StutterMonk

Throughout my journey as a musician, and especially as a keyboardist, I have been interested in exploring synthesizer sounds. Because my collaboration in bands has most often revolved around classic fusion and rock genres, I have tended to focus on Rhodes, Wurlitzer, and Hammond B3 instrumentation. When I’ve attempted to insert a synth part into these styles, it often sounded out of place. In fact, most of my bandmates have actively discouraged me from including these types of sounds.

Beginning around 2020 I started buying analog synthesizers, including a Minimoog, a Sequential Prophet-6, and an Oberheim OB-6. I found that with proper effects added, the sounds they produced could fit into the styles I was playing with bands, as long they were kept minimal. But I longed for a deeper dive, so I knew I had to go solo or find other like-minded musicians to satisfy my synth itch.

I first heard about Ableton Live in the 2010’s and was interested in it immediately, but lacked the time to properly explore it. I am most familiar with Logic Pro as a DAW (digital audio workstation) and use that often for composing, recording, transcribing, and editing audio. Logic Pro has several good features for live performance, but it is not geared around this type of usage, whereas Ableton Live is.

Late in 2023 while taking a shower, a fully formed idea arose suddenly: I would take on the persona of a stage character called Stutter Monk so that I could branch out and explore these ideas without feeling bogged down by past experience. The concept would be a weekly live stream that was based on a Berlin School style of synthesizer music.

In the Berlin School, a “bed” of synthesizer pads is accompanied by repeating arpeggios that morph over time. It’s a meditative rather than a dance genre. I knew I wanted to add additional elements to this style including modern drum sounds, but I felt that the Berlin School style was a solid place to start.

I wanted there to be a strong visual element to the stream in addition to the music, so I setup cameras in my workspace for multiple angles on the action and generated scifi concept art images using MidJourney that I cycled through with a Ken Burns style slideshow.

Screenshot of a live StutterMonk stream

To start the show, I begin with some acoustic sounds including a drone from my deceased mother’s singing bowl as well as metallic accents using a steel tongue drum. Like a wet finger on a wine glass, the singing bowl is rubbed by a wand that induces a resonant vibration. The sound it produces is a pleasant hum but I found that it wasn’t tuned to a western key. So I added some water to adjust the tone. I found that I could get it tuned to C with F as an overtone if struck by the wand. It then becomes harmonious with a steel tongue drum, which is pre-tuned to western diatonic notes in the key of C.

Singing bowl and steel tongue drum

I needed smooth fader effects so I created a few devices in Max 4 Live, which is a data flow programming environment that is native to Ableton. The idea was to reduce the number of UI interactions required to produce smooth fades of different layers so I could focus on performance rather than mixing. Ultimately I created a few different devices for managing MIDI events and fader levels.

Here is the Youtube channel where you can find the Stutter Monk streams: https://youtube.com/@StutterMonk/streams

My initial goal was to produce 20 weekly streams, which I accomplished. My plan is to produce more StuterMonk streams in the future as time permits.

Takeaways:

• Ableton Live is an excellent environment for creating live loop-based audio
• Playing solo can be as thrilling as playing in a band given the right tools
• The Minimoog is an extremely expressive synthesizer
• There remain many possibilities for fusing traditional sounds with synthesizers