Dustin O'Halloran is an American pianist and composer with five acclaimed solo albums under his own name.

He released his first EP Sundoor with renowned classical musical label Deutsche Grammophon in 2019, and followed that up with his solo album Silfur in 2021.

He's also a member of the band A Winged Victory for the Sullen with Adam Wiltzie, and they released their album The Undivided Five with Ninja Tune in 2019 and self-released their latest album Invisible Cities in 2021.

He's the winner of a 2015 Emmy Award for his main title theme to Amazon's comedy drama Transparent (2014–2017), and was nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA and a Critics Choice Award for his score to Lion (2016), written in collaboration with Volker Bertelmann (aka Hauschka).

We get into many topics such as the old analog vs digital debat, habits at the piano, inner timing, the music of Hans Otte, the power of the ocean, icelandic breakfast, how to record the piano, working to picture and much more :)

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In the nitty I recreate the magical oscillator offset that's found in the wonderful and soon to be legendary Yamaha CS70.

It was inspired by this video of floating points in his studio, demonstrating this very thing.

It's been a treat to remake in software and I run down how it was done.

The most important piece of the puzzle was scaling the pitch wheel (actually 2 pitch wheels) to not be smooth but quantized to the intervals used in the CS70. To do this I used a Max for live device called "Bend Sequence" from Heaps of Bleeps. I really think this series is tremendous. I wasn't aware of his work but it's some great max programming and works so well. Here's the link to all his stuff :)

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Music in this episode comes from

BAPHONYM - from the LP STILLFACE which you can find here:

https://mondegreensoho.bandcamp.com/album/stillface

Please send your musical submissions to lidellmakeswaves@gmail.com

I love to hear them!

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Other links :

Mylar Melodies deep dive into the Orchestron link here

The music of Hans Otte link here ( this is not the album but rather a live performance)

January 8, 2026

Letters from an American

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