Michael Letchford on Bandcamp - as Amphonix Blue

Well, after many years of prevarication, I finally did it! I’ve just launched some of my recent Ambient music onto the unsuspecting enthusiasts at the music publishing website known as Bandcamp. This post has been updated as the name I’m using for my compositions has recently changed to Amphonix Blue.

What brought this on was actually working with a friend of mine on his debut album of Americana (British versions of country music, but own composition) tracks. He needed a fair bit of help to turn his raw recordings into properly mixed and mastered tracks and then into a collection of work ready for streaming.

That led me to think again about remixing my various efforts in creating soundtracks for videos into something more coherent - moving incrementally towards an album or two over the next year or so.

During the pandemic restrictions I revived my earlier interest in MOOG synthesizers. I have built and run analogue based music studios in the past, but eventually had to close them due to pressure from other work, so for the many intervening years I was playing only acoustic guitars as a pastime. The relative isolation during the pandemic served to kick me in the musical butt. I spent most of the time discovering Modular Synthesis and getting to grips with a growing collection of orchestral sample libraries and a relatively compact digital studio. Relative, that is, to the mountains of my analogue gear from the 80/90s, long ago donated to a Romanian university!

More recently I’ve been editing and composing short pieces for videos I’ve compiled of my drone based photography. Composing to picture is definitely an art form I have yet to master, but it is a great discipline in forcing you to work to a structure. So, out of that has come the first few newly minted tracks from those endeavours.

My Amphonix Blue Music at Bandcamp

My first release, the ‘Evolutions’ EP, hosts five tracks which are all very different in their instrumentation, but the common theme is to take a musical idea and ‘evolve’ it in a two to five minute format. I’ve used a variety of synthesizers for these tracks as well as several traditional instruments and sound sources - even some of my bird song collection from field recordings I made a while back.

Anyway, for those who might be curious, you can find the EP at https://amphonix-blue.bandcamp.com . Please give it a play through and let me know what you think. If you approve, please click the ‘follow’ button on my Bandcamp page to be notified of more music.

Since that first EP I’ve released many new tracks, most of which are on YouTube and some are on Bandcamp depending on whether or not there is a visual counterpart to the piece in question. My YouTube channel hosts those compositions that have a strong visual element supporting the particular piece. You can find my channel here:amphonix blue on YouTube.

Corfe Castle - Just After Sunrise

Corfe Castle is one of those eerie places that both intrigues and mystifies you whenever you visit it.

If you stop to think for a moment as you walk around it you can’t help but be in awe of its majesty and yet be baffled that anyone could order its almost complete destruction. In its day it must have been a majestic sight, especially from below its ramparts, as seen from the village and even at a distance of several miles.

I photographed it just after sunrise on a cold October morning using a DJI Mavic Pro 2. Manually flying that drone in careful circles, traversing around the monument whilst keeping at a safe height and distance was not an easy task but very rewarding nonetheless. I was pleased with the raw footage as it captures something of the way the remains of the Castle still dominate its surroundings.

The video footage was edited in DaVinci Resolve. The soundtrack was composed for the video by me also as part of a series of musical Evolutions I’m soon to publish. The music was composed and mixed in Logic Pro and comprises several tracks of sound design created in Omnisphere and Trillian. It also features some of my bird song sounds captured in field recordings on Coombe Hill and edited in iZotope RX10.

The soundtrack has significant low frequency content so I would strongly advise the use of good quality headphones while watching the video. iPhones and iPads cannot reproduce those sounds accurately enough to get the most from the work.

If you’ve enjoyed the video please take a moment to give the page a Like with the button below. That just helps me see how many visitors have seen it. Many thanks for stopping by!

