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about
I don't know if you'll think the back-story on this one is cool or crazy, but it goes like this. I was at home one evening playing with my 10-year old special needs son while the rest of the family was off gallivanting. He is non-verbal but loves music and has a basket of "toy" instruments. So he's shaking this toy tambourine, and I'm thinking, "Dude, that's a pretty steady beat there" so I got out the iPad and made some recordings. Then I made some recordings of other instruments in the basket (bells, shakers, tambourine hits) and toys (exercise ball, keys, camera) and thought "this could make a cool drum kit!", so that's what I did. It turns out that the first tambourine recording was exactly 117 beats-per-minute, so I went looking for Bible books where "chapter 1 verse 17" might fit this series and found it in Mark 1:17.
Technical details:
This song followed a similar course as "Romans Road" with NanoStudio serving up "drums", bass, guitar, and pad sounds as well as mixing/mastering duties. Vocals again came from a combination of Meteor and Synthtronica. There were two big differences though. First, all the percussion sounds came from the above mentioned recordings. Of course, some had to be heavily processed. The "kick" was an exercise ball hit dropped two octaves, filtered, and compressed as an effect to cut down the wicked long reverb tail from the pitch drop. The "toms" were tambourine hits tuned down (though less drastically) and the "snare" was also an effected tambourine hit. The other clicks, beeps, shakes, and bells were left largely untouched except for a little reverb, panning, etc. In particular, the inspirational tambourine loop was simply trimmed to make an 8-beat "hi-hat" rhythm that drives much of the song.
The other difference is that the EWI contribution comes from the Animoog app. Getting that to work deserves an article in itself, but to summarize, it involved sending the EWI MIDI out to the Line 6 MIDI Mobilizer interface to the MIDIBridge app with FreEWI "plug-in". FreEWI mapped CC#2 (breath) to aftertouch for sending to Animoog. In Animoog, the stock patches were modified to use aftertouch (channel pressure) instead of "poly pressure" to get them to respond to breath. Quite-easily-done! :-) (Actually, I'm not done with Animoog by a long shot; I think it has great potential as an EWI synth. The only thing I really don't like about Animoog is it only has about 20s of record time - little more than 8 bars for this tempo.) The EWI is playing the melodic pad part in the intro, then all the lead parts for the rest of the song.
lyrics
"Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men." (Mark 1:17, NIV1984)
I like many styles of music but most of my own productions tend towards jazz with electronic elements. I play the Akai
EWI4000s electric wind instrument, ukuleles, guileles, NAF, whistle, recorders, harmonicas, and various software instruments on Windows and iOS....more
This may be "just a demo" but very nicely done. And the coolest part is that all the bass on this album is from the EWI's internal synth! Factory patch #1 at that. Wow. Jim Hanks
