Pianofield @ Letheringham Priory Church

Pianofield did a fund-raising concert for this amazing church. The church has a wonderful acoustic it sounded great! A highlight was playing the loverly little church organ on “Monk Over The Hill”. It is a very special place to perform!

Thanks to:

  • Terry, Polly and Morris for being such great hosts.
  • Chris for being a great camera man.
  • Tom for doing a great job on the live and recorded sound.
  • Pauline for filling the church with amazing scented candles.
  • Everyone who came along, all your ticket money went to help fix the church roof and we raised over £1000!

Here is the whole set:

Sun
Wing
Buzzard
Evening Star
Coming Home
Onset Of Winter
Monk Over The Hill
Devil’s Cauldron
Skater
Monsoon

Solar Powered Grand Piano

As part of pianofield we decided to make a solar powered MIDI keyboard in a case that looks just like a grand piano. The aim was to play realistic piano sounds in interesting and strange places. Here it is in the reed marshes outside the international concert hall at Snape Maltings, Suffolk, UK.

Here again on the beach at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, UK.

The solar panel fits onto the lid of the piano and is positioned to absorb the most sunlight. In this way, the standard solar panel controller charges the 12v led acid battery. This is then converted to the correct voltages for the keyboard, audio power amplifier and laptop through a highly complex switch-mode power supply which I designed.

Now this technology is used in all our gigs until the sun disappears when we most often have to eventually plug into the mains. But it means pianofield can literally play anywhere in the world!

 

MIDI based Piano Pedal Looper

One of my great joys of the last few years has been collaborating with my very talented friend Frances Shelley setting up and performing in our band pianofield. Have a listen!

When we started, it was our aim to combine piano and soundscapes. We wanted both to be inspired by field recordings and our surroundings in a free-flowing improvised style.

Frances uses a combination of real pianos and high quality sampled ones, which she plays on her MIDI keyboard. I use Ableton Live as the foundation for my composition and live performance. The key for us is to be able to improvise as freely as possible during the performance. We record this performance as an Ableton Live set, which captures everything in a form we can then edit. We then take this in to the recording studio to edit and adjust it to make a final mastered version.

This free and improvisational workflow is really enjoyable to work with during the performance. The recording of “everything” as MIDI notes allows us to make a more polished re-interpretation of our performance for a recorded version.

Our first approach to working together was based on a single copy of Ableton Live running on my Mac. The keyboard was connected via MIDI and the real piano as an audio track. The keyboard is usually running into a Native Instruments Kontakt 5 sampler plug-in. The soundscapes and other electronic instruments were controlled from an Ableton Push 2 and other MIDI control surfaces.

This approach was great for recording everything in sync. However, it was a lot of extra work for me managing the piano while I was performing but most importantly Frances  was unable to adjust her sound whilst playing the piano without involving me. This was not what we were aiming for but got us going!

With the advent of Ableton Link technology, we had an easy way to synchronise 2 or more copies of Ableton Live across ethernet. This opened up the possibility of running the piano and keyboards separately from my soundscapes and electronic instruments. This gave Frances the ability to really use Ableton Live while playing and freeing me up to be more creative live.

Synchronised Ableton Live Setup

This diagram shows an overview of the setup we now use for both live and studio work.

The main aim was to allow Frances to work closely with 1) effects such as delay and arpeggiators and 2) looping.

The effects and arpeggiator were easy to provide with the core features of Ableton.  We set up a Novation Launch Control and mapped the controls to the parameters she wished to adjust. Keeping this near the keyboard allowed her to make level adjustments and parameter changes to effects as she played.

Piano setting control

The second feature she needed was a way to quickly switch between various presets and effects in Ableton. I created a Max4Live plugin to help with this. The 8 buttons on the Launch Control allow a quick switching mechanism between combinations of tracks; each track setup for a different sound.

The plug-in has 8 settings across the top and a grid control down the side which allows you to set which track combinations are enabled in the live set.

MIDI based Piano Pedal Looper

Frances really likes to build up layers of piano switching between the MIDI keyboard and a real piano. After hunting all over the Internet, we did not find anything that was suitable. There are lots of amazing analog loopers which we could have used for the live performance but once converted into audio we were unable to fully edit and reinterpret the keyboard afterwards in the studio.

The basic facilities provided by Ableton  for midi loop creation and editing  were what we needed but they were just impossible to use while playing the keyboard live as they all require looking at the screen and operating the mouse.

It was time to build our own!

Using max4Live, it is possible to access almost all aspects of Ableton Live programatically, this seemed like a good start. Then, after watching Tom Cosm demonstrate what he had done with a max4Live looping project I was inspired!

