NOT--HERE

Episode 1 - Sound Art

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Sun, 2 Feb 2014 01:26:00 +1100

In this First episode of Not--Here you will get a brief overview of Sound Art through the eyes of google. Thats right, I googled Sound Art and read through the results for your enjoyment.

Just quickly. Being an internet user and regular listener of podcasts, I have noticed a lack of regular podcasters in the area of Sound Art. Not to say there are none, just that they are not particularly regular. It is my intention to upload a new podcast every fortnight or month. One of my favorite podcasts is FPP or The Film Photography Podcasts. They have been the inspiration behind starting this with their attitude of just do it!

The sound in this podcast are all tracks performed or created by myself, with the exception of the Japanese recording Kasane Ogi (SA 3033 or JP 365) on columbia 45 in my collection.

The links used(or you could just google it yourself):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_art
http://www.everydaylistening.com/
http://joltarts.org/home
http://www.liquidarchitecture.org.au/
http://www.soundart.com/
http://www.melbournereview.com.au/arts/article/sound-bites-city-at-RMIT-gallery
http://esp.anat.org.au/australian-sound-art-resources/
http://esp.anat.org.au/about/
http://www.anat.org.au/about/
http://www.nfsa.gov.au/artofsound/
http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/exhibitions/wired-for-melbourne-sound
http://www.gertrude.org.au/programs/public-education/talks-forums-28/
http://www.kingsartistrun.com.au/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ives

Octatrack Hands-on Videos Begin to Appear, Featuring New Elektron Super-Samp...

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 11:46:00 +1100

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Octatrack Hands-on Videos Begin to Appear, Featuring New Elektron Super-Sampler in Action

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 2/17/11

Elektron's Octatrack sampler is shipping to producer's hands, bringing this multitrack, time-stretching, step-sequenced, modulation-packing digital sampling hardware to real-world music-making. The results make comparisons like "Ableton in a box" seem pretty fair – and give you more an idea of what the thing does than Elektron's bizarre (and wonderful) short science fiction film, which seemed to suggest the box would incite revolutions and make you grow tentacles and change into a tortured alien. (See below)

Two of the people I'd most want to see work the device are featured in the videos above – at top, Richard Devine, and at bottom, Matthew Dear. Devine, for his part, makes use of re-triggering features:

Just triggering single shot samples of nord percussion and analogue drum sounds. Using the three stages of LFO's for each track to control effects animation and various other parameters. Making some use of the re-trigger sample functions spanned across 4 patterns.

Matthew Dear plays live on a New York public radio station program, Beats In Space on WNYU 89.1FM. (Listen to the whole show.)

It's a story focused on the drum sample library, not the Octatrack, but there's also a good example of how far you can stretch a single samples in Surachai's recent hands-on for TRASH_AUDIO.

Elektron have also in the last couple of months shared sound samples via their very, very active SoundCloud account; examples below.

Octatrack DPS-1 Site Sounds by Elektron

Octatrack DPS-1 | Sampling by Elektron

So, what's really going on inside the Octatrack? That to me is the interesting element of the design. As Roger Linn and Dave Smith focus on analog synthesis and no digital sampling (at least in Dave's machine) on the Tempest, the Octatrack takes digital features previous seen in software workflows and builds an integrated hardware design around them.

The heart and soul is an 8-track sequencer, with multiple patterns, arrangements, parts, and scenes for putting together a full performance (or performance set), which connects to "machines" for sample playback or external input machines. The combination of those basic modules is where things get a little crazy, with re-triggering, chaining of tracks, and the like, and Elektron promises to add more in future OS updates.

The other side of the machine is a whole heck of a lot of effects: multi-mode filter, parametric and DJ-style EQs, phaser, flanger, chorus, delay with repeat, plate reverb, compressor, and lo-fi distortion.

The most ingenious addition is a single optical crossfader, which allows DJ-style moves amidst all these digital layers, ideal for making sense of live performance.

Live sampling is a big draw; one of the better walkthroughs of how that works is in this video by darenager (who stresses this is not a musical performance, but a demo – I can appreciate that):

Elektron isn't assuming you're going to toss your computer in a bin; there's a USB2 port for connecting to a computer workflow. But it occurs to me that the likely retort of dedicated computer users – that they can do all this and more – is likely the reason others will choose to use this device. It does less, but focuses entirely on what you might want to do most.

I could go further with that, but I suspect we'll carry on with this balancing act between digital hardware and software until the last human consumes the last flicker of electricity on earth, so, uh, fill in a zillion already-hashed-out debates here. In fact, let's imagine them all at once, as a mysterious buzzing sound.