Eurorack Modular Synthesis and Sound Therapy

As an enthusiastic synthesizer player in the mid 80s, I was fortunate to be able to build up a fully analogue music studio and used it to work on promotional video projects with a team of associates who specialised in building 3D computer models of architectural and civil engineering projects. The promotional videos needed sound tracks and as I was ‘the sound and video man’ I got the opportunity to create dozens of projects, helping to promote the design work of several important UK based architectural and engineering practices. It was a fun time.

Short deadlines and commercial pressures being what they were in those days (and still are)  it became increasingly challenging to compose original music for these short duration promos. To meet the short turnarounds the studio eventually evolved into more of a production house using a wide range of commercial library music to layer in underscores to support the more important explanatory voice-overs. So it was, in the mid 90s after many happy years of operation, I closed the studio to concentrate fully on developing the related software company that was to take up all my time and energy until three years ago

sound therapy

Over the past few years I’ve had the pleasure of rebuilding my studios and concentrating my energies on photographic, video, drone and sound projects. As part of this I’ve also been working with Gabriela Bocanete on her Holistic Health Coaching, Yoga Nidra and Sound Therapy consultancy business, recording and editing her course videos and creating meditation pieces to support her online classes.

Through understanding more of Gabriela’s work in Health Coaching and Sound Therapy I’ve become very interested in the beneficial effects of sound and music based therapies, and also in how this ties in with Gong Bath based meditation therapies and the study of the Chakras in Yoga. In my current studios, standard synthesizers offer a ‘ready made’ palette of sounds that are often used to create Ambient tracks and meditation pieces but I found that these, even today, are still limited in their capacity to explore sound and music as a therapeutic tool.

I own several such hardware synthesizers from manufacturers such as MOOG, Sequential (Dave Smith), Elektron, Korg etc., and they are all inspiring instruments, each in their own way, but they do not allow you easily to build sound palettes ‘from the ground up’, from fundamental analogue oscillators, and then shape that sound in simple ways to compose pieces in support of relaxation and meditation sessions.

My initial Modular rack. The array of modules has since grown significantly but this was the set used for this video.

That ‘challenge’ has led me back to analogue synthesis and in particular to Eurorack based Modular Synthesis. Much has changed since my work with synths in the early to mid eighties, but there has been a strong revival of interest in those early synthesisers and a new bread of modular designs has evolved from the early machines.

a composition for meditation

This post isn’t the place to cover any level of detail about Modular Synthesis but I’ve recently worked on a video piece that has given me the chance to illustrate the sort of thing I’ve been doing to get to grips with it and apply what I’ve learned to real life meditation track work. Naturally I’ve wanted to create not only audio tracks but also combine them with occasional video work.

The piece below was composed as my first modular based relaxation and meditation track. I chose to apply it to a short version of a drone video, which I shot some years ago, that first introduces the modular rack I used and then goes on to show the Dengie Marshes at sunset on the east coast and in particular the ancient Saxon Chapel of St Peter on the Wall that survives there at Bradwell-on-Sea to this day. It’s a fascinating walk along the sea defences and today it’s become a bird sanctuary and so some parts of the coastline are now protected and inaccessible.

All the sounds created for the track are generated from first principles in one or other of the modules, then the sounds are ‘shaped’ in various ways using envelope generators and also modulated via low frequency oscillators and tonally shaped using various types of filters, then all the separate signals are finally mixed into an arrangement. Reverb is added at the end of the signal chain and the arrangement is passed through various processors into a digital audio workstation called Logic Pro X where it’s mastered and combined with video.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Playback via headphones or a high quality audio system are essential in getting the most from the work as the deep drones and bell like sound textures will not reproduce properly on Smartphones or iPads.

On Returning - A Visual Poem

‘On Returning’ is an example of ‘Visual Poetry’ - where one has attempted to support the original written work with relevant imagery.

‘On Returning’ is a short, visual / video poem, written while revisiting deepest Cornwall, alone; seeing the familiar, triggering memories from the distant past, from long ago, but recalling events (and relationships) now through different eyes.

