Dave Graham
Composer and multi-mentalist
New Blog to end all blogs
Trautonium!!!
I'll let wikipedia do the talking:
"The trautonium is a monophonic electronic musical instrument invented ca. 1929 by Friedrich Trautwein in Berlin. Soon Oskar Sala joined him, continuing development until Sala's death in 2002. Instead of a keyboard, its manual is made of a resistor wire over a metal plate which is pressed to create a sound. Expressive playing was possible with this wire by gliding on it or create vibrato with small movements. Paul Hindemith wrote several short trios for three Trautoniums with three different tunings: bass, middle, and high voice. His student, Harald Genzmer, wrote two concertos with orchestra, one for the monophonic Trautonium and, later, one for Sala's "Mixtur-Trautonium". One of the first additions of Sala was to add a switch for changing the static tuning. Later he added a noise generator and an envelope generator (so called 'Schlagwerk'), formant filter (several bandpass filters) and the subharmonic oscillators. These oscillators generate a main pitch and several harmonics, which are not multiples of the fundamental tone, but fractions of it. For any of the now two manuals, four of these waves can be mixed and the player can switch through these predefined settings. Thus, it was called the "Mixtur-Trautonium". Oskar Sala composed music for industrial films, but the most famous was the bird noises for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds."
Alas I couldn't create instruments for all the sounds this wonderful creation can make...but the one I have done has a great old fashioned sound, wobbly tuning and a crackly vinyl ambience. Enjoy! And once again please let me know if you like it!
As a slight postscript here I'm going to add a couple of bonus ones - I've done my back in and am spending a lot of time unable to move...hence the miraculous addition of some new instruments...nothing groundbreaking, but they are different from the ones that come with Logic, so worth picking up. We have in the blue corner, a slightly livelier Clavinet and a cheap sounding Electric Piano. Have fun!
Free Logic Mellotron instruments pack
All you need to do is copy the folder and exs file into "Library>Application support>Logic>Sampler Instruments" and they should appear in your EXS Sampler Instrument menu.
Feel free to email with any suggestions, comments or requests! The addy is dave@musiclikeplanets.co.uk There are more to come soon!
Online mp3 store up and running.
Another project to watch out for
Another project to watch out for
Even more new material
There is a lot to watch out for in Daveland just now. Not only an as yet unspecified album or two from Regolith. But also a "sophisticated and nuanced" remix - not my words! - of the Posthumn ep. And...a full length solo album. The solo album will be a reworking of my "Soundtrack to a ghost story" piece that has finally been picked up on by a very wise label-meister and will see a cd release in a heavily extended form - with a bit of luck!
New album on the way
My new album, Orion is available from Earth Monkey, the huge and wonderful mother of all netlabels.
The idea for the album came to me when leaving my old flat one evening, when I suddenly noticed the constellation Orion hanging low in the clear night sky, right in front of me. Not only was the evening stunningly beautiful, but it trigger memories of a family member pointing out the constellation to me as a child in my parents back garden. I realised that these stars have been burning there in space for the 25 years in between - a blink of an eye in a stars life, and my entire youth - and had a vision of these calm stars watching over us humans scurrying around.
This is a romantic notion of course, but it did inspire a musical metaphor of different timescales, the fizzing, speeding little lives, and the long, transcendant stateliness of the universe itself.
Regolith News
I am currently working on a new batch of Regolith material, which is coming along very nicely. We have finished "Cadre Turf" which was an interesting exercise in unusual means of composition and production.
The Cadre Turf sessions:
To start with, I recorded some guitar ideas, which I gave to G. He chopped them up and created a strange, angular scaffolding out of them and gave them back to me. I transcribed these diced guitarworks, and added more guitar as well as some extra instruments to emphasise particular moments.
The result is strange but alluring - lost moments and unexpected peaks, there is a logic at work but the overall feeling is of something unmoored and drifting. I'm very pleased with it, and hopefully it will be seeing a release shortly.
PS I am looking for musicians for a very special project. I need classical musos, preferably string players for a recording project. Get in touch via dave@musiclikeplanets.co.uk if you are interested.
Quiesence
Due to my wife Denise being very poorly, I'm not keeping up with musical events for the time being - things are ok now, but were looking rather hopeless for a while. Thank you to everyone who has sent best wishes, it is always appreciated.
There will be some more parts to this website appearing soon, with luck as I'm hoping to expand things a little. I would like to make some scores and arrangements available, as well as some musical samples.
Interdum
There is a bit of a lull just now, but with the promise of a frenzy slightly later on. On the Regolith front, we are working on some very exciting material - which shall be kept under wraps for now so as not to spoil the surprise. However, if I were to mention orchestral sonorities, harsh noise and electric guitar you would be getting a decent idea of what's to come.