Extra drowsy Formula

This song is called “Turn Off the Eyeball.”

I use the term “song” loosely — this is more of an experiment in technological toys — I had just gotten my MicroKorg and was playing around with various things I could do with it, and I had just figured out how to cut and paste things in my digital recorder, so I was playing around with that, too.

Let’s see — the main keyboard riff is a Yamaha TX81Z Tone Generator, I think. I know I used it for something. There’s some giant-robot-talking near the end of what I’ll call the “breakdown” — it’s not very present in the mix, which is to say it’s “hard to hear” — and that’s using the Korg’s Vocoder. There’s the sound of sharp inhales throughout — I’m pretty sure that’s run through the Korg as well, but I’m not sure exactly what I did (this will be more useful once I catch up and post these comments closer to when I record the songs) but the goal was to make it sound like mechanical pneumatic valves and whatnot.

I really like the MicroKorg. It has lots of monophonic voices, so I don’t have to pretend like I should know how to play a chord.

Other instruments include the SR-16, autoharp (for only one chord!), and my beloved Casio SK-5 sampler (with which I sampled something — probably cymbals sitting on the floor — to make the giant marching robots in the breakdown). My notes say that there are three keyboards involved, so that’s probably Anders providing the organ parts (eek! Sorry, Anders!).

There aren’t really any lyrics to speak of.

Also, I’ll mention that the keyboard part coming out of the marching robots section was recorded onto an old Walkman and played back — near the end of that part you can hear it slowing down and breaking up — that’s me squeezing the Walkman in my hands to make the tape slow down. Fun!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 3:12 am and is filed under drowsy, Songs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.