Thomas Leisner

About Beauty and Bright Ideas
June 23rd, 2016

Rebecca Lenton Recording

I am happy to present my first classical recording at Delicious Drums Studio, featuring flute and harp, played by renowned soloists Rebecca Lenton and Nathalie Amstutz. We recorded three pieces from classical over modern to improvised music.

Rebecca and Nathalie call their Duo A Moveable Music. They bring an innovative flute and harp programme, combining classical repertoire and contemporary works with improvisation tailored to each performance and venue.

I had the chance to encounter the two at a private concert, a musical “Salon” at the home of one of my drum students. From Bach to Takemitsu and beyond, Rebecca and Nathalie guided their listeners through a multitude of musical styles, giving a brief introduction to the works along the way.

For many in the audience, including myself, it was the first time to have this combination of instruments, and especially to listen to a harp so closely. I had the opportunity to bring that experience even one step further by recording the duo, putting my favorite microphones as close to the instruments as possible.

Rebecca Lenton and Nathalie Amstutz both have a wealth of experience as soloists, chamber players and orchestral musicians in a wide range of musical genres. They play together as a duo to explore and further the repertoire for flute and harp.

Born in Switzerland, Nathalie studied in Detmold, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. She was solo harpist with the Osnabrücker Symphoniker, Düsseldorfer Symphoniker and the Bremer Philharmoniker. Today she freelances with orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, Düsseldorf Symphoniker, Bamberger Symphoniker, Philhamonie du Luxembourg, Oslo Opera,WDR Orchester Köln, the Hamburger Philharmonik and the Tonhalle Zürich. She is also very dedicated to contemporary music, having played at several new music festivals and working frequently with Ensemble KNM Berlin.

Born in England, Rebecca studied in London at the GSMD and in Basel. She has been a member of Ensemble KNM Berlin since 2001 and has performed at prestigious concert venues and festivals worldwide, including at the Carnegie Hall in New York, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Wien Modern, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Ultraschall Festival and Märzmusik in Berlin, Festival Présences in Paris, and tours to Argentina, Japan and Taiwan. She is also a regular guest with Klangforum Wien in Austria and has freelanced with orchestras including Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London Philharmonic and BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

May 12th, 2016

Acrepearls Snippets

We mixed a short medley of beautiful moments from our public live recording session at Spartacus, Potsdam. The video gives an impression of the band’s concept of playing improvised contemporary music.

April 19th, 2016

Fairy Tales

It’s a while ago since I did this speech recording at Delicious Drums Studio, but since these fairy tales were meant to welcome refugees over here at Berlin, it’s certainly not too late to welcome them again here at my personal site.

A very engaged friend of mine over at, Andreas Gerts, had the bright idea to realize a project to welcome people from all over the world to Germany by telling german fairy tales to them and especially to their children. So we recorded a CD including ten versions of “Frau Holle”, read in ten different languages.

These were handed out as welcome gifts for people with children arriving at Berlin. We realized that project during autumn of 2015, when german media discussed the so called refugee crisis every day. I hope that it was a small contribution to making these people feel a little more at home and coming to a rest in Germany after having had a troublesome time.

September 12th, 2015

Live Sound at Florakiezfest

For the first time I worked as a live sound technician in charge with my own equipment for a little street festival at the place where I live in Berlin, the Flora-Kiezfest 2015. Over the day we had 15 acts on stage, including four grown-up bands of different styles in the evening.

In the afternoon on stage we had everything from puppet theatre over singers and songwriters to a live radioplay. In the evening there were four bands playing worldmusic, pop, rock with strings and a ska band with complete horn seciton. I had picked two friends to help me on stage and we had hands full to do in order to manage the tight timeline of only 15 minutes to change between the bands, including line-check.

I had brought a good deal of my technical equipment at Delicious Drums Studio, including my new and excellent sounding HK Audio PA system and the good old live mixing desk we had used with Strange Fluid. I was especially happy with the gates and the parallel compression on the busses that I had implemented to the setup.

February 12th, 2015

Julia Toaspern & Band

Here is a demo recording for Julia Toaspern & Band I recently produced at Delicious Drums. It features four original tracks with Julia’s brand new acoustic band.

We met one day in December to record the whole band at once, playing together live in my studio, to capture the most authentic live feeling. Following the new concept of the band we aimed for a clear and acoustic, yet modern sound.

Musicians on this recording are besides Julia Toaspern on vocals and guitar: Brian Haitz on vocals, guitar and flute, Ralph-Eric Berg on double bass and Anselm Bresgott on beatbox. Compositions by Julia Toaspern, Arrangements by herself and her marvelous band.

Recording, editing, mixing and mastering by myself. I’m looking forward to hearing some more great tracks, and maybe to record an album soon at Delicious Drums!

 

 

November 16th, 2014

Flow

Here is a little recording I did together with my good old friends of Strange Fluid these days in my freshly refurbished little recording studio at Delicious Drums.

