The Null Device Blog

I’ve been working on a new-ish track recently – it’s something I started a few months back and then backburnered. It’s shaping up better now that I’ve messed with some programming. And bears a little inspiration from the more recent works of Bear McCreary. Heh.

I used oud samples in it, and originally had done them in a standard minor scale. However, since this was an oud, I thought putting it in a proper maqam would be appropriate.

I tried maqam husseini…that sounded like ass. Then I tried maqam hijaz, which was much easier. I tried hijaz rast and had no trouble tuning a few intruments to the right quarter tones (which sounded pretty frickin awesome, lemme say), but a few other instruments refused to play nicely with my attempts to microtune so I had to switch over to hijaz nahwand (or “form 2″ in some parlances), which is just (in D) Eb, F# and Bb.

It definitely changed the tenor of the song. Like, a lot. And it made the string hook sound completely different, and probably a bit less accessible. Still, in sacrificing that one hook I think the song itself is much stronger.

Of course, if I can’t make the vocals sound good I’ll have to transpose it down a step or two. Luckily I think my maqam will transpose nicely to C. Of course then it becomes hijaz kar kurd, I beleive. And I don’t have to edit any damned tuning tables…which is still easier than trying to program it all with pitch bend messages.

Did some cool effects chaining, too, chaining a delay line to a S/H-modulated formant filter. Really fills out the song in the second verse.

I also was sorting through my sample library and found some very nice bollywood-ish indian percussion ensemble samples that I didn’t know I had. I’ll have to slow one of them down and see how it works with this sort of dubby thing I’m writing too.

Oh, and I started writing some code for the next iteration of nd.com. Rather than try and maintain two separate photo galleries, I’m just gunna use Flickr and some API calls to embed what I need. That way I can link to other people’s public photosets too. I’ve already done some serious bulk uploading of my photo archives to Flickr. The downside is I’ve lost most of my captions. Oh well, they weren’t all that clever to begin with. I now need to write a decent inline photo viewer that won’t send users off to flickr on every click. I’m trying to keep it lightweight – I know there are entire flickr-based gallery frontends that exist but I want to easily embed this and make it slightly portable, which neither my current gallery nor available flickr tools are, especially.