Yeah, no

[seismic1]

I especially loved the toms and the reined-in guitar anarchy. Some of those flute melody lines were made for George and Napoleon to Tango with

The Walkman Pro was a great (although quite pricey) piece of equipment way back in '84. I think the audio quality on that live piece is actually quite good. King Crimson's Earthbound (1972) was not good audio quality. I think that was recorded on a cassette too.

Good work

[jancivil]

It wasn't my own Walkman Pro but it seems like it was in my hand all the time. I would go record trains and sample that on the Ensoniq Mirage. It was my idea to buy it, though.
Its owner wasn't exactly hoarding it, it was for the better good kind of thing. I had an SG and a drum machine, beyond that Other People's Equipment.

That track is kind of growing on me. I remember it because of the stupid vocals MONEY!, he would make shit up like that on the spot and just go for it. I wish I had 'People Get Excited' which works all the way through and you'd never imagine we did it off the cuff with no particular preparation or discussion at all. 100% cogent composition. He was probably prepared but this was the one time for those ideas. Ideas didn't need to be hoarded, or be very precious back then.


I like the drums in the third section. The composition more or less works. I'm going in for something freer next, I think.

[vurt]

Yeah, a finished compo now; So the full version appears here in the OP and the last link, with the intermediate unfinished version in the 2nd link.

I thought about extending the section before the time shifts gears and just ends but it's not happening. I was working around the nested tuplets limitation and... readjusting that much, I have to chop into the middle of this jungle and I just prefer not.

Instead:
Definitely going to reprise the final theme with some twists. Probably starting more acoustically and building again.

you need to start editing thread titles, ive seen this come back up a few times, but not checked in because i figured nowt had changed yet.
decided to see what others where saying as im stuck on the phone for now, and reading the thread find you've finalised it
will check when not stuck on phone

[jancivil]

I was thinking about editing the title today. I don't expect too many to care about the thing, frankly.

This is the final form, yeah. I may or may not tweak the mix, I think the mix is good. I was thinking about doubling 1 or 3 things with vibes.

I have something in mind which resembles '2' but it would be a massive amount of work. I may return to it. I did not repeat that, I did start in with material related to the first part of '2' with an acoustic group as I stated but I ended it.
I had the bass line for '4' (or '2B') printed later in the timeline but I finally deleted it.

a finished compo now

meant '2' had a real ending and the track faded out 'and scene'. I had further plans but plans are just a list of things which never happen.
'3' happened anyway.

I'm kind of sick of the material at this point. I was planning to permutate that last bass flute motif but decided against, in favor of brevity and of escape.

[vurt]

in parlance in keeping with the work : "that's far out! happening!"

the opening is like being attacked by an orchestra
and that guitar wailing is

it works quite nicely with the jazz herb too

[jancivil]

glad you could get into it
thanks

[experimental.crow]

just so as to not lose the plot ,
' no left sock ' is the completed composition ,
containing all the bits i need to hear ?..

[stanlea]

Still listening.

[jancivil]

just so as to not lose the plot ,
' no left sock ' is the completed composition ,
containing all the bits i need to hear ?..

All pertinent updates in original post now

I still think IIA is at most part of a suite with 'I' but it follows

[justin3am]

Killer drum programming!
The low end seems detached from the spectrum in some place (particularly when the low toms stand out), maybe deliberate, but the mid range and high end sound consistently glued together, throughout the various compositional changes. I've heard other mixes like this... It doesn't sound wrong. It's just an unusual sensation, for me, in headphones. I don't know if that even make sense.

I enjoyed it, particularly the schizoid guitar parts. Thanks for sharing!

[jancivil]

Yeah, I don't know what that is really. The gnarly guitar part still takes up way too much room and I wanted the drums to not be drowned.
It's not the ideal mix, for sure but you can hear everything and the tone of the drums isn't totally lost in '2'. This is an interesting advantage of a sampled drum set up: if you were hitting the toms this hard live you'd choke them but the sampling is apparently aware of this. This is however a trade-off since they're already mic'd, a drummer is playing into the mics rather than relying on muscle ideally because of this reality, you have to let them breathe. I have to use velocity '127' somewhat.
Technically the toms have a space carved out for them in a couple of ways. For one, the drums outs are sent to the same room as the rest but the decorrelation of the impulses is 'near', the rest of it 'far'. And the toms are virtually mono, the late reflections in the reverb are set to be not very diffuse and so the whole way they reflect is special.


Probably a subconscious Zappa influence; in the 80s he would mix toms really in your face. And in their own space, there is nothing I know quite like it. There is a story on Trance Fusion, which is a live guitar solo album which had to be mastered (posthumously) for CD, and the mix engineer was dealing with these "pre-mastered" stems where the toms were ridiculously overwhelming sonically (super-compressed with a lot of makeup) and had to 'unmaster' them, kind of a nightmare.

[jancivil]

thanks

[Deep Purple]

Definitely inspires repeated listenings, and interesting to see this development play out.

Despite your own dislike of the mud in the mix, I have no problem with that - things don't need to be sonically perfect to make a piece enjoyable, and I even think it makes things more interesting when there is variability rather than consistency in the way drums come through in a mix.

Summary: I like it.

[experimental.crow]

it's smart , and tight ...
as a composition , mirabile dictu !

i feel some further tinkering w/ staging
could be called for ...

[jancivil]

thanks

I don't see it as particularly muddy, if one is getting the low toms standing out that's a product rather of transparency. I would like to get more out of certain things and clarify it some more but '2' is a pretty dense thicket. I require some distance from it, and it's time to move to the next step.