I am not a musician but I have thought for years that I already know how to use my voice, and that perhaps I could do something combining that and found sound / field recordings, and then feed this into synths and FX filters etc.
The end product might be something like the old Firesign Theater, or mere noodling, or it could be more like “This American Life” on NPR / public radio but kind of shuffled like a deck of cards. ( By the way, if collaborating on something like this sounds like fun, I’m in the NW suburbs of the Chicago IL area . )
I wondered how I would best accomplish the task of field recording and home recording and getting it assembled and available for long term playback. ( We can get into those issues as a tangent perhaps, later. )
The reason I came to the forum today was because someone on the facebook page for MI referred me here, after giving me some advice.
I had been asking about how I might intelligently feed sounds captured by the EARS device into some of the MI eurorack modules to further distort them and play with them. The Facebook helper told me that a possible option of using Braids was maybe not a good idea as it was not designed to modify voices or anything, but simply to produce its own noise. ( The helper acknowledged that I could, however, use Braids to trigger my Arturia MiniBrute, since I had asked about whether the two could be “plugged together”. ( I had read, for example, that Korg and Moog are incompatible and I didn’t want to buy stuff only to find it doesn’t work together. )
“Braiids” had come to my attention because I put the key word “formants” into Google and linked it to MI, having already learned about Clouds and Elements from seeing them used with EARS on YouTube. I asked about “Formants” because I thought it might be fun to alter my voice. There is a module by Synthrotek called “Roboto” that mixed Speak and Spell circuit bending effects with input. And Braids DOES ( I saw ) offer effects llke a computer “speaking” gibberish that I liked. But my MI helper said that Braids would not alter whatever came from EARS.
I had asked a question re: power requirements and other things to be aware of and got some info on that also, and the difference between line level sound and microphonic sound.
Current equipment I have found for the project is a Frostwave “Resonator”, a Binson Echorec ( it was PF that got me going way back when ) , the Arturia Mini-Brute, a looping device, a condenser microphone and stand, a Korg MR -2000 ( whose connection software isn’t keeping pace with my Apple’s evolving OS ) and an M-Audio NRV-10 mixer, which was recommended as a way to interact on the fly with Ableton Live but also be a basic mixer, too.
I saw some neat stuff done with clock diviider tech, forcing a fairly tame drum beat into a real crazy rhythm, that was hilarious. There is, of course, a MI module called "Grids, which does offer a basic clock. Many drumbeats in the synth world sound tinny to me, like something from a cheap video game, but ( of course ) some people want them for precisely that reason. I haven’t got a drum beat thingy yet, but it would be nice if it actually sounded like a drum. Someone advised me that I should get a sampler vs. a “drum machine” if that’s what I wanted. It seemed like having some kind of way to do an “urban beats” background would be desirable at some point.
Yes, yes, I know I’ve covered a LOT of ground, and you may not have time to address ALL of this, even if you COULD explain them all to a noob like me, but maybe some of the, heh, elements of it anyway, eh ?