As for memory; looking back is both selective and fallible. Pain is rounded out, details fogged by the passing of time; by simply growing older, seeing things in a different light, putting them in context or understanding them from a new perspective. ‘On Returning’ is my attempt at capturing that idea. I hope it rings bells.

It is rendered in monochrome to reinforce the abstraction of temporal memory from that of real life events.

A Short Mandala Meditation

Working with Gabriela Bocanete, a talented Holistic Health Coach, has lead me to collaborate with her on the application of Sound Therapy as an essential element of Holistic Health management practices. Gabriela has developed a combination of Yoga Nidra practices with sound therapies derived from what has become popularly described as ‘Gong Baths’.

I make occasional contributions to her collection of resources, one of which was a short meditation piece composed on an array of MOOG polyrhythmic synthesisers called SubHarmonicons. These are modular synthesisers which create raw level musical sounds which you can develop and shape into a library of tones unavailable by any other musical route - essentially sound design. This gives you the potential of creating any sound with any timbre at any frequency. Combining multiple units gives you unlimited ‘sound design’ possibilities.

The MOOG Subharmonicon Modular Synthesiser

I used a piece I had composed in this way in combination with animated renders from a fractal generation application called Chaotica to which I applied a kaleidoscope filter, in Final Cut Pro X, to create the Mandala scene I show below.

The overall result is very effective in relaxing the listener while keeping their attention through the moving graphics.

A Video Interpretation of Ted Hughes' 'Crow' in Dance Movements

This video based interpretation of Hughes’ famous poem has been something of a labour of love, largely because it served as my transition from still photography to more ambituous video creation and editing, taking full responsibility for the the full workflow of project delivery from concept to final edit..

The inspiration for this particular project emerged from a deeply felt regard for Ted Hughes' highly anthropomorphic 'naturalistic' poetry and, in particular, those poems published in the collection by the name of 'Crow'.

Unexpectedly. the project sprang into life, finally, at a Dance Workshop hosted by Nicola Selby, herself a talented dancer and photographer. The concept finally turning into a collaboration between myself and the dancer I met there, who is Amy Eccleston, now Amy Hallam. We worked together for several hours; me shouting keyword directions summarising extracts from the poem with Amy interpreting those ideas in beautiful modern dance poses and movements which I captured on the studio’s Hasselblad.

There are many interpretations of Hughes' Crow poem, and many think it's fundamentally a re-telling of the Bible's Genesis story but, as Hughes envisions it, with a demonic, apocryphally evil twist.

Hughes himself explains that 'nobody knows quite how Crow was created, or how he appeared' (into the world). Crow, he says, was 'created by God's Nightmare'. What an inspiration that line turned out to be. I took that idea and interpreted it freely with Amy's spellbinding choreographic interpretations of my somewhat clumsy direction. The approach is described in an earlier post here on my companion website. The images used in this final edit were from the low-key lighting session. I hope you enjoy the outcome:

It turned into a very challenging project, taking several months to complete. One of the reasons for the long gestation period was that It also offered me the chance to work on a sound design for the score. I attempted to create a soundscape that complemented the darkness of the poem while weaving the still images into a semi-continuous evolution; from Crow's 'birth'. or 'coming into existence' to its final triumphant realisation of the havoc it was about to unleash on Man.

Golitha Falls near Liskeard, Cornwall

I’ve long been fascinated by Cornwall and in particular the area around the river Fowey. I’ve been a dedicated fan of Devon and Cornwall since I was a small child having spent many holidays and photographic workshops there over the years. I return whenever I can, as it offers me the chance to reset and spend time walking on the coastal paths and in the woodlands - a great way to recover your composure and sense of wellbeing.

A while back I stumbled on Golitha Falls, which is a few miles upstream from Fowey harbour on the river Fowey as it winds its way down to the sea from its source on Bodmin Moor. In dry weather it’s a little underwhelming as a ‘falls’, but after a period of heavy rain, it makes a very pleasant backdrop to a calming, one hour stroll along its banks as the stream burbles away in the background.

