Unexpected Observation of the Morning
Sep 2, 2010 Uncategorized
Cornelius’ “Star Fruits Surf Rider,” segues *perfectly* into Wire’s “One of Us.”
Native Instruments’ Big Day Out
Sep 1, 2010 Uncategorized
It may not be apparent from the posts about analog modular synthesizers and home-made Arduino hacks, but I actually do most of my work in software. In that realm, I’ve always been a huge fan of Native Instruments. I really do believe that the design choices (in both hardware and software) that manufacturers make gives their instruments a distinctive tone and character, and this is very true of N-I, but it’s a tone and character that I really like. I find that their instruments lend themselves really well to a feel that I think of as “lushly technical”. I don’t know if I can elaborate much on that. Perhaps you’ll know what I mean.
So today, Native Instruments has announced a bazillion things. The big thing is the new version of their flagship Komplete collection — Komplete 7. I use Komplete 6 right now. I upgraded relatively recently, having in the past individually purchased and maintained Battery, Reaktor, FMx, and Kontakt. When you add up all the standalone upgrade prices for each of those tools, it’s much more than the upgrade price from one version of Komplete to the next. As such, it seemed to me that moving to the bundle, which includes all of the above plus Guitar Rig (software version), Absynth and Massive, put me on what in the long run will be a simpler and more economical upgrade cycle.
Komplete 7 adds a bunch of stuff to the mix. It continues to bundle Reaktor 5.5, Battery 3, Guitar Rig 4 Pro, Absynth 5, Massive, Kontakt 4, and FM8. Those are the same versions that I have now, though, in Komplete 6. You’d expect version ramps for the new Komplete, right? I was a little confused too. This version of Komplete doesn’t seem to be about versioning the core products, but about introducing a whole pile of stuff into the bundle based on Native Instruments’ new philosophy of building new instruments on their core technology platforms.
As such, it also includes Abbey Roads Drums, Rammfire, The Finger, Traktor’s 12, Scarbee MM-Bass, Reflektor, Reaktor Prism, Reaktor Spark, Acoustic Refractions, New York Concert Grand, Vienna Concert Grand, Berlin Concert Grand, Upright Piano, Vintage Organs, Scarbee Mark I, Scarbee Clavinet / Pianet and Scarbee A-200.
As you can probably tell, a good number of these are detailed reproductions of existing instruments based on the Kontakt platform or new effects based on the Reaktor platform. The sample library size has also ramped up to over 90GB. So instead of getting a pile of new tools, I’d essentially be getting a pile of new content, some of which will be very interesting, some of which won’t be.
I have to admit that it’s not the wildly compelling upgrade that I expected, but it’s still very interesting, and at $229 USD to upgrade, it’s a significantly cheaper buy than buying the individual instruments, pretty much all of which are available independently. I do think that it creates some interesting crosstalk vs. the Kore platform, although they’ve always been clear that they think Komplete and Kore work best in tandem.
In addition to the Komplete bundle, a whole bunch of these instruments have been made available separately. I imagine the Rammfire instrument, replicating Rammstein’s guitar processing, will be of particular interest to a lot of people. Reaktor Prism, Vintage Organs, and Traktor’s 12 have also been announced as standalone products. (Many of the others already were available that way.)
Lastly, they’ve made an interesting move in tune with their Kore Player product, releasing freely-downloadable Reaktor 5 Player and Guitar Rig 4 Player tools, which will allow you both access to a limited set of instruments from the libraries of those tools and also allow you to run instruments and effects based on those platforms without owning the full products (I believe Reaktor Prism and Rammfire both fall into that model). Whereas Native Instrument in the past was very creator-focused, especially with Reaktor, which really encouraged creating your own synths as being the ultimate way to enjoy the product, I think they’re now seeing that many people just want a set of presets they can fire up and use, and they’re providing channels to satisfy those needs. The products are relatively inexpensive (they offer a lot of their built-on-a-platform-player products at the $79 USD price point) and give people plug-and-go use with a small amount of customizability. I think that that’s a pretty sound model for them, and I admit I’ve bought a few Kore Soundpacks without yet having bought Kore, myself.
