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Vietnam Day 3 Field recording with Richard Eigner and Workshop with Vietnamese Musicians

Richard Eigner getting into the many sounds at a busy intersection in Hanoi

I’m starting to get into the swing of things, body clock is still very confused but the vibe of the city is such that it carries you along on it’s noisy, smoky, hyper-alive wake.  I spent several hours walking around recording and taking photographs with Richard today. And when stepping off the street and into the calm of my hotel I keep noticing that my body is actually vibrating such is the excitement of the city.

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Afterwards I headed to the Goethe Institut to give a workshop on my Light controlled music hard/software which was really good fun especially when the audience started getting involved with playing the interface. I learned a lot.

Hanoi Score workshop and Scooter ride including Vietnam’s most controversial Fruit! (Day 2)

This morning I worked with a group of players and composers from Hanoi’s ‘Rhapsody Philharmonic’ we performed my animated graphic score piece.  at the British Council building which was a lot of fun.

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As you can see there is no fear of experimentation here. The players made fine use of a steel bin, instrument cases for percussion and tubes to sing down. Their timing was impeccably good and they also laughed a lot too which is no bad thing.

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Later on after a little afternoon nap I was picked up by the excellent Cuong on his moped for a tour of Hanoi by night. Cuong is rightly obsessed by fruit and we went on culinary tour which left my tastebuds in a state of complete ecstasy! In the video he points out Vietnam’s most CONTROVERSIAL fruit while skilfully whizzing along the streets of the old town.

Arrived in Hanoi! (Day 1)

I’ll be playing in Vietnam, Norway, and Germany This month.

Hanoi - Soundstuff Festival - Workshops and Concert - 9th-13th April

Tape to Zero - Oslo - 19th April

Operation Ton - Talk - 16:15h - 17:00h - 27th April & Golden Pudel - Concert - PM - 27th April

See you there, special prize if you attend all three.

J x.

Why don’t DAWs let you do this?

I was teaching recently and one of my students had a patch with lots of effects in it. They were all routed to a central matrix~ object. It was really powerful but let down by the fact that controlling the matrix~ can be quite confusing esp when performing live. Personally I don’t like having to think in rows and columns when I just want to put the delay after the gate instead of before it.

This is the solution I came up with in Max/MSP, Have a look at Mr Matrix in action…

Lots of fun, I really wish I could do this in Logic Pro!

Download the patch

If you don’t have Max/MSP you can still play with Mr Matrix by installing Max/MSP runtime. Just make sure you put the Mr Matrix folder within the runtime patches folder!

Mr Matrix by Leafcutter John is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://cycling74.com/toolbox/mr-matrix-draggable-fx-routing-system/.

New free software coming soon…..

Follow me on Twitter &/or Join Mailing List to find out when it’s released.

Sunday Synth Freakout.

CMOS Synth I’m in the process of designing and building at the moment.

J x.

Quadcopter Makes Disjointed Noise Improv

All the sounds you hear are being triggered and modulated by a downward facing LED which I rigged onto a little quadcopter. The light is picked up by the LDR’s from my light controlled music system which uses and an Arduino to send control data to Max/MSP where the sound is produced… I need to improve my flying skills if this is to go any further!

If you want to know more about the light controlled music system I’m doing a talk and concert at Brunel uni on Feb 27th and a talk an workshop at University of Wales Newport, City Campus on March 14th.

J x.

Tues Feb 12th Cafe Oto.

My Home Made guitar plays: Disorder by Palace music (Will Oldham).

Dusted off the guitar I made in 2007 and decided to have a go one of my favourite Palace tunes. Disorder comes from the 1996 album ‘Arise Therefore’ Which is a beautiful melancholic and sparse record with some of Will’s best lyrics of all time.

late 50's STC 3045 dynamic

I recorded the music with two very old mic’s that I’ve been getting into lately. The voice uses an old BBC STC 4035 from the 1950′s and the guitar a 1970′s AKG lapel mic which is labelled BBC Radio Paris.

I think this is an AKG made sometime in the 70's

I just saw the same mic hanging around Dudley Moore’s neck during his duet with Cilla Black – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxgHypEdeEU

About this guitar:

http://leafcutterjohn.com/?page_id=33

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqep67V4Qqw

J x.