NEW ALBUM RELEASE: Best Foot Forward

IT’S HERE! Best Foot Forward is my first solo album release in 5 years, available to buy exclusively through Bandcamp. Best Foot Forward features a compilation of unreleased recordings, heavy yet funky with a sprinkle of electronics and LOTS of guitar. https://martinchung.bandcamp.com/album/best-foot-forward

Nimbus Out Today!

Today is the day! Very proud and excited to announce my debut EP Nimbus is out now over at Bandcamp. This past 6 months the album has grown from an individual university project into an important personal and creative statement (pretty much taking over my life in the process!).

I would like to thank everyone involved in helping me make this project a reality, particular my family and friends for all their love and support over the past few months. Also a number of special thanks to certain personnel who’s knowledge and expertise contributed directly to the finished product:

Professor Monty Adkins for all his help and constructive criticism supervising this project, helping me become a better composer and further develop my own musical voice.

Dr. Alex Harker for getting me started on the rollercaoster ride that is creative coding in Max MSP, a daunting world for someone with zero programming experience! Using Max has honestly changed my life and changed the way I write music.

Dr. Philip Thomas for opening up my ears to the exciting world of experimental/contemporary music, raising my awareness and wonder in the sounds that we take for granted every day.

Ian Sanderson for his time and effort taking me step by step through the mastering process. Truly a deep and dark art requiring patience and golden ears!

Max 7 Harmonizer Patch

This patch came about through adopting a more bespoke approach to audio processing in an effort to further develop an individual instrumental and compositional voice. Coded in Max 7, the patch uses the gizmo~ object inside an FFT sub-patch to analyse peaks within given FFT bins before moving them along the frequency axis, shifting the sound up or down in pitch. Max 7 makes pitch shifting even easier with the inclusion of separate specific pitch shift objects without the need for a pfft~ shell however I still prefer to use pfft~ sub patches as they allow individual control over the FFT bin resolution.

The patch also includes volume envelope control based amplitude threshold detection of the incoming audio signal and four individual delay lines (not shown in the patcher pic) routed to the two stereo output channels in pairs. In addition this post also marks a move towards recording video to document specific elements of the EP project.