Ambient Music for Snowscapes

I got my Tenori-on a few weeks back and have had no time to fiddle or get inspired by it so I resolved to spend some quality time with its flashy lights over the weekend. What little time I had spent with it told me that I needed to get it hooked up to some other stuff to make the most of it so I spent the first half of Saturday pulling my old music kit out of storage and trying to remember how to get it all connected. One fried multi-voltage power supply and a couple of hours later I had a bare bones synth rack and a floor covered in discarded cables.

I was going to use the Tenori as the only sequencing midi controller in the set up as it was the interface I wanted to inspire me. I wanted to poke around, assign a few noises and noodle along. It took me a while to get to grips with what midi messages the Tenori was sending out to the other synths and I still cant figure out how it is doing bank select but the happy side effect is that selecting random positions in the grid yields sounds I didn't know were there on my CS1x.

Many cups of lesbian tea later I had enough layers to improvise a pretty rich soundscape. I am using no sequence layers at all for this just push, bounce and random. All fed through a shitload of delay and phase. It's hardly going to rock a dance floor but I am pretty pleased with it. I can probably tweak a couple of layers and add a better counterpoint to the pad but there is enough depth here for a decent length ambient piece.

For those that care the Tenori is feeding midi to my Yamaha CS1x and a Novation Super Bass Station. These are being routed through a (now getting scratchy) Macki 1202 mixer in and out of a DigiTech Studio Quad effects processor. Tape out being recorded off the crappy line in on my laptop. As was ever the case I am using the CS1x for too many voices which ends up making it sound muddy as it only has one output. At some point I'll grab ableton or something and use some VST voices so I can separate them in the mix.