Bzzzz.

There. Done.

But yes, at the same time as someone who's reconfiguring my own live software rig, you have to admit that which features they chose – and how you see them mapped to hardware above – is interesting even if you ~~can't afford a new~~ don't want to buy a new Octatrack.

Mostly what makes me happy is knowing that this machine is making other people happy, and then in turn will make some of them make very good music and performances that I get to enjoy.

And yes, I really do love the bizarre short movie Elektron created to promote their device. It's nothing if not creative.

What do you make of this new design?

In particular, I'd love to hear from those of you who just got new machines. How are you using it musically so far?

Also, if you're in Sweden, can you tell me what's in your water that makes you engineer all this insane stuff? Should I wish I had the benefit of your education system? Should I just eat more herring? Both? Or will the herring, at least, make me regret less that I'm not a product of your education system?

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Meet the Beep-It Optical Theremin, and Learn Lessons in Product Development ...

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 09:43:00 +1100

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Meet the Beep-It Optical Theremin, and Learn Lessons in Product Development from its Creator

via Create Digital Music by michaeluna on 2/20/11

What happens when you try to make bleeping and beeping a business? Meet the Beep-It, a simple but addictive optical theremin, and a fun noisemaking impulse buy for sonic enthusiasts. Then, if you've ever fancied developing a new idea into a product, learn a little bit about the path of its creator. We hear a lot about technology and entrepreneurship in broad strokes, but rarely do people tell you what it means actually putting ideas to work. So, where better to start than with a simple idea and a labor of love? Michael Una, musician, sound artist, and inventor, explains.

Greetings all, this is Michael Una. I'm an occasional contributor to CDMu and I want to share a bit about a big project I've been working on.

This is Beep-it:

More info at thebeepit.com.

It's an analog optical theremin. This is not a new idea, but I was driven to make my own with a focus on playability and low cost. Beep-it started as an idea a few years ago, and I've been working to make it bigger and better since.

A little while back we heard from Roger Linn on "How to get poor with prototyping." Mr. Linn made many good points and offered a realistic, if somewhat harsh picture of what it actually takes to take an idea to market. I'd like to expand on this discussion by offering my own experience with this exact process, from prototyping to overseas manufacturing.

Back in 2009, my nephew's birthday was coming up and I needed a gift. So I looked around my studio and found that I had enough parts to make something that looked like this. It made a lot of funny beeps, so I called it "Beep-it," after the Cornelius song of the same name. The case is a big plastic petri dish and the circuit is a 555 oscillator with photocell control.

It turned out to be the hit of the party and all the little kids wouldn't stop beeping. I had a stack of the clear petri dishes left, so I made another 25 and put them up for sale on Etsy in late fall of 2009. These sold for $25. I also showed them at a small art gallery here in Chicago. I sold a few, but nothing too crazy until the Christmas shopping season hit and my Etsy inventory sold out in a matter of days. I scrambled to build more and fulfilled about 40 orders before the season was finished. Small numbers, but it showed that there was a bigger demand than I was aware of.

As I built all these Beep-its, two things happened. I became much better and more efficient at building them, and as I got better I became dissatisfied with the quality. I also ran out of petri dishes, so I undertook a redesign and came up with this:

This version upped the price to $35, because I figured out that I was barely making money at $25. Now that I had a better product, I set out to try and market them and drive up sales. I did workshops, made some videos, and did my best to get noticed by prominent blogs and influential musicans. It mostly worked. One blog post on Boing Boing kept me busy for a month. There were other months where I only sold a handful. But over the next few years I sold about 250 of this version and shipped them all over the world. I bought myself some nicer tools and moved my workshop from a 2nd bedroom to a rented studio space. Things were looking up.

Now there's an interesting problem here- the more I sold, the more time I had to spend actually building them. Which meant that I had less time to do other things, like tinkering on new designs, actually playing music, etc. I hired some friends and family to help with soldering circuit boards and drilling the cases, but it still took up a lot of my time. So I started looking for other solutions.

I applied for and won a small business grant from Scale Well, which opened my eyes to the possibilities of larger-scale manufacturing. I got some great advice from local hero Joe Born and electronics guru Mitch Altman, and started conversations with an overseas manufacturer. After much back-and-forth and dropping some serious coin, last month my first shipment of "fancy" manufactured Beep-its arrived:

I've now partnered with master motion and print designer Joe Moccia, whose fine work can be seen on the product itself and in our web and video design.