So… Christmas in September, I guess! Now to go pore over feature sheets and decide if I want to jump on Komplete 7 or not. I think the answer is clear — it’s really a steal — but I may need some time to talk myself into it.
Probabilistic Sequencing with STG VMS + Dotcom
Aug 22, 2010 Uncategorized
Okay, fancy titles aside, this post is about allowing you to do “probabilistic sequencing” using synthesizers.com modules and the STG Soundlabs Voltage Mini-Store (two of them, actually). You can probably use this with any sequencer you may have, but I have the VMSes, so that’s what I used.
Definitions first; What I mean by “probabilistic sequencing” is this: In deterministic sequencing, you might use a set of knobs to set voltages and a set of switches to set gates for each step. A knob sets the pitch of the note to be played at that step, and a switch determines whether or not that step will be played (to allow you to have rests in your sequence). What we’re doing instead with probabilistic sequencing is to have a pair of knobs for each step. The first one determines the pitch being played at that step, and the second one determines the likelihood that that note will be played. If the knob is twisted completely counter-clockwise, you get a rest. If it’s twisted completely clockwise, you get a note. If it’s somewhere in between, you may or may not get a note, and the likelihood is in proportion to the position of the knob.
This was actually sparked by a question from Mark Sims on the synthesizers.com Yahoo group, but I became interested because I use probabilities and randomness extensively when sequencing in Nodal, and I find the results very effective, so being able to do that in hardware seemed like fun.
My solution uses the following modules: 1x Q110 Noise, 1x Q117 Sample & Hold, 1x Q125 Signal Processor, 1x Q124 Multiples, 1x Q128 Switch, 1x Q109 Envelope Generator, 1x Q108 Amplifier, 1x Q106 Oscillator, 2x STG Soundlabs Voltage Mini-Store.
The solution that I came up with (which is a slightly different arrangement than the original question, so it’s been modified for my configuration) looks like this:
I don’t know if that’s the best diagram ever. If you have any comments on the documentation style, let me know. The patch in words looks like this:
NOISE (White Noise) -> SAMPLE & HOLD (Input)
SAMPLE & HOLD (Output) -> SIGNAL PROCESSOR (Top Input)
SAMPLE & HOLD (Gate) -> MULT B
SIGNAL PROCESSOR (Top Output) -> MULT A
MULT A -> SWITCH (Control)
MULT B -> SWITCH (2A)
MULT B -> STG VMS 1 (Shift)
MULT B -> STG VMS 2 (Shift)
SWITCH (1 Common) -> OSCILLATOR (1V/Oct)
SWITCH (2 Common) -> EG (Gate)
OSC (Square Out) -> AMP (Signal Input 1)
EG (Output) -> AMP (Control Input 1)
AMP (Output) -> Mixer
STG VMS 1 (Output) -> SWITCH (1A)
STG VMS 2 (Output) -> MULT A
Obviously you can customize this to your liking. For example, you might want to choose a different waveform, or mult the pitch out to multiple oscillators or something else.
Okay, so what’s going on here?
The first Voltage Mini Store in this set up is being used traditionally, to set pitches. The second is our probability setting for each note.
Well, the Noise source is basically operating as a random number generator. The Sample & Hold is running the timing of the sequencer, both by grabbing just one value from the noise source per beat and by using its gate output to manually shift the sequencers. I left the output and input knobs on each of these at full. The frequency knob on the Sample & Hold will be set to taste for the speed of your sequence, and the timing source of the Sample & Hold is set to Internal.
