Good morning to you and after my difficult last post, I am going to talk about the great stuff in life, spring is in the air here in the UK, despite heavy rains storms and floods all over the place, the weekend was rather lovely in terms of the weather and today is bright and cheerful too. Perhaps we shall see some nicer conditions between now and including Easter.

Spring is of course a great time for photography, shooting b-roll, recording sounds, a favourite time of year for a multi-disciplinary artist and I feel that I've been stuck indoors for too long, I am sure many of you feel the way, as various parts of the world have had strange, often dangerous weather conditions over the course of this winter. I am itching to put on my walking boots, grab my camera and a device for recording some sounds out there (iPhone is as good as anything for this). Talking of which, that is a great segue into the first topic of today's post.

Life

I am going to talk a lot more about music, sound recording, sampling, old records and stuff on this newsletter besides photography and other forms of art. I purchased a VST plugin just before Christmas that comes in two parts, a mobile field recorder app and the VST plugin you can use with any DAW software, in my case Ableton. I have been enjoying it immensely, recording everything from birdsong along the country lanes near my house to our 2 year old granddaughter singing nursery rhymes. All of these samples are uploaded to cloud storage and synced to my computer later when I run the plugin, that's when the magic happens.

The samples are transformed into beats, rhythmic loops that you can manipulate either by manually tweaking the controls in real time or using something like an LFO to modulate the sampler, let's call it a sampler because it falls into that category but is a rather unique take on sampling. I would compare it with granular synthesizers but even then it is pretty unique, some of what it does would take quite a bit of effort to replicate in Ableton via other means.

I did record a video of a session, which I share with you here to give you a better idea, it is superb. I will keep on recording all of the wonderful noises I hear!