So despite having actually designed a product and brought it from idea to prototype to manufactured object, I still feel like I'm just getting started. My next steps are now to talk to bigger retailers and get them to carry my product, and to start working on the next product. And hiring a lawyer to handle some business administration stuff. And setting up a more robust accounting system. And putting together a new live performance to showcase my new devices. And like 10 other things that I can't think of right now. But let me offer a few parting tips for anyone thinking of turning their idea to reality:

Pick something you can accomplish. Build one, and sell it. Keep track of how long it takes you and how much you spent on parts, and how much you got for it. Then have a good think about whether it's worth pursuing.
While you can hire someone to do all the work for you, don't. It will cost you way too much, and you won't learn any of the valuable lessons that will go into running your business later. You actually need to do everything once before you can hire someone to do it for you, otherwise how will you know if they're doing a good or efficient job?
Don't spend money you don't have. Personally, I think taking on debt is a terrible idea. People will argue that it's the fastest way to accomplish your goals, but you won't spend it as wisely if it's imaginary money. Spend it out of your own pocket and try to grow that, especially at first.
You don't have to be an expert, but you do have to be an information sponge. In order to be successful, you have to be learning all the time. Which includes un-learning misconceptions and bad behaviors.
Ask for help. People love to share information and successful people won't mind helping someone with a good idea and good energy. People who don't share information usually aren't very successful anyway.
Stop thinking about it and do it. Until you actually do something, it's all theory. Get your hands dirty and make mistakes, and keep notes. The time has never been better for a good idea to take off.

Readers, many of you have great ideas. How far have you taken them? And what roadblocks have you hit along the way?

More (and purchase info):
http://thebeepit.com/

Previously:
Beep-It: Portable, Open, DIY Optical Theremin

Beep-It assembly of an earlier model at Handmade Music, Brooklyn (workshop + performances with Michael Una)

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Cheap Tape Saturation Hack: Delicious Distortion with a Tape-to-CD Adapter

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 08:41:00 +1100

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Cheap Tape Saturation Hack: Delicious Distortion with a Tape-to-CD Adapter

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 2/17/11

What a lovely coincidence that tape, originally a recording medium, works beautifully for distortion and saturation. Whatever the reason, tape saturation is a popular effect. If you want subtle, pristine saturation, there are various meticulous models of high-quality studio equipment. That was one topic in our interview earlier this week with Universal Audio's Dr. David Berners. (UA's model is intended to model the entire multitrack tape deck, so quite a bit different.) There's also, on a much gentler budget, a simple saturation effect in the US$79 Harrison Mixbus, intended more for the saturation behavior on main or submix buses than for replicating the tape equipment itself.

But sometimes pristine, high-fidelity tape equipment is the opposite of what you want. You want, instead, raunchy, destructive, dirty distortion. To me, like many others, that's more valuable. And it can cost nearly nothing, if you're willing to scrounge.

You don't need any pricey equipment: just one unwanted tape deck and a CD-to-cassette adapter you almost certainly have buried in a drawer or closet.

Helsinki-based producer and musician Riku Annala shares in a video tutorial how this works.

He writes:

Really, it's just a simple, almost stupid trick and I'm 99% sure that many others have realized it too, but I've never bumped into it anywhere. It seems at the moment that producers are trying to get away from the clean digital sound and there is a clear lo-fi trend going on. I've always been somehow fascinated with old c-cassette tapes (I'm a product of the 80′s) and I got myself an old tape deck for experimantation purposes. Here is the catch, I realized that by using one of those 3mm jack CD-to-tape adapters that are used in tape car stereo's for plugging external players, you can route digital (or any) audio through the tape deck to color the audio in various different ways!

More on his blog:
Studio Experiment #1: Tape Saturation for Cheapskates [Recue]

Well worth checking out his music, too, whilst you're there.

Variations on this trick? (I'm working on some hacks with a speed-variable portable tape player.) Other ideas? Make anything interesting this way? Let us know in comments.

Photos courtesy Recue.

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Finding Beauty in Samples, Musicians Make New Music from Another’s Raw Mater...

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 09:43:00 +1100

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Finding Beauty in Samples, Musicians Make New Music from Another’s Raw Materials

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 2/11/11

Remix albums are ubiquitous, and sampling has become one of the fundamental techniques of electronic music. But how much do raw materials impact the end result? And given that a sample might simply be a prompt or starting point, why not take on someone else's samples instead of your own?

Film aficionados routinely trade film – sometimes even double-exposing someone else's roll, for unexpected results. Here, a group of musicians take on another artist's samples, starting with 40 minutes of material by Forrest Reiff (Off Balance Atlas), shared on SoundCloud. The results are eclectic, sometimes exotic, sometimes chaotic, but well worth a sampling yourself. And if you decide to give them money, you can get a handmade cassette copy in the deal.