The multiple group called MULT A in the description above is being used to merge our random number generator with the output of our knobs from the second Voltage Mini Store, and send that to control the Switch. The output from the Noise and S&H goes through a Signal Processor en route because you’ll have to carefully set the values of the gain and offset until you get the probability curve that you want. The method for doing this is basically to set all of your knobs to 50% and then adjust until they fire about half the time, then check to see if they fire all the time at 100% and never at 0%. If not, adjust accordingly until you get the response curve you want. It sounds fiddly, but it didn’t take me very long to get something workable for me. You’ll probably want to slow down your timing while doing this to make counting easier. (I also cheated by temporarily unplugging the shift inputs on both Voltage Mini Stores so that I could just fiddle with one knob instead of having to twist them all to try the various values.)
I send both the pitch and the gate through the Switch because if you decide that you want a log decay tail on your envelope and you don’t do this, the decay tail will change to the pitch of the next note in the sequence even if that note isn’t supposed to be sounding.
From there it’s pretty straightforward. The pitch drives your oscillator, the gate drives your EG, they go to the Amp and Bob’s your uncle.
Here’s a short recording of the patch in action. In this example I’ve got notes 1, 3, 5, 7 at 100% (they always sound) and the alternate notes 2, 4, 6, and 8 at 50%, so you’ll hear them fill in sometimes and sometimes not. I’ve also added a bandpass filter sweep and some reverb because I can’t leave well enough alone. You’ll notice that there’s a little rhythmic click after each note. That’s not supposed to be there. I kind of like the way it sounds, but if someone has suggestions for getting rid of it, I’d love to hear it.
Justin Bieber Redux
Aug 17, 2010 Uncategorized
So, as you all knew I would, as soon as I got home, I downloaded that slowed-down Justin Bieber track and sped it up 8x to see what we got.
They’re not lying. It’s definitely the Bieber song. However, a lot more has been done to it than just slowing it down 8x.
At first I thought maybe it was a different version — perhaps an “unplugged” version. I didn’t listen to the original and the re-sped-up version side by side enough to say, but I’d posited that it was a different rendition that felt a lot more soulful and bluesier to me. However, from reading the comment thread on the post, it appears that it’s just that it was actually slowed down somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10.7x instead of 8x, and that in addition it was knocked down in pitch by a minor second, which presumably account for the change in tone and feel to my ears.
Also, the shimmery, dreamy quality seems to come from a large hall reverb applied to the original prior to slowing it down. You can definitely hear it when you speed it back up, and it actually imparts the same shimmery, dreamy quality on the original, even though the effect is also sped back up.
To be fair, if you speed it back up by only the mandated 8x factor, don’t shift the pitch back up and leave the reverb on, it’s actually still not a half bad tune to listen to.
Nonetheless, it’s an interesting thing. In a few tracks well prior to the ones on the site here (say around 1991), I used samples of me speaking that I’d made when I had a cold then both slowed down and pitched down by a factor of around 4 to 6, and they sounded awesome, like dragons. I’ve used small chunks of my own material resampled and stretched or compressed in time before. Still, this makes me really want to take some earlier ramp tracks and mess with them to see what kind of new material I can generate.
What’s up with October?
Jul 20, 2010 Uncategorized
I already have tickets to three awesome concerts in October. Nothing between now and October, and nothing after October, mind you.
- Swans at Lee’s Palace on Saturday, Oct. 2nd
- Four Tet at The Mod Club on Wednesday, Oct. 20th
- Recoil at The Opera House on Wednesday, Oct. 27th
They’re all general admission and all were quite inexpensive, so if you’d like to come, feel free to pick up tickets and we’ll go together!
My only sadness is that there are still no North American dates announced for the Einstürzende Neubauten 30th Anniversary Tour.
It’s undoubtedly going to be an exciting month!
My first rejection!
Jul 5, 2010 Uncategorized
As all of you know, I release my music for free download here using a Creative Commons license. This is something important to me. I have a lot of bones to pick with capitalism and the way we value things in large part due to price, to some degree or other. (Try selling milk half-off. Or see how seriously people take freeware video games vs. commercial video games.) I don’t think that there should be no market or that nobody should charge, but I think that a vibrant gift economy is also important. In particular, I think that people making things with no commercial expectations are freer to explore and innovate, and that these kinds of explorations and innovations are a crucial part of the creative ecosystem.
