Thursday, April 29, 2010

"Out Like a Lion"


Hello Travelers -
If you are reading this, you were probably prompted by me to do so, so I am likely not truly an "Unknown Quantity", but that's what I decided to call my "group" a while back. It might be an anti-group or a non-group or a solo project too.

Also, you might be wondering about the URL of this blog; "Ub4Q"...It's a statement of thinking differently, because everyone knows that "U is always AFTER Q".

At any rate, I am releasing two sets of recordings this spring. One is called "Realism is What?", which I actually recorded a few years ago, and have been sitting on, enjoying the tracks every once in a while on my iPod. This set features my Realistic (yes, Radio Shack!) Moog-Copy Synth that I bought in 1982 or 1983. More on that in another blog posting.

And this one is called, "Out Like A Lion", which is a play on words, because everything was recorded in the month of March this year. There were 3 sessions, which I recorded on this new piece of gear called a Belkin TuneStudio, that Sue gave me this past holiday season. Basically, it is a mixing board that you can record with, but the media is an iPod. So easy to use, and so clean.

The concept for "Out Like A Lion" is this - There are three "primary" tunes; one that is all bass guitar, one that is all Realistic Synth and one that is all soprano sax. I improvised about 10 "tracks" during each session, through various signal processors, and then layered, mangled, stretched, chopped and mixed the tracks on my Mac, using Ableton Live.

Then, there are two "secondary" tunes; one that is bass and synth, and one that is soprano and synth.

Then, there is one "tertiary" tune, which is comprised of all three instruments. Now, look at the "album art" again. Yep...it's just like that.

As I have been listening to these six tracks for the past month or so, they have really grown on me - I think they are pretty original sounding. I think sonically, that the "sound elements" (the audio version of pixels) are also pretty original sounding too.

In the following posts, I will comment on, and post a link to, an MP3 version of each tune over the course of the next week or so.

Friday, April 2, 2010

This is the place...

...where the music of and words about "Unknown Quantity" live.