aisling · Irish ambient for the M-VAVE FM-1
v1.4 · by CU_STE · www.stephen8n.com
AISLING (said ASH-ling: Irish for a dream or a vision, and a pun on AI Synth Link) is a generative instrument after the harpers and the west of Ireland. A harp's ostinato runs over a held drone, often in a jig's threes; a second harp drifts against it, an octave down; a flute plays long phrases far back in the reverb, with surf, wind or rain behind. Let it play for hours, or play with it: the white keys give you the flute, always in the piece's scale, and it answers you.
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New in v1.4
- The journey. Left alone, AISLING walks through its pieces. SELECT on GLO's Setup page sets a stay (5, 10, 20 or 40 minutes a piece); then the piece glides into the next over sixteen bars, layer by layer, the tempo moving across under the Drone, with nothing stopped. A touch starts the stay again. GLO a third time is the Journey page: which pieces are in the set.
- The day and the weather. KNOB 4 on the Journey page lays a slow day over whatever plays, a whole one in 20 minutes, 1 hour or 3 hours: brighter and wider by day, darker and closer at night, the Atmosphere rising with three fronts of weather and a light shower in the worst of the evening's. A sun or a moon crosses the top of the Aisling page. It moves none of the piece's values and saves nothing.
- An effect's CC is its amount. From 64 to 127 the value is how much of the effect there is (127 all of it, as its key gives), so a fader or a pedal fades an effect in. PERFORM's flash shows an amount under full as a bar.
Help, and the files
Listen, and play
AISLING plays itself from the moment it is switched on, and it never ends: each piece opens from the drone, flows, gives the flute its turn, crosses a bridge and starts its long rise again. You are invited in. The white keys play the flute in the piece's scale, so every note fits; play a phrase and it becomes the flute's theme. The black keys are effects while held: Ceo (KYOH, fog), Macalla (MOCK-al-a, an echo), Fras (FRASS, a burst of rain), Rise and Close sweep every filter, Transpose lifts the harps, and more. SELECT turns the level of the layer you are looking at; in PERFORM (SEL) every key is an effect on the whole music while held, 27 of them, and the knobs push Filter, Wet, Energy and Chorus.
What it plays
- Drone. Organ, strings, a reed drone, glass or a choir whose vowel moves, with the root an octave below; its chords swing slowly between two tonics, as the old tunes do.
- Sequence. The harp: a wire-strung harp's ostinato, often twelve notes in a jig's threes, repeated by the echo, its filter wandering.
- Sequence 2. A second harp, a step shorter and often an octave down, so the two drift apart and meet again.
- Lead. The flute, far back in the reverb, phrasing in calls and answers; or your own melody on the keys.
- Atmosphere. Surf, wind, rain, a turf fire or a curlew, where a piece wants it.
Eight pieces: Skellig, Burren, Aran, Carolan, Blasket, Samhain (SOW-in), Connemara and Tir na nOg (teer na NOHG), in the old modes and the pipes' keys, each remembering how you left it. Every layer has its sound pages and a Move page, where its filter wanders relative to the knob you set.
AISLING is by CU_STE (www.stephen8n.com). It is a fork of NACHTFAHRT by FartyPants, based on DUB-1 by sbegueria, itself based on AMB-1 by Charles Vestal; its granular cloud follows JIANT's; the platform is Felucca by Leo Kuroshita (Hügelton Instruments). GPL-3.0. M-VAVE and FM-1 are trademarks of their owners. AISLING is not affiliated with M-VAVE, Hügelton Instruments or NACHTFAHRT's author. Its faces are Barlow Semi Condensed, IBM Plex Mono and Uncial Antiqua (SIL OFL 1.1).