This video is a short homage to record a couple of visits I made a few years ago when the conditions were pretty nearly perfect. It was shot on an Olympus OM1-D DSLR (and for those in the know you will recognise the sharp highlight rolloff!). The location sound was recorded in camera, but the video is accompanied by a classical guitar piece called ‘Snowflight’ which was composed by Andrew York but played on this occasion by myself and which is taken from a recording I made many years ago while auditioning a classical guitar in less than ideal circumstances.

The video material was perhaps less than perfect, but I managed to make the most of it editing it in Blackmagic’s superb DaVinci Resolve software.

Steve Fischer's 12/15 Model Guitar Showcase Video

This project was a promotional video produced some time ago to illustrate a guitar luthier’s build of his 12/15 model. It was shot in Jacksonville, Florida after receiving the instrument from Steve’s Utah workshop which I visited while working on the west coast that year. It was also a first test of a new pair of Schoep CMC 641 mics.

Steve Fischer is one of those luthiers who works steadily and quietly in the background, handmaking beautiful acoustic guitars in his remote Utah workshop. This model, his 12/15, is one of those guitars that you pick up and immediately fall in love with. It is a unique build. It is a twelve fret to the body style but, unusually for such a guitar, it still sports a full size 15” lower bout body - which helps tp give its sound body and volume.

It was his first build of this design and comprises some much loved Brazilian Rosewood for its back and sides. It has a Brazilian Rosewood fingerboard, bridge, edge bindings and headstock facing. The rosette inlays and purfling are made of spalted maple. The soundboard is made from book matched master grade German spruce.

If that isn’t enough uniqueness for one instrument, the sound this guitar produces is really beautiful; solid rounded bass with even, crystalline trebles. The guitar is very dynamic and has a wonderful presence in the mid-range with a very long sustain. In the example piece, listen to the sustain of the bass notes under the trebles as they play the melody. This is all due to the extraordinary tonewoods, the light build and the excellent craftsmanship.

The piece in this example recording was composed to showcase the guitar’s great qualities. It’s called Gabriela’s Fancy, written and played here by Michael Letchford. The recording was made with a Sony PMW-200 video camera, using two Schoep CMC 641 supercardioid microphones recording directly into the camera.

Post Processing Bird Song Recordings with iZotope RX7

As part of a Yoga Nidra video project, we had to make some new field recordings of typical English countryside bird song. These recordings were to be used in a mix with Tibetan gongs, singing bowls, a female voiceover and an underscore. So, making sure we had clean recordings with a tightly managed frequency range was very important, so that the bird sounds could easily sit in a broad mix and still be clearly heard.

We’ve done this type of field recording many times before but because of tight project deadlines it wasn’t possible to choose an ideal site i.e. a remote woodland well away from traffic noise and persistent over-flying commercial aircraft. So we had do the best we could; recording in a local wood not far from a residential area and the dreaded M25. Visiting the site beforehand made it obvious that we would have to do quite a bit of work on the recordings in post, but luckily, this particular place had limited footfall, especially that early in the morning. So that was at least one blessing!

To get the best ambience, I wanted to use a large diaphragm condenser stereo microphone, so I pulled out an Audio- Technica BP4025 Large Diaphragm XY Stereo Mic from the mic cabinet and paired it with a Rycote Windjammer kit WS3 and a Rode carbon fibre boom pole for support. I charged up batteries for the Sound Devices MixPre6 we use for field recording and put everything into an Orca OR-280 sound bag, which is the perfect carrier for this gear.

Next morning, just after dawn, I was off to the woods!

One of the helpful features of the AT BP4025 is its polar pattern and frequency response. I’ve found that when trying to minimise inescapable broad band traffic noise it’s helpful to carefully rotate the mic so that the low frequencies and mid band noise is minimised (behind the mic).