So I try to do my part by creating, and giving my creations away for free. I do it here with music, and, usually in smaller ways, it’s a common theme across all my creative projects, whatever medium they may exist in.
I was talking to my good friend BC Holmes not too long ago about this, but also about the idea of submitting to a record label or going through sites like The Sixty One which, while it’s not a label, has a strong aspect of ranking. I also talked about popularity, getting comments on the site, knowing if people are listening.
She asked me some really good questions, poking at why I was doing what I do and why I begun to care about measures of approval so much.
There is a certain amount of ego tied up in that. I can’t deny that. But one thing that I said there that I still think is key to me is that to be said to be contributing to the gift economy, which is an important aspect of this work, I need to feel like what I do make available has value. There’s no real contribution if I take a piece of paper, draw a scribble of no value to anybody who sees it on it and leave it out front of the house with a sign saying, “Free.” I mean, I suppose to some degree just doing it contributes to the idea, but it also might devalue the idea in the sense of reinforcing the idea that only things of no value are ever free — “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
I ran into this headlong when the first Pixel-Stained TechnoPeasant Day came about. Pixel-Stained TechnoPeasant Day is a day in which people celebrate the vibrant online gift economy and the important role it plays by giving away works for free online. It’s important and dear to my heart, so I put together a track specifically for it — you know it as Pixel Pt. 1. I had thought that I might write elaborations on the theme in future years as Pt. 2, etc. But what happened was that the submission of the track was ignored. Not just ignored in the passive sense of putting something out and having nobody notice, but actively ignored in the sense that people collecting Pixel-Stained TechnoPeasant Day submissions in my community and putting together link roundups of them omitted my contribution from those lists time and time again, despite my submitting it to be added. Initially I had assumed that this was in part because I wasn’t in the primary demographic of participants and I wasn’t working in media or styles that were popular with the people most actively engaging with the celebration. However, when I re-read the posts about the origins of it, I saw that indeed, although it had been often left out of the way the meme got repeated around the blogosphere, the original had specified that only free works released by those who ordinarily (successfully) charged money for their work were relevant. While this didn’t seem to be the case for many other people participating in the link roundups, it did seem to be part of the initial description, so that may have been another way in which I didn’t qualify.
And that really was the core of the perceived value argument, to me. In order to show that we have a vibrant gift economy, we need to show that there is a good deal of free content being made available by artists or artisans whose work has been in some way or other marked as being worth paying money for, if it weren’t being given away for free. A great example would be the works of Cory Doctorow, whose books are available simultaneously for money and for free and do well in both incarnations.
Well, what’s the equivalent for a studio musician? You can put out tip jars and donation buttons or have PWYC online stores in addition to downloads. Tip or donation buttons have been on the site in the past — I think there’s still one on it now — but haven’t seen any activity. PWYC online stores to me eat away at the feeling of sharing something for free. But moreover, if I really dug in my heels and asked people to please donate or pay if they like the music, then that mitigates the degree to which it can be said that it’s free. At some point it becomes “guiltware” rather than “freeware”.
Probably the best alternative would be to offer free downloads but have professionally-pressed CDs for sale, and I may look in to that at some point.
However, and I realize this has been a long tale, there was also the opportunity of Magnatune. Magnatune is like a record label, but as opposed to most record labels, they accept Creative Commons licensed music, they distribute using the exact same Creative Commons license that I do, and they charge their users under a subscription model that makes micropayments into the accounts of artists who those users download. Most importantly for the purposes of this discussion, though, they act as gatekeepers. They want to offer their users a unique service, and given that a lot of the music is likely to be available for free elsewhere, they need to make a value proposition for their users. The value they bring is in having people who review submissions and accept or reject artists, so that they can be said to be only offering their users music of suitable quality — music that they deem has value.
