help me and whatever deficit of genetic material and gray matter I would wish I otherwise possessed that might help me better understand this wild beast known as music and more specifically sequencing.

There is a correlation I see between our DNA and music and that is; patterns. Our genetic base pairs are made of Thymine, Cytosine, Adenine, and Guanine known as TCAG and these four molecules are organized into patterns that repeat billions of times in order to bring sense and meaning to the building blocks of our very being. In popular music, we are typically working with 4 beats per measure and 4 measures (4/4 music) and it is through these repetitions that the order of music and its rhythms become the most common sequencings of sounds that are appealing to us humans at this time in our history’s.

If you think that the study of genetics is difficult, that is where my mind is currently at in regards to building my first musical sequences. To the listener, they may hear 120BPM and never give a second thought to the fact that they are listening to two beats per second, but a second is a lot of time. Try counting as high and fast as you can in one second, I can get to seven or eight as I speak the numbers out loud. So between the beats are pulses where things like snares could be triggered.

When you consider that it is not uncommon for a song to have upwards of over 100 voices that come in and out of the mix during the course of the track, you have to understand that all 100 of these have their own time signatures and hence they get sequenced into the mix at a particular moment or their individual elements are conforming to the timing that has been dictated by the sequencer and clock timings.

While it might be too ambitious for me to begin considering even two voices simultaneously, just understanding one sequenced voice has been a hurdle. Yesterday I wrote about clock signals, it is from these timing devices that the master clock is used to set the rest of the voices in the track to work off the same beat structure. Okay, so what gates and triggers in what sequence make for interesting rhythmic patterns? This is where I need to start experimenting with the basics such as a bass line or pattern for a kick drum. I could use an already written midi track and set it down as the basis to start building a song upon, but then I don’t feel that I’d fully understand the fundamentals.

And so I struggle trying to learn the basics of when to trigger a pulse, send a gate to a voice, or attenuate a voice that was just triggered or modulated for pitch. Someday I will come to grips with this genetic soup of sounds and timings that feel like they are just beyond the horizon of my comprehension.

Timing

JWise Photo of the Day

Pamela's New Workout from ALM

Music to the casual listener is mostly about rhythm, melody, and lyrical content. To someone learning how to make music one of the first lessons that becomes obviously apparent is that music is all about timing. Clocks, triggers, gates, pulses, PPQN (Pulses Per Quarter Note), randomness, steps, and modulation of all of these play a central role in how the Eurorack modular system is going to stay in sync, create and evolve rhythms, and move your piece forward, even when going in reverse.

I’ve chosen Pamela’s New Workout (PNW) from ALM as my master clock, I had tried the Arturia Beat Step Pro before deciding I wanted everything in the box. Once settled on a clocking device there is still an incredible depth of knowledge that will have to be acquired due to details regarding the division and multiplication of the signal if you will apply a Euclidean rhythm, or maybe you’ll choose to randomize its timing signature.

The PNW has eight outputs and each of them can be independently clocked. As the master clock, I patch out from this source to sync other modules that need to stay in time with each other. Even a random clock event should typically be in time with the rhythm of the piece that is being created.

Each of the eight outputs can in turn be divided or multiplied from within the PNW and by routing a clock signal to something like the Doepfer A-160-2 Clock Divider or the Animodule Tik-Tok Divider/Multiplier. If I want a random synced clock I have a couple of choices here too by taking a PNW output into the SSF Ultra Random Analogue or into the Makenoise Wogglebug, both specialize in random clock signals. I can take one of these external clock outputs into my Stillson Hammer sequencer and adjust the timing on a per track basis right within the Stillson, the same goes for many sequencers. In all, I currently have more than a few dozen devices that benefit from having a clock signal sent to them, while nearly everything else that follows these modules is the recipient of those perfectly or randomly clocked timings.

It’s daunting to try and think about the potential of which modules and sounds would benefit from particular timing signals. While I have more than a few passive signal multipliers also known as Mults (clock signals do not benefit from powered mults as CV signals do, as clocks send pulses that are not reliant on perfect voltage signals to convey their information accurately), I will still need to come to an understanding about which devices I want to send every manner of timing in order to achieve whatever it is that is stewing musically in my imagination.