After two months of reconstruction at Delicious Drums everything looks shiny and like new. I wanted to show the new “Sound Kitchen” to my friends, talk about the good old times and just by the way we whistled one or two notes, the result of which you can listen to right here.

Besides Kai Mader on Saxophone, tracks three and four feature T. C. Mabemba of Strange Fluid on vocals. As my favorite bass player Joh Weisgerber was so busy recording Ratatöska‘s new album at his own studio, Jürgen Munder jumped right in for him on the last track, playing the bass on a keyboard for the very first time! As far as I know that was his first time for him playing an instrument on a recording, and it definitely was a big fun and pleasure for the other three of us, as we only knew him as our effects specialist at Strange Fluid before.

August 25th, 2014

Drum & Bass Sessions Day 3

Here’s the third part of my series of improvised Drum & Bass recordings I did with Abelha Supersonica. Another day, another sound. We had quite different inspirations in that session compared to the other recordings on day one and two.

The session was improvised again without any preparation or rehearsing and recorded directly to stereo in one go. Just Abelha’s voice and groovebox and my prepared drumset.

March 1st, 2014

Drum & Bass Sessions Day 2

This second day we met was probably the most creative and productive of my meetings with Abelha Supersonica. The result is a solid piece of improvised drum and bass, which I split into five tracks afterwards.

January 30th, 2014

New Stoppok Album

The good news is: There will be a new Stoppok studio release coming soon! We just met for a weekend at his house near Bremen, where we played and experimented a little together.

The less good news – at least for me personally– is: I won’t be his drummer once again. Well. Stoppok had invited me some years ago when he was in preproduction for his last studio album “Sensationsstrom”. We spent some days in his studio then to experiment, rehearse and record. At that time he decided on Benny Greb, who recorded the album and was the drummer of Stoppok’s live band during the past five years.

Now we had a great time playing and talking. As a drummer I was most concerned about finding a new concept and feeling to play without bassdrum and adding some odd percussive sounds and a little electronics. I think it worked out pretty well. But Stoppok had already told me beforehand that he had jammed with Wally Ingram and liked his feeling and energy very much. It seems like he finally convinced Wally to leave Los Angeles for some time and come over to Germany for recording and touring. Stoppok has booked Bremen’s “Studio Nord” for the beginning of february.

As a drummer and percussionist Wally certainly integrates with Stoppok’s new concept perfectly. Stoppok will play the part of bassdrum and snare himself while singing and playing guitar, just as he does when he performs solo. A complete drumset is not needed with that concept. But nevertheless I think it still perfectly fits the older rock-style songs, especially when performing live with a band. I’m curious how things will turn out during progress in the studio and on stage. I definitely wish everybody involved a wonderful time and result. There are tons of great songs, but you will have to be a little patient now until they are officially available.

January 28th, 2014

Drum & Bass Sessions Day 1

In wintertime it’s good to remember the last summer sometimes. I specifically remember my sessions with Abelha Supersonica, a vocalectro live act from Berlin. With just her voice and a few little boxes she creates a superbly flowing performance.

November 29th, 2013

Lydia und Claudia

I just finished the production of a CD for folk-singers “Lydia und Claudia”. It’s their first album and it’s got a rough and fresh attitude to it, which I like very much.

June 15th, 2013

Theatre Music Theme

When asked for writing music for a stage show I developed this theme and produced a rough layout demonstrating it’s application in three different styles.

The show was intended to have an atmosphere between naivety and darkness. The theme I came up with therefore sounds a bit like a melancholic children’s song. It’s simplicity helps adapting it to different styles of music while still offering some possibilities.

The “Zwielicht”-Theme:

And it’s variations in three quite different styles:

 

November 4th, 2012

TouchOSC Oxygen 8 Emulation

The attached file is for TouchOSC, the touchscreen control surface app for your mobile device. It emulates the functionality of the famous “Oxygen 8” keyboard when used together with Ableton Live.

The Oxygen 8 is a small Midi controller keyboard with a keyrange of two octaves and eight rotary knobs for controlling parameters in your audio software. It became popular as one of the first compact mobile studio solutions when everybody started to produce music on the go with a laptop. As one of the first devices of it’s kind, it offered power supply through the computer’s USB port.

This simple emulation has the Oxygen’s eight knobs. This fact in itself isn’t very impressive, but if you use it with Ableton Live and in Preferences/Midi you select “Oxygen 8” as a control unit, these eight knobs will be automatically mapped to the “Best Of Parameters” set of parameters predefined by Ableton for every device. So without any manual mapping you will have access to the most important functions of this software.

As a bonus the TouchOSC system is not only smaller and more light-weight than the original keyboard, but it has TouchOSC’s relative mode enabled, which means that you won’t have any parameter jumps when switching between devices and touching the knobs. And if you are missing the keys: Well, you may of course add them into some other tabs in the layout. Simply refer to my version of the “Keys” standard layout and copy and paste it to the Oxygen 8 layout.