So it was mostly for that gatekeeper service that I decided to submit to Magnatune. Their licensing is non-exclusive, so I could still offer tracks for free here, but people who use Magnatune could download my music there as well.
I submitted a sort of Magnatune-only album which consisted of Orchard Days and Fountains minus certain tracks that have somewhat … complicated licensing issues. (I have to think about how those tracks work on my own site as well.) And I heard back today.
The response: “Unfortunately, while your music is very good, it isn’t the kind of thing we’re looking for. Sorry!”
My friend Chris seems to feel that there’s a lot of music on Magnatune that’s in a similar style or genre, so I imagine that that’s a form letter rather than a heartfelt evaluation, but who knows?
I should note that I’m not angry that they rejected the music and I don’t think people need to tell me that they were wrong or misguided in doing so. (I am kind of bummed out.) They’re business people who presumably know what they’re looking for, and in fact, it’s that ability to say no that gives their ability to say yes any value or meaning.
So I’m not sure where the portion of what I do here that was aimed in that direction goes now. Do I just try to translate that into a drive for achieving excellence on here and in the other non-discriminating venues (Jamendo primarily at this time) that I currently use? Do I try to see if there are other “record labels” that can dovetail with Creative Commons online releasing? Do I try to get a professional run of CDs pressed and sell them through the site here? (Do I take this as a sign that the stuff I’ve got at present isn’t ready for that, and try to improve?)
There are of course other options that are less positive, but would be more melodramatic than practical.
I’m really not sure.
The iPad and creativity
Jul 2, 2010 Uncategorized
Wow, I didn’t post anything in June at all?
Well, this started out as a quick test of the WordPress app for the iPad, but maybe I should talk about that a little.
I got an iPad around the beginning of June. It really is a neat device, and there are a surprising number of music apps for it. I have been especially impressed with the Korg iElectrine-R, which mimics the drum machine it’s named after perfectly and sound great. The interface is a joy on the touch screen. It’s basically like getting a several-hundred-dollar rhythm box for ten bucks. Now that Line 6 has an iPad MIDI interface out, I’m hoping it will get tempo sync (master and slave) in a future release, which is all that’s really missing. Are you listening, Korg?
All of that being said, the iPad is really a consumption device. Yes, you can create things on it, but that’s not what it’s really good at, nor what it was designed for. Watching videos, playing games, reading comics, surfing the non-flash prtions of the web, all fantastic. There are even great educational apps galore. But creating content, you always feel like you’re fighting a bit of an up-hill battle.
And yet, the device is so handy, so convenient, so fun to use that you find yourself altering what you do with your time to fit its talents, and therein the danger lies. It’s very easy to wind up letting it become a tremendous time sink. In the first three weeks that I owned it, I didn’t turn on my laptop once, didn’t launch Logic or Nodal once, didn’t touch the modular once. And so, other than popping out a couple of rhythms on the iElectribe (which, for all its niftiness, is not really an ideal app for my creative process any more than an actual Electribe would be), I didn’t do anything creative at all. And that happened across the board really, not just with music.
So I think I will need to limit how much time I spend on the iPad, and try to view it as mostly a commuting and travel machine.
I finally got some time lately with the laptop and the modular again, and it felt really good. I’m hoping to do more of that. I even plan to bring it down to Sarah’s for the weekend. (The laptop, not the modular.) So hopefully I’ll have more to share soon. And maybe if the WordPress app for the iPad works out, I can use more of my downtime to write here. 
Tags: Gear
Turquoise Hexagon Sun
May 13, 2010 Uncategorized
I’m listening to Boards of Canada’s album, “Music Has the Right to Children,” today at work. It’s definitely in my top ten favourite albums, and has been ever since I got it. Probably my top five.
Here’s the weird thing — This is the first time I’ve ever listened to it.
