My Gakken Diary, Part Three: First Music

I finally got it together to make a piece with the Gakken SX-150. My basic idea was to treat the Gakken the same way I treat my Arp Odyssey: run it through a Line 6 DL-4 in looper mode, with a long repeat time, to emulate tape delay with feedback. Much of the work I do with the Odyssey involves modulating consonant intervals in the filter with a combination of envelopes, sample and hold and the LFO. I like making automatic music with the Odyssey, using a slow LFO to trigger events, and using different kinds of feedback in patches to get the synthesizer to more or less play itself. Needless to say, this isn't really possible with the Gakken, and it requires a lot more manual intervention than the techniques I've worked out with the Odyssey.

This first piece was made almost entirely by tweaking just two parameters; the filter cutoff and the amount of LFO modulation applied to the oscillator. Because it's very easy to slip with the small stylus on the carbon strip, the third parameter is a kind of manual oscillator drift. You can get some very nice beating effects by sending tiny tuning changes into the delay, just by slipping a bit on the carbon strip with the stylus.

Here's the piece:



And for comparison, here's a piece from 2004 using the Odyssey: