Too Much Information - music by Used Soyuz

Here is another VCV twiddle, in two mixes. First I made this one, with three takes, edited together in Audacity:

 

Then I worried that it sounded a bit grim, so I thought I'd liven it up with a bunch of vocal samples, taken from two episodes of Gerry Anderson's Space 1999:  

I played this version to my family, whose response was, 'It's just a load of samples, with no music.'. I guess there's just no pleasing some people.

As We Get Older And Stop Making Sense - music by Used Soyuz

My first bit of soft modular synthesis. I have been wanting to use VCV Rack for ages, but it didn't like my Linuxed Lenovo, so I put it on my Windows laptop instead. It worked first time. Here are my first two twiddlings, including my first ever use of a sequencer, edited together in Audacity. Free stock footage from videezy.com.

At first it reminded me of early Human League - 'The Dignity Of Labour' - only not as good. In fact I just read of the death of Richard H Kirk, one of the founders of Cabaret Voltaire. This is now a clumsy tribute to their early 'Methodology' period work. Only not as good.

Whatever Next - music by Used Soyuz

A quick instrumental track, meant to be cathartic - ends up sounding like cheesy movie soundtrack. LMMS on my Linuxed Lenovo, video done with Kdenlive.

A4 (M4) 8 Bit Race - music by Used Soyuz

I wanted to do something a bit more upbeat and silly. I got the title and video on a coach trip to Bristol to see Thing One, and composed it on my Linux Lenovo in LMMS, using mostly Synth1 presets that I tweaked a bit, and a FutureBass bassline with a random arpeggio and some automated note skipping. Vocal samples were recorded on my phone and treated in Audacity, using its Vocoder effect for that 80s synth-crunch (note to self - mix a mono vocal and a sawtooth into one stereo track, and make sure it's sampled at 44kHz or above). I caught myself humming 'Close To The Edit' by Art Of Noise and Cake's 'The Distance' while I composed this - can you tell?

My second album is on Bandcamp!

I have put together another album for Bandcamp. My career is still a tree falling alone in the forest. I probably ought to tell people about it...

 

Drivetime - music and video by Used Soyuz

For my first go on my new-old Linux laptop I took audio from NASA of Martian wind and driving sounds recorded by Perseverance: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multim...​ I then 'Paulstretched' (clip length x 10) the sample in Audacity and added some bleeps in LMMS on my recently-flashed Linux laptop (mostly using TAL-Noisemaker, and one Synth1 preset). The video was edited in Kdenlive, which seems much happier than on the Pi 400.

My old new Linux machine

So, I realised that while my Pi 400 will run LMMS, it only runs older versions (due to its ARM chip?), and not the VSTs (soft synths) that I want to play with. So I took my old Lenovo ThinkPad, and reflashed it with Linux (Ubuntu Studio). It now whizzes along with LMMS, Audacity and Kdenlive. I have had some problems getting individual VSTs installed (I still don't get what WINE really does if it's not an emulator), but I am in the VST business. Which begs the question - what shall I do next with my Pi 400? How about going right back where I started, with Sonic Pi?