Before The Beginning

This is a brief video recording of a much longer session, something I made back when I was first figuring out how to sequence within a mindset oriented around using delay to expand the sound of the bleeps and bloops coming out of the Moog units. I probably messed around for about an hour with various sequences, patches, and effects until I found something I liked and hit RECORD on the camera. The Minitaur carries the bass line, which runs through a Supermassive (Luscious Dotted Eighths preset) and runs into another Supermassive (Benson, Arizona, 10% mix) before hitting the master channel, on which resides a Toneboosters Reverb and Barricade brick wall limiter. The Sirin carries the high notes, iterating through a pattern while I fumble around with the knobs. It also runs through a Supermassive Luscious Dotted Eighths and a 10% mix of Benson, Arizona before hitting the master channel. Someone commented on a previous video that my performance featured a lot of unnecessary micro-tweaking of knobs. The guy is right, from his relative point of view - that's exactly what it looks like if you are looking at each adjustment as a separate action, especially when the effects of that change are buried in a wash of delay, reverb, and time-stretching. I am happy to report that you'll see a lot more of those micro-adjustments in this video as well, and with good reason - the micro-adjustments are part of something larger that is taking place in the piece. If you look at each adjustment of the knobs as part of a whole, then you're no longer watching several micro-adjustments occurring one after the other at all. Instead, you're watching a few much larger adjustments taking place over a much longer period of time. Of course, we solve this issue now "in the box" with "automation" of our "virtual instruments," but before there was ever such a thing as automation lanes or control tracks, this is how it was done: countless manual tweaks of the knobs to ensure that the sound coming from the instrument included a human element of organic variation. Here is an exploration that hearkens back to a time when I truly did not know what these tiny little machines were capable of. It is therefore a small part of my origin story as a synthesist: consciously pre-cosmic in its genesis and thusly titled "Before The Beginning."