Bleep Bloop
I can even play my Neutron on its own, without attaching a keyboard, like it has a sonic heartbeat I can bring to life.
Last month, I treated myself to a really exciting piece of musical equipment that I have really fallen in love with: my Behringer Neutron modular synthesizer. Like most things in my life, I learned about the Neutron from Twitter — a composer I follow named Brad Fowler got one in August, and his excitement for the instrument and what it can do made it irresistible to me.
I’ve always been very interested in electronic music but insecure about my abilities in the medium. If you look at my new Works List page, you’ll see that there are not many electronic pieces listed there, and most of them are for amplified acoustic instruments. When I wrote the first of these works, Djentdemic for percussionist Christopher Sies, a few years ago, I wasn’t really sure if it ‘counted’ as an electro-acoustic piece because there was no fancy software at play. Chris and I did an interview with experimental bassist Gahlord Dewald a couple months after Djentdemic was premiered in February 2016, and I even admit I’m not sure if Djentdemic is an electronic piece at all (Gahlord even teases me on air for saying something so ridiculous!).
I’ve written some fixed media pieces using DAWs (check out Mechanismus), and played around with Max/MSP and Supercollider, which are incredibly flexible, coding-based programs, but, in addition to being hard for me to learn, I get stuck with the physical abstraction of the experience. Mediated through the computer screen, mouse, and keyboard, there is not as strong, if any, tactile connection between me and the sounds I’m creating, which is very different from all my experience playing instruments.
The Neutron is different. The knobs have character and ‘give’ to them, the patch bay can get cluttered with wires, and I hear the Neutron’s sound respond, often unexpectedly, when I move my hands around the interface, experimenting with different combinations of effects and settings. I could, of course, make a simulated instrument in Max/MSP that exhibits all these characteristics (and many more, because that program is basically limitless), but I don’t have the skills for that right now. The Neutron fits the physicality of my improvisatory style, honed in middle school and high school over hours of relentless electric guitar noodling, and, in this way, has shown me a new path to making electronic music.
What I love the most about playing with the Neutron is the way it listens to itself, and makes me listen in new ways. Because it is a modular synthesizer, the discrete components of its sound are interwoven and can manipulate each other. Some of these connections are default settings on the instrument, but others can be created spontaneously using the patch bay. The permutations are staggering. And, even though the Neutron is electronic and produces a synthesized sound, there is something very naturalistic about the way it reacts to itself and evolves in the moment. I can even play my Neutron on its own, without attaching a keyboard, like it has a sonic heartbeat I can bring to life.
The videos I’ve included in this blog entry, and the others that I have posted to my Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok accounts, show the Neutron can do so many other things in conjunction with different hardware. Those have been fun to produce as I document my journey learning more about what the Neutron can do in preparation for creating either fixed media or live pieces with it at some point in the coming year. It is exciting to have a new outlet for musical ideas that is compatible with various modes of self-production, as the COVID-19 pandemic has eliminated all my performance opportunities (the same is true for so many other musicians, as well). My urge to create new music is just as strong as ever, and the Neutron gives me a new and rich musical medium with which I can express myself like never before.
