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Showing posts from August, 2009

Mix DS146: Drumlins

My trusty original X-Session MIDI controller had been playing up in the lead up to this months show. Several of the rotary dials on it began to malfunction, causing them to have a life of their own and start changing values for me during a mix... The offending article - My long-serving original X-Session I've unceremoniously retired it to the dustbin now but this then gave me the problem of what to replace it with? I did my research on what was available and ended up going for the compact and relatively inexpensive elder brother to the X-Session, the X-Session Pro. I was tempted to spend more on one of the posh Vestax's controllers, but they still haven't really got it right for me yet... not for that kind of outlay anyway. The VCI-100 is nice but I don't need or want platters. The VCM-100 is nice too, but I don't need another audio interface and I want 4 faders. Faders are what I missed most about using the original X-Session. The most tempting I found was...

Consonance and dissonance in balance

As Frank Zappa explained it, "The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consistent and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only 'good guys' in it, or eating cottage cheese." In other words, a composer cannot ensure a listener's liking by using exclusively consonant sounds. However, an excess of tension may disturb the listener. The balance between the two is essential. Contemporary music has evolved in the way that tensions are less prepared and less structured than in Baroque or Classical periods, thus producing new styles such as Jazz and Blues, where tensions are usually not prepared. New show coming up this weekend folks!
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