LOG: Manuel and Forge - Keyboarding

[x-empath.livejournal.com]

Manuel meets Forge in the music room. They talk scales, chords, and mutant powers. They also play really obnoxious music. Backdated to Friday, Jan 14th, 2005.



Manuel walked into the Music Room and made a beeline for his keyboarding gear. Couldn't hurt to get everything warmed up and ready to go for when Forge arrived. Just to warm up and to shake some of the rust off, he turned the sound down fairly low and started playing some Neuroticfish - they usually had lovely synth parts that didn't require a great deal of advance programming.

Besides, playing "It's Not Me" fit his sense of ironic destiny.

Forge's ears perked up at the sound of the synthesizer as he opened the door. He'd heard that Manuel was a bit of a virtuoso on the piano, and it seemed that at least part of the skill had remained after his apparent brainwipe. Waiting in the doorway for a while, Forge considered how to proceed. When he'd arrived at the mansion, it hadn't been six hours before Manuel had made it obvious that he considered himself lord and master of the place, and everyone else existed solely by his good graces.

This guy, however, could have been a different Spaniard with the same face. The arrogance was gone, and frankly - from what Forge could tell - he wasn't a complete dick. Apparently amnesia had its good points.

As the last notes reverberated off the walls, Forge walked casually over to the mixing board behind the synths. "This is pretty high-end equipment," he announced casually. "You ever DJ with stuff this elaborate?"

Manuel refocused his attentions and grinned at Forge. "Hey." he said with a friendly wave. "Usually, at the places I was DJing, this stuff would be considered bleeding-edge." he said with a shrug. "When I took a serious interest, I persuaded a couple of pros that they didn't really need their stuff anymore. Now I can't really go back to the clunky crap." he said with more confidence than he actually felt. "So do you already know how to play, or do you need help with that too?"

Forge shrugged. "Ms. Blaire's just had me going over scales. When it comes down to it, it's just an input device, right? Keypress to electric impulse through circuits and transistors to sound. Seems simple enough."

He pulled over a rolling stool and sat down before one of the smaller keyboards. Removing the glove over his left hand, he adjusted a small screw at the base of his wrist. "Sensitivity control," he explained as he wiggled his fingers. "Don't want to accidentally chip the keys. You'd be surprised how many keyboards I went through before wiring the feedback sensors in."

The scales were good, reasonably precise. Obviously the boy hadn't been exposed to chord structure, or anything remotely resembling improvisation, but he did seem to be grasping the basics.

"OK, not bad." Manuel said with a grin. "Not bad at all. Scales are the absolute beginning, and you've seem to got those down without too many hassles. Now here's a neat trick. Use one hand to play a scale over here, and then use your other hand to play one on this side. Can you _do_ that?" he asked, referring to Forge's artificial hand. "It's called a chord. Give it a try, you'll like this one."

Forge arched an eyebrow at Manuel and tried to replicate his demonstration. After a few dissonant attempts, he paused and closed his eyes. "Okay, I get the idea. Different tonal structures. It's just that the hands don't want to cooperate. I know how it's  supposed to go, I just - ah!" He slammed a fist into his thigh and placed his hands back on the keyboard.

His left hand had the deeper notes down, mechanical fingers practically flying over the keys. It was his right that kept hitting notes a tenth of a second out-of-rhythm, resulting in an odd discordant clattering of sharps and flats. Pausing, Forge looked at the keyboard's functions for a moment. "Wait a minute..."

Hands moving quickly, he toggled a few switches, playing the right-hand scale once more. Then pressing a button, he started playing the left-hand notes in sync, listening to the chord coming from the speakers. "Record function, ha!" Slowly, though, he began to frown. "And I'll put money on it that Ms. Blaire won't let me use it. Looks like practice the old-fashioned way, then."

Manuel nodded. "Probably not." he agreed. "I can usually cheat - I used to be able to feel when a chord was wrong. Can't do that anymore, at least not any more than anyone else can." he said flatly. "You're good with machines, right?" Manuel asked with a fine disregard for the obvious. "Think you could take a look at my drum machine? It's a piece of shit, I warn you now, and it keeps choking on gunning anything through the effects backwards. Think you can fix it?"

