Brass sextet for 6 trumpets and epic digital signal processing

March 25, 2022 7:02 AM

Brass sextet for 6 trumpets and epic digital signal processing
I haven't been able to make music with my brass quintet since the start of the pandemic. I ended up redirecting that grief into a 10-month quest to use extensive digital signal processing to transform live trumpet audio into realistic horn, trombone, and tuba, so I could play a sextet with myself.

Role: Programmer, performing, audio engineer, video editor

posted by range (6 comments total)

Beautiful! Forgive my ignorance, what are the non-trumpet/cornet instruments you are using for the trombone & tuba? Lapsed trumpet player here myself...this is the first thing in a long time to make me think about pulling it out of the closet. Also, what is your recording space like? That was to my relatively untrained ear quite good acoustics.
posted by sapere aude at 9:26 PM on March 29, 2022

The two trumpet parts are both "standard" Bb trumpets. Solo cornet is a trumpet pitched in Eb. Horn is a rotary trumpet in C. Trombone is a normal (US) orchestral C trumpet. Tuba is a Bb flugelhorn (most people's reference point here is Chuck Mangione).
posted by range at 9:45 AM on March 30, 2022

The recording space is nothing special -- I'm in a roughly 8x10' attic space with junk/valuable work product everywhere. I'm playing into a decent but not amazing ribbon mic with a baffle behind it (in the form of a $2 Ikea bathmat) to get pretty dry direct audio which then goes through a completely amazing FX/reverb chain derived from research done by IRCAM, a French public institution that has done a lot of groundbreaking work in music-related research.
posted by range at 9:51 AM on March 30, 2022

I'm gobsmacked. It's like stepping back to around 1900. Beautiful work. I'd never heard of Oskar Böhme and now reading that he died in one of Stalin's labour camps. Jesus.
posted by brachiopod at 8:58 PM on April 1, 2022

That was absolutely beautiful, thank you!
posted by biogeo at 1:24 PM on April 11, 2022

Thank you for sharing this. I really enjoyed it
posted by latkes at 2:58 PM on April 25, 2022