The weblog of Vlad Spears: musician, science fiction hero, Max/MSP/Jitter gangsta, Daevl incarnate. Currently engaged in fast action on slow sculpture, I have an ongoing love affair with animism as an approach to creativity and an affinity for all things automata, gridded or digital.

Fine Print

All written material on 2Second(fuse) authored by Vlad Spears is published under the Creative Commons Some Rights Reserved license, unless otherwise indicated.

 

Attribution - Noncommercial - NoDerivs 2.0

 

Fight corporate ownership of culture:

Create and Disseminate!

020050511 14:41 •

After the ticky doings of Explode/Implode comes something much more fun.  The process I call Rhythm Mouth is the fastest, most intuitive way I’ve found to add fills, flourishes and percolation to static beat tracks when working almost exclusively in the realm of digital edits.

I use an inexpensive Plantronics USB mic/headset combo and let the track I’m working on run while I literally mouth bits and pieces of rhythm and record it to a new take.

Ableton Live screenshot showing Rhythm Mouth process in action.

While processed vocal rhythms can sound incredibly strange, especially when layered with more regular percussion, the new “mouth” track is mainly a guide for aligning existing drum sounds.  Rather than try to capture ideas two or three steps beyond the generating machine in my head, I’m cutting out as many middlemen as possible.  Brain to tongue to audio, the question becomes “Which existing rhythm sound should I replace these mouth parts with, to best perform these fill patterns?”  Since the tracks of musician-speak are not meant for actual production, I can use this process anywhere without worrying about sound quality.

Bonus: the looks on faces as people pass while I’m beat-boxing into my laptop.