I borrowed Dr Frankenstein's laboratory for the evening. ("Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?" "Same thing we do every night, Pinky: Try to take over the world!") and spent the evening practicing my evil laugh, mwa-ha-ha-haar, and cooking up a Weapon of Musical Destruction. Going to deliver it later to a hardcore, square-jawed, five star general from the deep South. He'll spit out his big old cigar and say "Boy, that sure is some fine mil-spec theremin there. Operation Sonic Destructor is good to go, get the President on the line and start a-chargin' up the Jericho Horns boys, tonight we're gonna sing them SOB's a lullaby they'll never forget..."
It's kind of Pere Ubu's 30 Seconds Over Tokyo meets Industrial Introduction by Throbbing Gristle.
unlit airraids (http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=475314)
Play it [b]loud[/b].
I can quite understand if this is not for you (as my father says, "Huh. They call it music but it isn't.") So to save you the trouble of downloading it, here's a description.
This is music from the war zone. It is night. Against a backdrop of distant machinery jackbooted platoons march through the decimated city. All around the ruins loudspeakers blare out the cracked aphorisms of a bellicose despot. The claxons start to crank up to warn of an impending air-raid, but too late as the bombs start to fall...
What have I learned here?
Tried a new technique in garageband, imported straight from my experience using photoshop layers.
Put the same sound on two or more tracks, and treat each differently.
The opening track, the rhythm of distant machinery, is the same as the next voice, marching jackboots, which is shifted by half the duration of the sample to make them separate and distinct. The jackboots are actually two tracks, each with the same sample but treated differently. The emphasis moves from one voice to the other and back again over the length of the piece so the sound changes continuously in character. The voice is three tracks, also in perfect synchronisation. The first is distorted and megaphoney just beyond comprehensibility. The second is completely undistorted and plays just loud enough to make the first track understandable. The third is clipped until just snatches of voice remain, and then pitch-shifted into a squeak.
The two theremin tracks, the rising claxon and the falling bombs are both slow extended tiger claw strokes, one falling, one rising.
That needs some explanation. I am building a language, a nomenclature, to better think about what I am doing. The basic musical unit here is not the note, which has a fixed pitch and can vary only in volume, duration and tone, but the stroke, in which the pitch is also variable throughout the duration of the stroke. In this sense a note is a static stroke. The simplest non-static stroke is a movement either towards the pitch antenna or away from it, of constant velocity. This is easy to achieve, moving your hand at a steady speed - it is harder to achieve strokes where the velocity varies in a controlled manner - say to make a stroke in which the pitch varies sinusoidally like a police siren. Here we need to change the stroke from a straight line to a curve and take advantage of trigonometry. Describing a circle at a constant speed automatically moves the hand towards and away from the pitch antenna with just the required variations in rate of change of pitch. So a stroke is a curve described in the air.
The two strokes used in this piece are both slow straight lines (mostly), extending from one end of the range of the theremin to the other, hence "slow, extended". "Tiger claw" indicates a sawtooth wave with added gain to make it really sharp, and fast delay with lots of repeats to turn it into a cluster stroke like tiger claws ripping through your tent. Cluster strokes are one instance of an italic stroke, one in which the nature of the stro
