Saturday 13 October 2012

Turbine II


Whilst on holiday I had a chance to radically overhaul Turbine, and add more beats, louder ones. In that post I toyed with the idea of using Hellflower St Germain as my rock name. This month I've come up with some alternative names which I will present after the music:



Alternative "Rock" Names for Ashley Pomeroy (Me)
1. Kangaroospine
2. Ramshoal Andantier (which I used a very long time ago)
3. Fragment of Lice
4. Transport Participation Box
5. Quoup
6. Bridge of Pies

Number five is my Warp Records name. As before, the track was performed live-in-the-studio with Audiomulch running on a Thinkpad X61. The matrix looks like this, shown here running with an external monitor:


If you trace the contraptions you can see how it works, and how Audiomulch works. On the left, for example, you can see LoopPlayer1, which is playing the bassline that begins at 1:25. The bassline is fed into SupaTrigga, which cuts it into little pieces and regurgitates it into Glitch, which cuts it into little pieces again. Then it goes through DigiGrunge, which dirties it up, and then it passes through a flanger, which makes it go whoosh. Thence to the mixer and out into the physical world through a compressor. The process of making music with Audiomulch is almost exactly the same as the process of turning cattle into spam, or worms into birdfood.

As you can see, even with an external monitor the display is still cramped. Like most laptops the X61 only supports a maximum of one external display, although there are ways to get around this. Matrox makes a device called DualHead2Go, which splits the external display across two monitors - it fools the computer into thinking that it's connected to one very external large display - and a company called DisplayLink makes a multi-monitor USB hub. Does it work? I don't know. But this man does. Yikes! Matrox's DualHeadEtc is very popular but the X61 only supports a maximum resolution of 2048x1536, which is plenty for one screen but not very much for two. This is one of the few things that dates the X61 (that and the old-fashioned VGA connector) but I still love it. I'm going to give it a hug right now.

(hugs laptop)

Ouch! It's sharp. And suddenly I've turned into Mark Prindle again.