Assembled by hand, one copy at a time, in the White Pillar Workshop. A white 5" recordable disc, printed and duplicated via an Imation D20, held securely inside a white paperboard jacket bearing a custom WDY4 logo decal (printed by David Tagg in beautiful Atlanta, GA) on the front and a black text label on the back.
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Workingman's Drone returns with Year Four, twelve more monthly installments of carefully crafted drone music to be issued from January to December of 2021.
For the ninth volume, catalog entry WD45, a significant studio milestone comes to pass, wherein we explore the voice of a Moog Werkstatt monophonic analog synthesizer. The Werkstatt is the first proper Moog voice acquired for my work, slightly discounting the three Moogerfooger units I purchased from David Tagg several years ago (two of which can be utilized as voices, incidentally, between the ring modulator's carrier signal and the low-pass filter's self-oscillation), so the urge to build a wall using the Werkstatt was not an easy one to ignore. At a technical level, the Werkstatt is being used to generate pseudo polyphony by way of a tuned pulse wave VCO pitch, with pulsewidth modulation controlled by a very fast triangle wave LFO, which created something akin to overtones from a ring modulator. Additionally, the filter is being used with its resonance pushed up to the fullest allowable, and the low-pass cutoff being very slowly swept by an external LFO from my modular system, which allows the resonance to cycle through various different tonal profiles, always peaking and returning to the base of a valley, establishing a beautifully mountainous motif. From there, the audio output of the Werkstatt was multed via an SSDP Jade Series multiple, where it was then made into a stereo signal by way of two different low-pass filters (Disting Mk4 and 2HP LPF) that were themselves routed into a Tiptop MISO, in order to facilitate the two slightly altered multed signals being sent in full stereo into/out of a Strymon Magneto and Mutable Instruments Clouds. Lastly, one more multed copy of the Moog signal was fed into an SSDP Jade Series phaser, which was swept very slowly via a Dreadbox Utopia's LFO, and sent into a Doepfer A-135-2 mixer, which amplified it before sending it out to the main mixer. All five signals were equalized and mixed via a Mackie ProFX8 mixing board before terminating in a Peavey FX2 mixing desk for one final pass of parametric EQ and panning adjustments.
A few more detailed thoughts about Workingman's Drone as a series, and where it sits in the landscape of ambient and drone music in particular: 17463.space/wdy4.txt
credits
released September 3, 2021
W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded at White Pillar, August 31, 2021 using the Moog Werkstatt monophonic analog synthesizer and the R-EW Audioholistics modular system in tandem with Mackie ProFX8 and Peavey FX2 mixing consoles. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and design by ABM&D. Physical edition decals printed by DT Editions in beautiful Atlanta, GA. This is Milieu Music number WD45, 45th in Year Four of the Workingman's Drone series. milieu-music.comanalogbotany.com 17463.space
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