Bossa Sbilenca
16 April 2012 Filed in: Music | Alternate
controllers
Listen to Bossa Sbilenca
A simple song in Carlos Alpha tuning system featuring Spectrasonics Omnisphere and Camel Audio Alchemy sounds.
The tune has been composed playing my Opal Chameleon.
I started using sounds from a previous song (Alpha Therem Waltz) then I added double bass and a drum loop.
This song is related to that song also because of the “transnotational” issues involved (see Transnotating Carlos Alpha and Transnotating Carlos Alpha 2).
While composing this song I discovered a useful technique:

as you can see from the above picture, the Disarray output (MIDI data from the Chameleon remapped by it) is sent to Logic Pro’s input twice: directly and through the “transnotation map” so that each MIDI note creates two events. See below:

this is the MIDI event list of the first eight bars of the theremin theme. The instrument receives on MIDI channel 2, events on channel 16 are created by the “transnotation map” (see previous picture).
The same eight bars as they appear on the score editor:

Once I use the command “Separate MIDI events by event channel” I get MIDI notes on one track:

and the score on the other one:

(actually notes you see here are the result of manual correction of the score created by the “transnotational map”. Further explanations on my previous article “Transnotating Carlos Alpha 2” ).
The title refers to the fact that a straight bossa nova rhythm is used to play a slightly “sbilenco” non-octave piece.
This note reminds me of what Michael Brecker wrote about his friend and colleague Don Grolnick: “he liked living close to the edge... as long as it was two or three blocks away”.
That sentence explains, somehow, what I aspire to do musically, in my own way and with all due respect for those two great musicians I deeply admire and whom I don’t dare to compare with.