Re: More Tonal Theory: Arppegiators/Accent/Melody

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 12:46 PM, Rainer
Straschill<moinsound@googlemail.com> wrote:
> If you're working with the most simple of these constructions - a
> pitch shifter/delay chain with feedback - then it helps to work with
> tonal sets which are rather simple: if you're using diminshed chords,
> there's a total of three of them in the tempered system, and for
> whole-tone scales, there are only two, and in both cases, the pitch
> between each step is equal.


Great post, RAiner! One specific character of the whole tone scale
that I like is that it has no natural tonal center. But as listeners
our brain always creates a tonal center "by default". What this means
in musical terms is that if using whole tone scales you can play just
about anything and it will sound good. So, if you are two or three
musicians that want to do a group improvisation you can stick to the
whole note scale as a way to make it easier to develop the ability to
listen while playing and collectively create direction and movement in
the music. It's just a very forgiving, open and inspiring scale!

Diminished immediately brings up association with guitar playing,
since that was my first instrument to learn and I was quite excited
when finding out that if you play a diminished chord on a guitar and
move it up the neck three frets, then you will be back on the same
chord again - but with a different voicing. IN fact there only exists
three diminished chords within a twelve tone scale, which is logical
as each diminshed chord has four notes. When starting to do
livelooping on sax by the early eighties I owned a digital delay and a
digital harmonizer that I daisy-chained in a feedback loop and set the
harmonizer to +3 (a minor third) to find that it also creates a
diminished chord. Equally, harmonizer set to 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 produces
whole tone cluster-scapes.

I guess you (Margret) use the PitchShifter 2 plug-in for that in
Logic. You can actually set up two bus/aux channels as a feedback loop
to have the signal pass through a delay (set to 100% wet - important!)
and a PitchShifter so the audio will "climb" or "dive" in pitch with
each loop repeat.

There is also a plug-in that does all this within its own signal
routing, the Delay Designer. The DD also offers filtering and LFO,
which can be fun as well.

If you care to work with synths/sampler you may do related experiments
with Logic's arpeggiator. First make a MIDI assignment to control the
arpeggiator's parameters (typing in the used MID CC# at "Controller
Base: xx"). Then you may use an external knob, pedal etc to change the
rules for arpeggiation while it's running. This is so fun! Most
powerful is to work the time resolution in real-time, making the
arpeggiation of a chord/cluster/scale go faster or slow down.
Especially cool IMHO is to add many tracks and create interweaving
textures based on your improvising instincts. If recording your
actions as MIDI you are able to go back afterwards to analyze and
learn what it is that makes certain textures so musically intriguing.

Think I'll stop here. This topic is so fascinating it can just go on
for ages afaic :-)

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se
www.perboysen.com