The Grooved Whale Project

For the past 10 or so years I have been looking for the codes that create music.

Most of my explorations ended up on digital equipment where I could reduce things to numbers and examine their mathematical patterns.  I learned quite a bit by doing this but programming electronics does not feed my soul.  The greatest pleasure for me as a musician is to interact with others, where I open myself up to the risks and rewards of creating in real time.

I have been working with three musicians – Kirk Watson, Alcvin Ramos and Haagen – and have found myself invigorated and challenged as a musician to bring my best to the table. We’ve been jamming and improvising together where nothing is scripted but everything unfolds beautifully. The thrill of interacting with others – of listening and responding, testing my boundaries, taking leaps of faith – is for me the creative adventure of music making.

Music is easy to create if you know and follow the codes. The kicker is it takes a lifetime to learn them. Every day I practice. Today I worked on a track that I thought would be interesting to post a sample of. It is only an exploration of a patch I created. It consists of a sparse bass line and some percussive elements, is 1 bar in pattern length and is tweaked in real time.

The difference between this improvised track and a finished song is in orders of magnitude. There are mistakes or musically undesirable parts to this track. There are boring parts – parts where you wish something might change.  There are also parts which groove where I should have stayed rather than move on. Such is the benefit of hindsight. Once I learn the patch I will be better able to control these elements.

This track may eventually become a component of a song, or it may end up being one of countless explorations that never make it to the light of day. Anyways, thot i would post it for your edification and/or enjoyment

Here are two more snippets from explorations from this week:
This one explores filter sweeps.

This one explores gating my violin in different patterns