Audio-Technica BP4025 Stereo Microphone Polar Pattern

The frequency response of the AT BP4025 shows a kick up at around 3Khz and again at 6Khz to 12KHz which can be useful for recording bird song, but the ruler flat response below 1Khz wasn’t any help at all on this occasion so the low cut filters on the MixPre6 were used to reduce some of the incoming low frequency content.

Audio-Technica BP4025 Stereo Microphone Frequency Response

The wood I was working in was less than five miles from the M25 and on a windless morning it’s impossible to get clean tracks without picking up heavy traffic background noise. I was running the MixPre6 inputs at around 55dB gain and carefully picking locations to minimise noise but as you’ll hear, that was quite a challenge.

I spent around two hours recording and came back to the studio with a wide range of material, but it was obvious from headphone monitoring that there was going to be substantial post processing before selected tracks could be incorporated in the planned mix.

Bird song has a lot of high frequency energy and a very wide dynamic range with surprisingly loud transients, so it’s vital to set mic gain carefully to avoid clipping while still getting adequate levels for the quite bird sound or the ambience you’re seeking. Also it’s important to keep changing position so that you get a good range of birds and their dynamics. Still, morning choruses can be very loud and dense, so I was trying to capture single bird song so that it could be featured in the mix as desired.

So, now to the post processing. You can of course do this kind of work in Audacity at no cost, or work ‘blind’ using the Accusonus tools, but I’ve learnt that being able to see and immediately hear what you are doing and to be able to use a variety of tools in the same software package means you can work more efficiently in the long run and also try different approaches without moving files from one environment to another. For this reason I chose to work in iZotope’s RX7 Audio Suite

As you’ll see, the selected bird song file shows strong content from just below 2kHz all the way to over 20Khz, whereas the mid to low frequency broad band noise from traffic below 1KHz is fairly constant at approximately the very same level as the target bird song material. The image below show the left and right channel recordings with the sound spectrum analysis in the background and the waveform overlaid on it in blue. Looking at that you can see just how much energy is recorded below 1Khz

Bird Song - Unprocessed Baseline Audio File in iZotope RX7

It’s easier to see this low frequency data in the following image, made using a detailed Fast Fourier Transform spectral analysis of the overall file: It’s particularly bad at 500 Hz and below despite the use of low cut filters in the MixPre6.

Bird Song - Unprocessed Baseline Audio File in iZotope RX7 - Spectral Analysis

This is the selected original stereo file, unprocessed. Sadly this player only allows .mp3 files at 128Kbps:

So, how to process these files in the most efficient manner and get the best possible files? Well, the previous week I had been working on female voice files and used all three tools I’ve mentioned above and I realised that sometimes simpler is better - and certainly quicker. Looking then at the spectral analysis and realising that all the target material was actually in the upper frequencies, after much experimentation and careful listening tests, I decided to use a rather steep low cut filter acting from about 1800Hz downwards and a high cut filter to take off unuseful high frequencies above about 20KHz but kicking in at around 16KHz.

You can see the dramatic effect this EQ had in the following image, which shows the very high and low to mid content almost completely removed (illustrated on the upper, left channel with the shaded boxes). You can also see the effect in the bottom left spectrogram:

Bird Song File after applying low cut and high cut filters

After this step it was now safe to apply some mild compression and make up gain to tame the peak levels of the foreground birds in the recording and also bring up the ambient background bird song to give a little more of the contextual atmosphere. Finally I levelled up the recording by targetting an LUFS Loudness of -23dB LKFS to EBU R128 standard.

Bird Song File with High and Low Cut filters, Compression and Loudness Correction

This was the final result (again unfortunately in .mp3 128Kbps format):

This file, along with all the others, also treated the same way was used to compile a composite field recording which was succesfully used in the video piece mixdown. It just goes to show that you can pull back even some otherwise unuseable recordings with a bit of careful post processing!