Tyler Mazaika

I’ve put a few improvisatory and experimental drone pieces up on YouTube, and hid them away under the name zk dronze. These are part rudimentary exploration, part proof-of-concept, part tech demo, and were recorded using Launchpad/Push custom control designing software I’ve been building.

“Clarity” is made with one instance of the Hive VST plugin. The control surface controls oscillator waveform settings (green bars), oscillator transpositions (red bars), oscillator-to-filter input toggles (blue buttons) and a few other things I don’t remember a year later.

A small set of pieces/experiments put together over the last couple years. These were mostly trial-runs of a few custom Max for Live devices I’ve been developing.

The track ‘Thick Drone Squelcher’ relied heavily on a few of my first Max for Live devices which were used for easily automating groups of MIDI Control Changes. This track drove home for me that what we recognize as a particular instrument is as much about how it is played as it is about “natural” sound. In this case, the “squelching” synth is to a software plugin called Diva as a fiddle is to a violin.

Dunes was performed entirely in a MaxMSP patch and makes extensive use of the patch to make the varied, dynamic envelopes on each line in the piece.