Quite a lot of effort later, we have our MIDI looper! The aim was to allow loops to be recorded, erased and stopped without looking at the laptop or taking fingers off the keyboard. It was also important to be able to sync new clips with pre-prepared loop clips as this opens up all sorts of creative possibilities. They can also act a backup loops when performing live. We wanted the whole thing to work within Ableton Live and make a Native Instruments Machine Jam; the main focus for mixing, starting and stopping loops.

We decided on a 3 pedal interface for the looper. The pedals are used as follows: Left for starting a loop recording. Middle for moving onto the next loop to allow layers of loops to be built up. Right to erase or  undo a loop recording and allow it to be re-recorded. There is no need to touch anything else to use the looper. This was very important for us.

When a loop is created it appears on the Machine Jam as a clip. It can then be started, stopped, duplicated, re-colored and so on just as any other clip in Ableton can be.

The picture below shows the looper with some pre-prepared loops on the left side of the grid – ready to go. When new loops are recorded they appear on the top row of the grid. The touch-strips allow the loops to be mixed live.

The Max4Live plug-in has options for quantisation so one can set the loop length. There is a mode that allows the first clip to act as the master. Whatever the length of the first clip is will set the loop length quantisation for the other 5 loop tracks.

The blue bar on the right shows the position in the loop. It was helpful for debugging but does not get much use now. There are 6 looper tracks, which can be used or everything can be locked down to just use the first one.

This plug-in is also integrated with the piano settings plug-in described above. In this way, when a loop starts recording the piano setting is temporarily set to a fixed piano sound 1. After the loop is running the settings then go back to the original piano sound.

Open Source Sode for Wii Controller and ZigBee based IMU to MIDI

I am really interested in Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) and have been building them for the last 5 years. Each year it gets easier and they become more accurate. My main interest is using them to generate music.

I have some early (but well tested) code that can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/wii2live. Let me know what you do with it. This uses a ZigBee as the wireless connection which has been an excellent long range low power solution for a while now.

I have created a super sensitive IMU for the seatrees.uk project let me know if you are interested, it a wired solution.

I am now building a Wi-Fi version using an ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip for the communications, a Teensy 3.2 for the main processing and the BNO055 Absolute Orientation IMU. I have started to integrate this in to Ableton Live.

 

Echoes @ Butley Priory


ECHOES – Music, walk and poetry to respond to the magical and spiritual atmosphere of an amazing 12th Century site.

Composer and improviser Frances Shelley (www.francesshelley.com) alongside soundscape designer Matthew Bickerton and artist Pauline Bickerton paulinebickerton.com.

American poet and writer Genevieve Katherine lead a 45 minute walk around the Priory grounds and ruins, with short intervals for readings of her new works, some poems being especially written for the occasion. Geneviève is a spoken word artist who works from nature, ritual, and the simple truths of our mundane and mythic existence.

Then it was back to the log fire in the Great Hall, for an improvised performance on two pianos and various keyboards and computers by Frances and extraordinary soundscape artist Matthew Bickerton The incredible stone vaulted Great Hall became an installation in itself with film projection and lighting accompanying the music.

The aim of both poetry and musical performances will be to respond to, capture, and express in the various mediums of the artists, the magical and spiritual atmosphere of this 12 Century site, at the darkest, most still, and most regenerative time of the year leading up to the Winter Solstice.

Supported by the Suffolk County Council.

seatrees.uk

A collaboration with Frances Shelley (Improvisation/Pianist) & Pauline Bickerton (Sculptor).

An inertial measurement unit (IMU) measures the movement of the tree sculptures. This is processed by bespoke software (Max/Msp and Processing) to produce MIDI data that drives Ableton Live. The result lies between music and a soundscape.

The audience could sit and listen to the trees all day. Then each evening Frances and I improvised along to the tree.

For more information :  seatrees.uk

 

The Awe of the Other – Aldeburgh Beach, Suffolk

A collaboration with Pauline Bickerton.

2 over size chairs 500 meters apart, connected with headphones allow people to have a surprising encounter with one another. The results were installed in a modified Bakelite radio using a small Arduino and digital amplifier.

Transducers were used to bring the sounds from the chairs to an audience in the Aldeburgh Lookout. The windows and fabric of the building were used in various ways to act as loudspeakers.

World in a Box – Ramsgate, UK

In a collaboration with Pauline Bickerton and driven from a live feed of seismic data from a station just next to Margate, the vibrating dippers on a ripple tank create a wave pattern. One dipper is drive by the surface wave and the other the wave through the core of the earth.