
NodeBeat and Clarinet

The second challenge for ‘10 Weeks : 10 Sounds‘ is a little more complex than the first and resulted in three long pieces in a fairly laid-back smoky jazz-club sort of style.
NodeBeat is a graphical sequencer for the iPad and iPhone that is simple in concept, but can result in some complex music. It uses a series of ‘nodes’ that trigger either a musical note or a drum beat according to how close the nodes are together. This can be further refined by use of specific scales and waveforms, tempos and transpose levels, as well as the ability to turn on movement and gravity. Under these last options, the nodes move around on their own accord, introducing a gradually changing random factor.
I’ve worked with NodeBeat before, to provide the rhythm for Drei Viertel Drei’s ‘Igor’s Jigsaw‘. For that song Katharina put the rhythm together and I used NodeBeat’s MIDI-out to trigger body part samples; this time I stuck to using NodeBeat’s own sounds, rather than introducing another instrument, but the MIDI facilities really turn the software into a serious tool for creating musical patterns.
The clarinet is a Rudall Carte Graduate model, B-flat, which is a bit of a culture shock for a guitarist used to playing a ‘C’ and hearing the same note. I’ve only used the instrument a few times before, mostly on The Lunacy Board’s ‘Difficult Second‘ album, but I needed to dig around to make sure I was using the right fingerings, since there are rather a lot of keys on a clarinet.

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