My wiard synthesiser made its live debut.
2005-10-01 by Norman Fay
I played a concert in Leeds, UK last night, doing this kind of spacy synth music/prog rock thing that me and my guitarist friend Mark do. I thought it would be fun and perhaps creative to take the Wiard/Blacet synth along, and indeed it was. I planned to use it partly to cover sections where I was loading in backing parts to the sequencer, and partly for improv bits. After we'd done our proper soundcheck, and when the other musicians were doing their soundchecks, I turned off our onstage monitors and set up the modular on headphones. Obviously, I didn't have time to set up some great detailed patch, and it would have been stupid to do so anyway, given the nature of what we were playing. I set it up as follows, dividing it into as many different sound generating "cells" as I could: 1/the noise ring fed one of the waveform city wave shapers, which was set to one of the quantising wavetables. This then ran into the omni filter, and this went into the x1 input of the LH mixolator. The omni filter cutoff was controlled by the ar envelope of the waveform city. The idea was to have a kind of randomly generated sequence. 2/the other waveform city ran into a blacet frequency divider, which ran into a borg filter, then into the x2 input of the lh mixolator. The idea here was to have a manually controlled drone, where I could control the timber of the drone via the borg, and add interesting subharmonics via the level controls on the frequency divider. 3/a woggle bug output via a borg to the y input of the lh mixolator. the clock out of the wogglebug triggered a blacet EG1, which controlled the cutoff of the borg. I took the step cv out of the other half of the wogglebug, and stuck it into the decay cv of the EG1. I was kind of hoping for the transmission from outer space thing the wogglebug can do. LH mixolator x+ out went to x in of RH mixolator. LH mixolator x- out went to a blacet time machine. The output from the time machine went to the y input of the RH mixolator, using the joystick I could control the balance between the wogglebug and the 2 more, er, "tonal" elements on the horizontal axis, and the blend between dry sound and delay on the vertical. I used the wiard/blacet during 2 improvised sections. During the first, I mainly used the wogglebug. I suppose you'd have to say it was a failure, though I had an absolute blast - I didn't realise just how overpowering the sound of the wogglebug would be! It went full on and just totally overwhelmed everything. I was grinning like a maniac, but at the end there was just this shocked silence from the audience. The second section was better. I brought up the noise ring controlled sequence pattern, and since the soundcheck it had settle into playing this beautiful harp glissando like riff. When I turned it up, I was just like wow, listen to that. It kicked us off into this great, albeit somewhat disjointed improv. Just about exactly what I was hoping for. noise ring thru quantiser is such a great source of inspiration. The strengths of the Wiard in this situation are/were plain - mainly the way in which it can easily be divided into several sound-generating cells, but also its unpredictability, the way it can throw up something to surprise you, and give you something to strike off from. Also, of course, it sounds great. This goes for the Blacet modules too - I had the Binary Zone in the rack as well, and I wish I'd used that last night. In the music scene the event was aimed at, the most common/accepted way of using a modular instrument on stage is "berlin school" style - a Moog, or more commonly an "arrick" set up to play step sequencer patterns and thunderous bass drones a la Tangerine Dream "Ricochet". While I have respect for several artists creating music in that style, Wiard-style is more inspiring to me, I think. I'll certainly do this again. So, although it may be scary to take yr Wiard instrument out to play live - the fear of theft or damage is obviously pretty grim, I recommend it very strongly, it's a real thrill. Apologies for any typos, and for rambling on so.