Brevity and Drones

J Dillas Donuts has been one of my favourite albums for a few years now. One of the most impressive thing about this collection of loops/beats is that J Dilla knows when to quit a loop. Tracks generally last about a minute thirty. The beats loop several times, a few changes might occur, or another layer might be added. Once the track has said everything it has to say, it ends.

For an instrumental hip-hop album, this really makes a lot of sense. MF DOOMs instrumental albums (Special Herbs, Vol. 0-9), while awesome, often feature unchanging loops that continue for 3-4 minutes at a time. That gets tedious. J Dilla, on the other hand, offers up 31 short, tasty donuts for your consumption.

I like brevity in music, so I'm going to try to make a bunch of short ambient works. Today I made the first of that set, using a drone I created a few weeks ago (another thing I like: music cannibalism). Please enjoy the original sourced drone, and the final ambient work.

Original drone: Space Drone 2

Spacedrone2 by Liam Dodds


Final work: Ambient 25-09-10

Ambient 25-09-10 by Liam Dodds


MF DOOM - Vinca Rosea




MF DOOM (prod. J Dilla) - Gazillion Ear

One Note Csound Composition

This is a piece I wrote tonight for a Csound assessment. We had to create a "one note composition", which basically means you code together an instrument with a number of processes/set events that occur within the space of "one note".

Csound uses terminology associated with traditional music: the orchestra, the score, notes etc. for structural elements. This is really misleading and confusing to new users. This isn't really "one note". It is just a synthesiser with a number of different modules that create music based on initialisation values only - there is no live manipulation.

The actual sound is created by a big bank of sine wave generators and grain2 (a simple grainwave synthesiser in csound) running through a few reverb/delay effects.

12/09/10 by Liam Dodds

Welcome

My loyal readers,

Please enjoy this test post, featuring text typed by myself and a short draft/sketch of my final major work for university.

SCMP302 SKETCH by Liam Dodds