Monday 18 December 2017

Jam

As some of you may know, I love to go to Jam Sessions! It's such a cool way to make music with others and be creative. You also meet a lot of people there!
A week ago I went to a Jam in Brugg presented by a friend's band called "Dinner 4/5". They make really cool and jazzy music. Besides playing at the jam and mixing the jam, I also took lots of pictures of them playing!












Monday 11 December 2017

Tameshiwari

A couple weeks ago I was asked by a friend of mine who I‘ve known for quite long if I wanted to take pictures of a Tameshiwari at my old karate school.
I did karate for around eight years and then I stopped because I wanted to try some new things. Maybe I‘ll start again one day when I have a little more spare time. This friend of mine, Philip, was in my karate class back then. Afterwards, we didn‘t have much contact anymore, but now we‘re in school together and playing piano in the BigBand of our school! Funny how ways cross again someday :)

Back to the Tameshiwary. What is that, you might ask? Something to eat? No, it‘s actually just the act of breaking stuff. At our school, we mainly do it with wooden planks and roof tiles. They also educate you how to do it in many different ways and every year there‘s an event where a lot of students come together to break some things!

And this time I took some cool pictures of it:










Saturday 11 November 2017

Klangschaften

Yesterday evening I had my matura-presentation. The Matura-Project is the final project you do as a high school student and which counts like any other mark in your degree paper.



In the past weeks, I've worked quite hard on these two "Klangschaften". The word can be translated to "soundscapes", but that is already a thing. Klang means sound and the term "Klangschaft" should make an association with the word "Landschaft" which means landscape. The project itself is also restricted to two landscapes, one is my school which I attend at the moment "Kantonsschule Wettingen", and the other one is based on  Baden, the town I live in.

All the sounds, without any exception, are recorded at these two locations, then edited in the Music-DAW Ableton Live 9.

You can watch both of the projects in This YouTube Playlist.
And feel free to share them with others who might be interested in such projects.

Tuesday 31 October 2017

Autumn comes to our school!

Last week I helped my school to get some cool drone recordings for their KSWE-News. They turned out really nice! You can watch the video here (It's in Swiss German, but you can watch some of my footage ;)

I also took some images of the yellow and orange trees. It just looked lovely!



Saturday 21 October 2017

The past weeks have been quite stressful because I had so much to do for school. At the moment I am finalising my final project, which takes up a lot of my free time. That's why I haven't posted anything for some time.

But now a lot has passed! First of all, I've spent a week in France near Dijon with some friends, which was lovely! We made a lot of jam from fresh figs which we've collected in their garden, visited a lovely town and had a great time!
I also spent some time travelling around Switzerland. I visited Basel, Bern and Zürich a couple times to get some stuff, or just for fun.
With our band, we opened a jam session, which was amazing and there were some cool concerts at our school too! Yesterday, for example, there was one called "Light and Passion", where the orchestra performed pieces from Mozart and Salieri. Since I am now responsible for the advertisement of their Facebook page, I took some pictures and even did a live stream which you can watch here.








Sunday 1 October 2017

Build your own Modular Synthesizer!

In my last post, I’ve talked about the mono sampler I’ve built from a kit. Last week, my friend Gideon and I continued this journey and we’ve built two very tiny modular synths called “Kastle” from Bastl Instruments. This time we even had to solder a lot of parts together, all that time worrying if it would even work!
A little info about modular synths: there are, as the name already says, many different modules of synthesizers. Compared to a casual synth, these modules need to be connected by patch cables to change the way the sound flows. There are many different kinds of models you need to get sounds. First of all, one needs a sound source, which is an oscillator (a wave-form generator), filters, etc..
You can either apply different filters to the sounds, or you could maybe use one module (with a low-frequency oscillator) to change the pitch of an oscillator or any other setting you want.

The one we got, was a very tiny one. It's called the Kastle from Bastl Instruments and the cables are really tiny too! One could somewhat describe it as a modular-pocket-synth! It is quite cool and gives you really weird sounding, funky sounds.








Sunday 17 September 2017

Electronic Music

As some of you may know, my final school project is about electronic music. I sample sounds from some area and then use them to create songs. For this, I ran around quite some time to get the recordings and now it's the time to stitch them together.
For a long time, I've used Logic X for all my music production. But it is not that great for sampling! That's why a good friend of mine gave me a little crash-course in Ableton Live, a program which is made for electronic music production. And it was totally worth it!
Now I use a combination of both programs to get the perfect result.

I need to manipulate the sounds that I've recorded a lot to get the results I want. Either I equalise them to emphasise some frequencies, I shift the pitch, cut them and use many other effects. Most of them I do on my computer because it is simple and gives you clean results.


But now I've bought a kit to build a mono-granular-sampler called the "MicroGranny". The kit was quite fun to build together, but the whole messing around with sounds is a lot more fun!
It is a tiny pocket sampler which means, you can record sounds and then change their rate, pitch, release and also the size of the grains. It splits up parts of the recorded sample and mixes it together in other ways. It makes the sample sound a lot more special and diverse.
When I bought it, I did not think that I could use it for my final project, but now I can and it is a lot of fun!


Another thing that happened last week was, that one of the biggest cranes in Europe was brought to our school to build the new sports hall. The school then asked me, if I could take some pictures with my drone:

Sunday 3 September 2017

Badenfahrt 2017

Now this took quite a while to post, didn't it?

One week ago, the "Badenfahrt" took place in my city. It's a  huge ten-day festival which only takes place every ten years! Because of this huge time gap, the party is always way bigger than anyone expects. This time approximately 1.2 million people have visited the small town! There were many awesome concerts every day and I played as well!

I've been editing these four recordings of our performance on the roof of a high tower for nearly a week now. I've tried to add video to them but it just didn't work out. So here are the audio tracks!



Besides the many concerts, there were a lot of other performances, many restaurants and bars, and even an open air cinema! All of these places were only built for the Badenfahrt and were recycled again afterwards.
At such a huge event were also a lot of people who helped for voluntarily. I also helped at the open air cinema, where I looked over the place, distributed headphones for the viewers and had a good time.

Here are some of my impressions of the Badenfahrt!












Sunday 13 August 2017

Fireworks, lots of fireworks!

On August 1st, the Swiss National Day, there are so many fireworks in every city, and, in my opinion, the one in Baden is one of the prettiest!
My friend and I have the perfect spot to watch it. You just lay on your back and look straight up in the sky.

This time I took my camera with me and the results were stunning!