sethpiece




hardware:   Apple MacBook M4 Air, Eurorack modular system/hardware
software:   Apple Logic Pro X

I am glad that I'm not at Columbia right now. Seth's departure for Carnegie-Mellon is a real blow to our program at a particularly precarious time. There are excellent people still at the CMC, but I don't know how things will progress now. Columbia really dropped the ball on this one.

For my retirement, Seth had done a marvelous thing and arranged for members of the Sideband laptop ensemble (my former students) to do a performance 'in the spirit of Brad' (whoo-hoo!). So this was my attempt to recreate that gesture for Seth, but without the resources he had at his disposal. But the feelings are strong!

Seth does wonders with "process" pieces, and sethpiece was built around a Seth-like process: the sound of the act of trascribing text into a computer. I added a bit more DSP processing than Seth probably would, and the piece should be about three times longer than this is to get closer to being a real simulation of a Seth-piece. Plus Seth did a lot of work with hardware processes, and I'm a software kinda guy.

I hope Seth enjoys this even partly as much as I appreciate his music. Good luck in the future, Seth and Jennifer!

Piece website:

Brad Garton
April, 2026