"Now that," Forge grinned like a predator, "is something I can do." He kicked off the wall, spinning the chair around and coming to a stop in front of the equipment. "Reasonably new," he proclaimed, "and if you're using the Roland's MIDI settings as input, then..." he reached in, plugging and unplugging connectors rapidly. "You're running signal through the crossfader twice because of how the stack's wired. Run a sample through backwards, and the crossfader's going to take out all your midrange frequencies, and it'll sound like shit."

Turning the machine on, Forge tapped one of the contact pads, listening to the heavy bass beat come through the speakers. Toggling two switches, the beat shifted to a syncopated rhythm, with alternating beats echoing briefly. "There you go," he called over the noise, "bass output that'll blow girls' clothes right off."

Manuel blinked. And then grinned. "All rightie then." he said with another predator's grin. "It's Just One Fix time." he said, sliding the chair over to the synth stacks. "And here we go..." he added under his breath, and kicked off the script to run the backwards cymbol splashes from the drum machine through the synth and to the speakers.

Grinning, Manuel played the first few heavily distorted bars of the tune before shutting the whole assembly done. "I'd say that worked." he laughed. "Hey - you did a good job there." Manuel said approvingly. "A shame there are no women here so we can test the clothes theory."

"Not that you need the help," Forge said sarcastically. "Seems you've gotten back into the swing of things, pre-amnesia speaking. Your powers haven't come back, though?" He cocked his head quizzically."That's odd. What happened? Head injury, power overload, that sort of thing?"

Manuel shrugged. "I wish I knew." he said. "That memory's buried in the amnesia. Genetically, everything's still there, but I can't access my power at _all_." he explained. "I've had my brain scanned more times in thirty days than I have in my previous twenty years. All that I do know is that I think they were trying to overwrite me - to wipe me away and replace me with a more subservient, obedient version. Didn't work very well, thanks to Amanda." he grinned. "It should come back, with time. At least all the debris and the remnants have been
swept away."

"Suck," Forge commiserated. "Well, powers aside, I've got to say it's an improvement. I mean, you get to relearn all the good parts of stuff, and you don't have to remember any of the crap. We should all be so lucky."

Manuel grinned thinly. "Until you realize that you've forgotten things like your own family, your name, your power, your bank account number, the people you've nailed, all of your friends - it was a pretty terrifying time there for a while. Luckily for me, a lot of that stuff came back to me. But yeah, I was apparently a real ass back in the day. I'm not too sad to have left that stuff behind. I just kinda wish I had my power, you know? It's not easy being the mundane in a school full of muties."

Forge nodded, then pulled out his PDA. "Let's see, you didn't put a whole lot about your family on the journals - of course, I have no idea what you had in anything you'd locked or that they've locked down since your accident. Yeah, you're twenty, Spanish, dating Amanda and near as I can figure, possibly getting at least some on the side somewhere." He arched an eyebrow briefly, "You were pretty damn rich, too. But you didn't seem like the type to entrust that particular bit of information with anyone, so I'm not sure who'd have your bank
information. Theoretically, you should still have all your money sitting somewhere."

With a flip, Forge replaced the PDA in his holster. "So," he asked, "rich family, you de la Rochas?"

Manuel blinked. "Apparently." he said with a shrug. "I can't remember a thing about them, and no one here is talking. Anyway - been taking a listen through the stuff on the school music server. You and the black guy, Haroun? You're the ones who go big into noise and doom. How do you feel about industrial? I've got a ton of Ministry CDs, some Icon of Coil, stuff like that and I'm always looking for something new to listen to."

With a quick check of his pockets, Forge plugged an adapter into his PDA and hooked it up to the synthesizers. "If you like the industrial stuff, there's some great stuff out of Sweden I found while websurfing - really big into the rivethead scene there," he snorted, "not really into the whole faux-posthuman rebellion act myself, but they come with some crunchy music." He finished his synchronization and queued up a track.