Okay, not the first time I’ve heard any of it, but it’s probably the most prime victim of modern-age listening methods in my collection. When I first got it, I think I’d gotten several albums at the same time and I clicked through the tracks quickly and picked a few obvious ones that I loved — Triangles and Rhombuses, ROYGBIV, Pete Standing Alone, Open the Light. Some of those are some of my prime examples of, to me, musically perfect songs. I took those songs and put them in playlists. Over time, the number I’d include in my current playlist waxed and waned, but it was usually some subset of those. I’d hear the other tracks here and there when I had my whole collection on shuffle, but even with the sad state of ripping, there’s a lot of music in there, so I’d hear them very far apart.
I’ve never once in all this time listened to the entire album from beginning to end in track order.
So I decided to do so now, and I’m a hundred times more in love with it than I ever was. Listened to in order and complete, it’s so much *more* than the tracks are individually. I know it’s weird that I’ve never done this before, and these “revelations” are exactly what I’d expect from the experience, but still, sometimes something just brings it home that much more.
Also weird is that while I love the Bibio cover of “Kaini Industries,” by Boards of Canada and had always meant to seek out the original to compare them, it turns out that that track is on this album.
I never did spend my April budget for music, as was my New Year’s Resolution, and I also haven’t spent May’s. I’m conflicted about spending right now because I just bought a pile of graphic novels, then an iPad, and I’m pretty much tapped out. But I think whenever I get caught up, I’m going to pick up the remaining BoC full-length releases and take the time to get to know all of them a little better.
The Amen Break, Sampling and Copyright
Apr 8, 2010 Uncategorized
My friend Sean pointed me toward this video today, which I think (despite a recent deluge of media about the Amen break) is fascinating and well worth watching:
I did most of my “growing up” in the 80s. That decade took me from 8 years old up to 18 years old. In that time, I also discovered music in a really earnest way, both as a listener and as a participant. And for me, music as a participant was all about sampling. Friends of mine had other electronic instruments. James had a Roland U-20 synthesizer and an electric guitar. Devin had a guitar and some pedals. Gus had his voice, and some tools we made for treating that. Rick had an Ensoniq Mirage for a while, but he also had one of the old Casio phase-distortion synths. I’m not sure which. A CS-80? I was all about the samplers. I started with a Korg DSS-1, and I actually did use its seemingly ridiculous sampling capability. I soon thereafter moved to an E-Mu EMAX and later an EMAX II. Unlike people’s conception of samplers, I usually didn’t sample beats, phrases, hooks or any of that. I mostly created sounds out of tiny raw elements, little chunks here and there, usually sped up or slowed down so drastically as to be unrecognizable (but still technically illegal).
Now, I do use more synthesizers than samplers. I have Kontakt at my fingertips — easily the most powerful sampler that I’ve ever used (one of the most powerful anybody’s ever used). And yet, I use it mostly to drive reproductions of orchestral and ethnic instruments. Part of the reason for that is time and breadth of interest, as well as a change in workflow when I changed back to software. Part is that I’ve become more interested in synthesis, especially analog synthesis of late.
But I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that part of it is the complicated morass of legality surrounding sampling. And that’s something that has resulted not only in me changing how I work, but in me feeling much more isolated and insular in my work. My work when I was heavily sampler-based was always deeply rooted in the culture, in touching base with other works that had inspired or interested me, in taking bits and pieces of my world and rearranging them to create something that reflected what I saw of it. Now, that’s very hard to do, at least without worrying about getting sued, and the internet makes even safety through obscurity difficult.
The increasing commodification and control of our culture does, as the author of the short piece says, restrict us and stifle our involvement with the culture. And I think it’s affected the degree of relevancy and meaning in my own work. (Not that I’m doing much of it these days.)
That’s one of the reasons that I release everything under Creative Commons. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be sampled, but I’d love it if I were, even if the person went on to make money from it. But more importantly, I think it’s important to there being a culture at all that people are allowed to participate in as anything other than paying consumers.