Today I "accidentally" tricked Hauptwerk's recording feature into "inverted" recording:
When I played back an earlier live recording with the improvisation done for Peter Collings in it, I rewinded a few seconds during playback to listen to a specific part again. This part sounded so interesting when played backwards that I was curious how the complete piece would sound when played back "in the opposite direction"...
The most interesting fact in backwards recording with Hauptwerk is that the resulting audio doesn't sound as awkward as usual, when simply inverting the WAV data. In this case, only the MIDI signals are sent to the Hauptwerk playback engine in reverse order, but the samples are still played forward. This results in a very unique experience.
So here's the "Improvisation 'Collingsienne'" -- played backwards with a number of tempo variations to compensate for the faster passages that would have sounded a bit "stumbled" otherwise. Also, it contains a few seconds of material that was cut out in the "forward" version, which only seemed to be crap there but sounded very nice in the backwards variation. At the end of the piece, you will hear the "finish" of a bit of playing around with the menuet from the Suite Gothique, which in the original impro session was taking place before the impro part.
For those who own a 7.1 surround system, an 8-channel FLAC file can be picked up here to get an impression of what it will sound like in my living room:
- URL:
http://via.woody-mc.de/to/5ELfv1VuvEbut7Qv
- Player: Current versions of Media Player Classic are able to properly play multi-channel FLAC files.