MVG

Composer John Croft wrote Intermedio III for bass clarinet and live electronics in 2012. It is an absolutely beautiful piece that raises many questions among audiences. In this blogpost I will talk about one of its most defining characteristics: the instrumentality of the live electronics. What does that mean? Basically it means that your instrument gets bigger while remaining as nicely responsive as you always knew it to be.

Listen to a short excerpt of Intermedio III:

This is actually not so easy to achieve. Here is an image of the 'simplified' process diagram of the electronics. It comes with the score, but I did the coloring myself. It illustrates all the processing being done on the bass clarinet signal by the computer: in white at the top-left is the bass clarinet input, to which the computer adds all kinds of colorful sounds, before sending the signal out to the speakers (in white on the right-hand side of the diagram).

There are 5 things happening here (greatly simplifying):

Green sustains high notes (above written A5) and bass notes below E3 (those in the bass clarinet extension range).

Blue warps your pitches (including overtones/partials) when you play notes in the lower register. Dark blue is added to light blue when you play bass notes in the extended range.

Pink warps and granulates your lower register (it chops it up into fine grains and makes a kind of cloud out of those grains after warping the frequencies) when you play kind of loud in that range.

Red makes granulated bursts of your sound when you play really loud.

Yellow granulates your sound when you play air sounds.

You had probably already noticed the "green" sustained high notes in the excerpt. The strangely altered pitches that basically follow the bass clarinet belong to blue. Pink sounds very similar to blue but more smooth, a little behind, and undulating. The somewhat rough bursts or bubbles of sound that you start hearing once it gets louder are part of red. Yellow sounds like air (you can hear it early in the next excerpt) and any rapidly changing pitches that you hear are mostly part of yellow as well.

Here is a much longer excerpt of the piece accompanied by a screencast of the program running on the computer. The screencast uses the same color coding as above so that you can explore.

What makes these electronics 'instrumental'? The electronics respond naturally to everything that you do. There is no cheating but also no wasted effort in playing them. The low notes that you love your instrument for get their own special treatment for you to enjoy. High notes that you linger on get noted by the electronics. Different registers, a highly characteristic feature of the bass clarinet, have different colors. Crescendoing does not simply get louder but also changes the color of the sound.  Last but not least everything organically transitions into each other. In other words: when you put some special effort into your playing you are rewarded by the electronics. You can approach your instrument in much the same way as usual. The bass clarinet that you play simply becomes bigger.

Perhaps if you paid very close attention you are wondering why, while the lower and higher range of the instrument are being processed, the middle register is ignored? This has to do with the notes used in the score. The score focuses on multiphonics connected through melodic lines. Multiphonics (2 or more notes played at the same time) have a bottom note in the lower range and a top note in the higher range: they skip the middle register. So the reason that the middle range is not specifically treated in the processing is that this register (almost) never occurs in the score. Much more can be said about the interplay between score and electronics in this piece but I'll leave that..

till next time, MVG

Finally a post on that drum set built out of bass clarinet sounds. Thrash and Variations by David Dramm uses a part for drum set as the electronics to the piece. The drum set is however not a regular drum set but is created entirely out of bass clarinet sounds. You can find a small excerpt of the piece here. Below is an audio example to illustrate the bass clarinet drum set that we made.

Now I am going to give away some of the secrets to what you are hearing. Here is how the different drum set sounds were created on the bass clarinet:

bass/kick drums Slaptongue. The different types of kick drums were created by overlaying samples and by using different mic positions.

snare Air through the tube with the mouthpiece off. The air flying past the rim of the neck opening on the bass clarinet creates the resonance. The attack was fine-tuned by overlaying different consonants.

snare roll Voiced flutter tongue through the tube with the mouthpiece off

closed hi-hat Short air burst through the tube with the mouthpiece off

open hi-hat/cymbal Blowing air between the mouthpiece and the reed created this whistling sound. 

The precise articulation (consonants at the attacks) used and notes played were important for all sounds as well as the microphone positions used to record the different sound types.

To get the full energy of the sounds, we occasionally used compression to amplify the softer elements of the sound, making it as if you are actually listening from my perspective as a player where you can hear all the little detail. For the rest: just panning across the stereo field mimicking the lay-out of a real drum set, and smart rotation and timing of samples to make it a little less mechanical.

It was the snare drum that gave the most troubles, I kept getting more of a tom sound. Actually, I like that tom sound, someone should use it some day in some piece. I made sure to use it a little in the excerpt.

Till next time, MVG 

Most pieces on my repertoire use lots of different bass clarinet sounds. Some only use around 10. These are the sounds composer Bas Kalle asked me to record for him to build his electronic piece 'Wankel Evenwicht' (fragile equilibrium):

notes (loud and soft): lowest note, highest note, some notes in the middle of the instrument

air sounds: short air bursts, crescendoing air bursts, long air sounds

flutter (rolling r): on air sound and on high notes

humming through the instrument

Using only these sounds and applying digital transformations Bas created an entire piece that still reflects on the instrument somehow. Listen to the opening statement:

Here is Bas shedding some light on how this piece came about:

The biggest challenge in making this piece was that it would be the only electronic piece on the program. I decided to look for the 'extremes' of the bass clarinet: differences in pitches, dynamics and the coherence between noise and tones. Using digital manipulation of sounds many things are possible.

Composing an electronic piece like this one is a very intuitive activity for me. I use different processes in rapid succession and alternation to create the sounds that I am looking for. The exact processes I use is not something I remember after the fact. I did make a lot of use of filtering, reverb, and time-stretching. For example: by time-stretching, applying a filter, and time-stretching again you can create a broad spectrum of possibilities. Using very narrow filters you can turn air sounds into whistle like sounds.

Bas Kalle