Download Download TouchOSC Oxygen 8 for iPod

 

 

October 3rd, 2012

TouchOSC Design Mod

TouchOSC comes with a selection of useful controller layouts to choose from. They are pre-installed and can be used immediately. After modding the two big controllers for Ableton Live and Apple Logic, I also changed the colours for the various other basic controller layouts.

In case you’re wondering what TouchOSC might be, have a look at my introduction to TouchOSC. In case you already own TouchOSC you may simply download the attached collection of layouts I have modified, open the included files one by one in your TouchOSC Editor application and upload them to your device from there in order to use them.

The “Beatmachine” layout.

 The “Keys” layout. I have added some octaves.

 The “Mix 2” layout.

 The “Mix 16” layout.

 The “Simple” layout.

Download Download Neutrum Design TouchOSC Mod for iPod

These colours are just my personal preferences, but in case you like them too, here they are. I only have the iPod versions here, as I only have an iPod. Please leave a comment in case you are interested in the iPad versions, they are easily and quickly done.

 

September 20th, 2012

TouchOSC

TouchOSC is an app for mobile touchscreen devices that offers onscreen controller elements to interact with your computer via OSC and MIDI. You may build your own controller layouts or choose from a list of existing layouts.

TouchOSC is one of my favourite Apps. It’s cheap and efficient, it’s very well programmed and designed, and it offers a functionality many of us have dreamed of for a long time: To have a touch controller for our music software, and even to be able to very easily build personallized controllers ourselves. And to add one on top: It all works remotely and stably.

Above: TouchOSC showing my Neutrum Design Mod for LogicTouch

The software package comes in two parts. First of all the app for your mobile device that shows the controller elements on screen and establishes a wireless connection between your mobile device and your computer without the need to install any other sofware on your machine. This works flawlessly out of the box with some included layouts of control surfaces. Secondly an editor application running on your machine that allows you to edit layouts or to create your own from scratch.

The app for your mobile divice is available for iOS as well as for Android, and the editor application runs on MacOS as well as on Windows or Linux. Both pieces of software run very stably and I couldn’t discover any bugs so far. They are programmed to contain a stable basic functionality without many extras, yet offering a wide range of possibilities including all you usually need without getting confusing.

As the name suggests, TouchOSC uses the modern OSC protocol to communicate with your audio or video software. It can communicate directly with software having the OSC protocol implemented. But as the older MIDI protocol is more widely used it also may send MIDI messages over OSC, which makes your TouchOSC control surfaces appear as a normal MIDI device on your computer.

In case you are interested have a look at the  TouchOSC website for more details, pictures, explanations and a clear and very straight forward documentation. As I like this little piece of software so much, I have made a bunch of design modifications to the standard layouts, as well as some basics layouts for my projects, which you might try to get started.

 

August 30th, 2012

Lessons and Coachings

I offer private lessons for drums, vibraphone and piano, as well as coachings covering all aspects of sound engineering, music production and band training. See here for details.

June 18th, 2012

Music For Puppet Theatre

Out of two songs from a good beginning have become ten now, making up a complete CD called “Wusel und seine Freunde” and featuring all of the ten characters of the “Wusel” trilogy by Puppentheater Katinchen.

Starting with copyright problems for the music on the second piece I began composing the first two tracks, then added some more for the first run of the third piece and finally wrote the rest, to also feature the characters of the first part, and to round up the whole thing. From the finished album we then took parts of the tracks to get the theatre music we actually needed for the scenes. As the tracks were composed with this in mind, it was no problem to get the right mood in the right place, by simply adding some loops and fades.

You may listen to the whole CD here. You can’t download it, but you may order a CD at the Katinchen Website. For the actual theatre music watch out for one of Puppentheater Katinchen’s performances.

 

March 21st, 2012

Lovely Tunes

I just finished two tracks I composed and produced for my girlfriend’s puppet theatre “Katinchen” and of course I don’t want to keep them secret from you! Would love to hear how you like them.

Enjoy listening, and in case you want to find out more about the puppet theatre, have a look at the website of Katinchen, featuring a friendly educative style of puppet theatre for children.

This first song I composed in a way that should resemble to the music from the soundtrack of “Amelie” by Yann Thiersen.

The second piece is based on a traditional children’s song about elephants in a forest, which is already in use in one of the theatre pieces.

 

January 12th, 2012

Strange Fluid New Album

With Strange Fluid we released our brand new studio album “Freak Licensed Unit IDentity“.

September 25th, 2011

Qualita Rossa

Some weeks ago, when I went to my cellar, I found a CD that I had forgotten about for many years: A demo of my former smooth-jazz trio „Qualita Rossa“, and I was surprised how much I liked the sound – much better than I had it in mind.