The beats that came out of the speakers were like a machine gun on full-auto, with double-bass counterpoint and a lashing guitar melody that reverberated off the walls and made Forge's teeth vibrate. Although he didn't understand a word of the lyrics, it was the feeling behind the music that he could really get into. Raw, primal emotion, the desire to go out and scream at the top of his lungs. Frowned upon were he to actually do it, he could just put on the headphones and let the music do it for him.

The music came to a halt in a decrescendo of operatic cymbal crashes and growled Scandanavian vocals, and Forge patted the speaker affectionately. "Now that? That rocks."

Manuel blinked as he tried to recover from the onslaught. "Yeah, that's pretty good." he admitted. "A little muddy for my tastes - I like my raw primal emotion sheathed in cold calculating machine-driven music. But for sheer fuck-the-world-ness, it's hard to be the Scandanavians." He then tapped out a few commands on his laptop, and then grinned. "Like this." The noise that came out of the speaker was as cold as ice and twice as biting, a machine-generated onslaught of despair and angst. One the track faded away into the final few bars of machine-generated dissonance, Manuel grinned. "Scandanavia is good, but Germany is better."

"Wait," Forge reached out to the control knob, rewinding the track to a certain point and replaying a segment of it. "there it is again. That part where it hits the chord sequence, then just drops off. Like you're expecting one thing, and then the big letdown. This all came out of a synth?" At Manuel's nod, Forge breathed out. "Man, now I feel all small and shit. I mean, I can build you the machine, and make it sound awesome - but I can't do this. I can play the music, but I can't make it."

"That comes with experience and feeling, man. You like the passionate music, that means it talks to you inside. That's half of it right there. The rest is just training and practice and seeing what works and what doesn't." he said with the placid assurances of a former empath. "And not everybody can. Shit, man, I'm a glorified technician most of the time. Half the time I needed my power to really make you like the music. Working on fixing that - I'm taking an independent study course with Ms Blaire."

"That must have been a hell of a rush," Forge replied, "DJing like that, and getting to see the effect it had on people. Me? I'd kill for something like that." He rolled the stool so his back was against the wall, looking out onto the empty music room. "You can look at a screen and guess what people are feeling, what they really think. You can get pretty good at it, watching patterns of behavior and so on. But you never really know, do you? What they think. What they say when you're not around." He glanced over to Manuel. "But you did. God, I'd love to be able to do that."

Manuel grinned. "Sometimes it was a real rush, I'll agree with you here. Other times, it really, really sucked. Like you said - you always know what they really feel. So somebody could be smiling at you, telling you how much they liked your stuff, and you would just KNOW that they hated it and they thought you're a piece of crap they scraped off their shoe. And what really sucked was learning control." He then blinked and stared at his own hands. "I have no idea why I just said that. I don't remember anything about my power, but somehow
I know that I had problems controlling it."

"Can't really say I know what that's like," Forge admitted. "I mean, my power goes out of control, who'd know? They tried to diagnose me once as obsessive/compulsive, when my power manifested. When you've got it, you know, you've got to do something with it. Keep the parts moving or they'll rust, right?" He tapped his temple with a metal finger. "If it weren't for this," he said, "I'd be just like what you said, a mundane. Less than one, even. It's easy to think of it that way, that our powers are all we have, isn't it?"

"But then again," he corrected himself, "look at you. You lose your power - become one of the 'mundanes' as you say, and they still love you. Hell, even Kyle likes hanging out with you, and he hardly likes anyone that he doesn't know."

"Kyle's a kid." Manuel said. "Do kid stuff, and he's your best buddy. All we did was cannonballs in the pool. It's not hard." Manuel kept his smile pasted on, but something in Forge's words was ringing across the amnesiac recesses of his mind.

~When you've got it, you know, you've got to do something with it~

"I've had a little bit of an awakening about how your powers are not all that you have. I'm not doing great over here, but I'm managing to do OK as a mundane." he added after a second or two. "Anyway. Scales and chords. Sounds like you've got the right idea, you just need to figure out a way to do them without using your augmentations."