Author: Prent Rodgers

Musician seduced into capitalism.

Baritone Guitar Samples

I’ve been working on some new guitar samples. I bought some Ernie Ball “Not Even Slinky” guitar strings, and a “Powered by Lace Bridge Humbucker Guitar Pickup, both pictured here, along with the rig I built to play the strings in the samples:

These strings are often used on a baritone guitar, an instrument I did not know existed until I heard one on a Beach Boys song, “Caroline, No”, and perhaps on the theme to Twin Peaks. The length of the open strings is 30.5 inches, and the diameter of the lowest string is .056 inches. It is typically tuned a 4/3 below a standard guitar, with B as the lowest note.

This example is a six note F major overtone chord to the 11 limit, gliding to a C major overtone chord, then back to the F major overtone chord. Tuning is 72 EDO.

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Or download here: Pomp & Parade.

Four Dead Americans #3

I had to throw out all the glissando tables that Csounds’ PitchAMDF produced. The tool has some bugs, but mostly the problem is pitch tracking in general is hard. I switched to a method that uses Adobe Audition to count the samples between zero crossings. Well, not really zero crossings. Every zero crossing is not a fundamental. So I have to use judgement to pick the appropriate pitches. For example, here’s a section of the word “this“, as in “what difference at this point does it make?” from Hillary’s remarks.

Notice how I’ve marked a section that includes several zero crossings, but how the marked section clearly repeats. It takes up 132 sample frames in the audio file. At 48kHz sampling rate, that’s 363.636 Hz, around an F+ or 34 in the 72 EDO scale. I sampled every thousand frames or so in the audio file, around 800 different sections, and built cubic polynomials that tracked through those pitches, using Csound. I modulate the pitch of a flute, trumpet, vibraphone, finger piano, and guitar strings using those cubic polynomial function table. Here’s the result. This isn’t music yet. And it gets really wild towards the end, probably because of a coding error on my part.

Download or Play it here.

Four Dead Americans

This is from a section of the words spoken at the Benghazi hearing that contain the most famous quote from Hillary Clinton:

With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans.
Was it because of a protest, or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d go kill some Americans.
What difference at this point does it make?
It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.
Now…

I’ve calculated most of the pitch tracking, but it needs some more work still.

Download or Play it here.

Cubic polynomial of the word “honestly”

Csound makes it possible to multiply an instrument times a function table. Here’s the function table for the pitch modification taken from the word “honestly” spoken by Hillary Clinton. This is a GEN06 function table, which allows you to specify a cubic polynomial through three points. It starts at 1.0000, and then goes up to 1.4419355 passing through 1.2209677. A sure sign of someone being nervous is pitch shifts like these.

f 761 0 257 -6 1.0000000 3 1.0000000 3 1.0000000 4 1.2209677 7 1.4419355 7 1.4935484 8 1.5451613 9 1.6384409 8 1.7317204 6 1.7204301 5 1.7091398 8 1.6978495
7 1.6865591 12 1.6865591 12 1.6865591 20 1.5935484 20 1.5005376 6 1.5567204 5 1.6129032 9 1.5884409 9 1.5639785 15 1.5411290 15 1.5182796 17 1.5182796 16 1.5182796 12 1.5182796 13 1.5182796

Which looks like this when graphed:

I then chose a pitch and Csound changes the pitch from that to follow the function table.

Honestly #9

Nearing completion. I just need to figure out if and where I plan to insert the actual Clinton voice. It’s so dissonant that I’m tempted to leave it out. But it’s not as if the remaining music is idyllic.

Download or Play it here.