Re: Mobius scripts audio examples

[Keith Smith <kahsmith@gmail.com>]

Nice ideas Simeon, I'll be messing with that for sure.
 

Luis,this may (or may not) be of interest to you. I had floated the idea quite some time ago, but the example I posted was way to long and the idea may not have been clear enough.

A while back, when Per made a few posts about the Chapman stick tuning, I got interested in playing with stacks of perfect 5ths laid down on separate tracks and and then pitch shifting the tracks individually in order to define different harmonic functions. Since I was interested in a rythmic ostenato for this, I never even considered the rate shifting that Simeon is using and the pitch shift in Mobius needs a bit more development before it's ready for showtime.

I played around with several VST's in Bidule and found that 'Son of a Pitch' seemed to be efficient enough that I could run several instances on my old Dell 6400 without choking. So I set up 6 instances of 'SOP' on the first three stereo outputs of a Matrix which was connected to the Mobius Stereo outputs.  You'll see the layout in the this group.

http://www.samplesmith.com/LD/SOP_PitchShift_Mobius.bgrp

http:/ww.samplesmith.com/LD/PitchShifted.mp3     links to a little demo where I lay down a quick 3 loops (any 
rhythm or note order you want, of course) and just play some scalar 
stuff to illustrate the idea.

The way it works is:
00:00:00   1. Record a stack on Track 1 Notes C, G, D   
00:02:11    2. Record a stack on Track 2 Notes Eb, Bb, F   
00:02:22    3. Record a stack on Track 3 Notes G, D, A      

This gives you a nice C- Dorian chord to blow on.
Now you can shift the tracks individually. The descriptions here relate to the the unshifted (original) notes.

00:27:05 Shift Track 2 up a semi-tone and it goes to C Lydian, say Cmaj7#11

00:40:11  Shift Track 2 up a semitone and Track 3 up a tone and you still have a Lydian scale but substituting A, E F# for the G, D, A it's a different flavor.

00:49:18  Shift Track 2 up a Tone (to F, C G) and Track 3 up a tone and you get a similar thing but with an F natural in the mix, suggesting a IV chord.

00:58:18  Dropping all 3 tracks a semitone gives a substitue for a V function -at least that's how I use it.

01:07:22   And dropping Track 2 a semitone gives a D Dorian sound which can work for a ii or a IV chord.

01:17      Back to the original  C Dorian -forgive the blooper!

The way I set it up in Bidule was to preset the individual instances of SOP to plus or minus 1 or 2 semitones and then turn them on or off as required, so if you load the group you'll see, TR1_SOP -1 CC56, meaning Track 1, Son of a Pitch, minus 1 semitone, controlled by CC56, etc etc.

The reason for the matrix was to route Mobius tracks 5,6 and 7 through the same shifters as 1,2 and three. That way, I could record some more ethereal stuff (differing loop lengths work fine) on those tracks and they would change function with the chords. The complication with that is you are restricted to the same note groups on on those tracks as you are on 1,2 and 3. So, it is a bit challenging to stay within the parameters.

Track 4 is unshifted, giving a safe place to 'land' after recording the initial loops and also provides a 'blowing' track that won't get pitch shifted while you're soloing (can get interesting if you don't do this).   

  I started doing some analysis on this but got distracted with some gigs at the time. Here's a pdf that might offer some ideas -unfinished.    

This certainly isn't for everybody, and it ain't the 'be all and end all' for harmonizing, but it does offer quick loop build up and excellent voice leading. It might be more practical on midi controllers with *lots* of buttons, because there are obviously way more options than I've listed here.

I hope someone has some fun with it.
k