Richard Brewster's Synthesizer » Old Music

Walking Piece

Richard — Fri, 01 Jan 1982 05:00:17 +0000

This short composition was mixed in real time. It features the formant effects of one of the Electronotes filters, creating a vocal-like quality.… —Read more

Live at Norwich

Richard — Sat, 01 Aug 1981 05:00:11 +0000

My foray into live performance. I set up a patch with the Generalized Resonator and controlled the VCO pitch and other tracking parameters with the keyboard. I’m playing the monophonic keyboard in this performance. A cool feature of that keyboard was a random sample and hold switch that I used to spice things up. Note that the patch sounds a lot like a step sequencer. But it’s not. I seldom use a step sequencer, because I find them overly deterministic. A sequence-like effect is obtained by a combination of LFOs. The live sound was powered by a 400-watt Cerwin-Vega amplifier driving two Cerwin-Vega PA speakers with 18-inch woofers and horns. It was magnificent! This recording is the best quality of those posted here, due to the use of metal tape without noise reduction.

Environment For Norman

Richard — Mon, 01 Sep 1980 05:00:47 +0000

This is a 10-minute excerpt of an aleatoric drone that features some interesting resonance and an analog delay unit that I had built, also from Electronotes. I remember recording it in a studio at the State University of NY at Binghamton. I have no idea what the patch was like. The recording was very noisy.

Voices One Through Four

Richard — Tue, 01 Jul 1980 05:00:27 +0000

Four different sounds were patched up simultaneously and mixed in real time. I used a monophonic 1V/octave keyboard for some of the control. The first ‘voice’ is composed with an Electronotes Multi-Phase Waveform Animator (EN #87 and #108) and a low pass filter. The second is filtered noise. The third is a bouncing ball created with an envelope generator and an VC LFO. The fourth, semi-random pulse sounds, was created with a Cascaded-Monostable Type Generalized Resonator (EN #93). This piece represents an attempt at composition, having a beginning, middle, and end with a recapitulation. It is twenty-three minutes long.