December Subscriber Playlist: Learning the MCS

by John Davis & The Cicadas

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	1.	Part 1 04:19
	2.	Part 2 03:15
	3.	Part 3 03:01
	4.	Part 4 05:18
	5.	Part 5 08:32
	6.	Part 6 09:53
	7.	Part 7 16:02
	8.	Part 8 08:49
	9.	Part 9 03:23
	10.	Part 10 15:02
	11.	Part 11 05:13
	12.	Part 12 17:18

about

The last subscriber playlist focused on writing songs with acoustic guitar and vocal. This month's is kinda the opposite - only focusing on texture. I recently acquired only the second piece of analog hardware rack gear I own - the Overstayer Modular Channel Stereo. It's kind of 5 pieces rolled into one - preamps, resonant filters, eq, compression, and three different parallel saturation circuits. Some people say it's really an instrument in its own right and I wanted to find out why. So I put a synthesizer on a latch note running through this box and spent about an hour and a half tweaking and recombining these various stages to see how it could change a constant single note. I might have cheated and altered a few parameters on the Hyrdrasynth I ran into this, but the latched note never changed and mostly all the changes are coming from the MCS.

Learning some of what it can do has me really looking forward to applying it to various projects in the future. I mixed down these excerpts to listen to so I could try and identify potential samples or sections or breaks that I could incorporate into a Folk Implosion record we're making plans to record this summer. The main idea I came away with was how interactive and interdependent the different stages are - and how surprising some of the results could be. Think of it as a really fun homework / study session. My thanks to Overstayer audio for the supportive artist discount.

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released January 14, 2022

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John Davis & The Cicadas Durham, North Carolina

John Davis is a musician who works solo, with Folk Implosion, with a backing band called the Cicadas, and with Dennis Callaci. He also works on defending and transforming public education as a teacher - organizer with the Durham Association of Educators. ... more

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