Forrest explains the project:

This album was initiated from an idea in my head to have other people hear the sounds that I sample and create their own interpretation of the source material. It's not really a remix album because there is no linear path that any of the sounds were presented in..it is more a reanimation of raw crystal sound waves into a new gem fortress. The artists were not asked to use the material exclusively, but merely to implement it into the creative process. Thank you to all the producers who participated out of their sheer creative drive in the first round. May the future bring bright things for us all.
The album is being offered free of charge but if you donate $8-$10 you will be guaranteed a physical copy of the release in cassette format. Feel free to donate less if you just wish to support the idea and enjoy the digital album. I will be hand making the tapes initially but if the interest becomes great and I receive enough donations a full on pressing will commence and you will receive a "professionally" dubbed and printed tape…which will mark the first official skylight gymnasium records release. We live in an extraordinary world filled with vast stimuli and beauty…I humbly thank you for your interest in this project and possible endeavors of the infinite beyond.
-Forrest Reiff (Off Balance Atlas)

One of the participating artists, Judson / Sumsun, sent us a heads-up on the project and shares his impressions:

I really enjoy listening to all the artists interpretations of the material, you can hear a little bit of Off Balance Atlas or hear a bit that I almost sampled, but then the songs really sound like the artists using the sample.

He fills us in on some of the process and background, too:

It's a lot of Roland SP sampling ([BOSS] SP-505 and [Roland] SP-404), cassette and mini cassette field recordings, random vinyl rips, hydrophones, analog and digital synths, you know, meat and potatoes type stuff. Then he sent the soundcloud page out to a bunch of friends and they sent it to their friends and it grew and grew. He started this months ago but just put the finished product up online. The label my project is on, Leaving Records, debuted it in a simple blog post:

http://leavingrecords.com/happening/sample-based-life/

Leaving is a small LA label owned by sonic wizard Matthewdavid and is a subsidiary of Alpha Pup Records (Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder label is also a subsidiary of Alpha Pup).

The images here come from Forrest's sampling setup, and I'm sure aren't dissimilar from many readers' noise-making closets.

SoundCloud was the means of sharing the files, for samples like this one:

Samplebasedlife (1) (DL able now) by samplebasedlife

SoundCloud and services like it, in turn, will be the subject of a lot of the hacking happening this weekend at the first-ever New York installment of Music Hack Day. I'll be interested to see if that helps spawn more ideas like this.

On the other hand, you don't need fancy technology; you could even mail a cassette tape.

http://samplebasedlife.bandcamp.com/

Tried something like this? Got a way of organizing samples, even for yourself? Let us know.

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Nine Keyboards in One: Extensive Q+A, Gallery for KORG on Kronos, Son of OASYS

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 12:58:00 +1100

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Nine Keyboards in One: Extensive Q+A, Gallery for KORG on Kronos, Son of OASYS

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 2/8/11

One keyboard, a mind-bending nine engines, lots of tech specs … now that we've lived in a world of impressive, technically-intimidating workstation keyboards for a couple of decades, it's easy to imagine your eyes glazing over when there's a new one, let alone the general public. So, what might get your attention? This.

"Workstation keyboard" is usually a phrase that sends me for the exits; my computer makes a perfectly good workstation, thanks. I've understood why people like them; I've just never seen one that could personally excite me. But now that the trade show hype has died down, it's time to take a serious look at the Korg Kronos. This one is a bit different. It's the first real integrated computer-in-a-keyboard workstation since the Korg OASYS – and it and the OASYS really do something no other integrated keyboards have. (Just sticking a PC in a keyboard shell doesn't quite count; that's almost more of a case mod than an integrated design.)

Now, imagine the OASYS in a completely new generation, and at half the price. The OASYS was priced so that it seemed like only rock stars need apply, however – US$8000. Kronos is US$3700 street, a price that has typically bought you an arranger keyboard, not something like this. Kronos, at that price, really does seem like a studio in a box. It's certainly not cheap (not with very capable instruments under a grand), but it enters the realm where a musician could make an investment in a keyboard that'd outlast a couple of generations of computers and (ahem) computer repairs.

Underneath its shell, the Kronos is still based on the Linux kernel (via a custom OS), lots of Korg software, and an Intel processor.

Kronos is impressive enough that other, computer-loving fans I know are taking a look. So, I asked Korg if they could walk us through more of the technical details.

This isn't a review. But while Korg's Richard Formidoni is positively glowing about their new baby, I do listen to what he says. Rich is one of us – and having been to his home studio, I can tell you that while he may be a company man, he has a cherished place for some instruments from makers beginning with the letter 'R' and rhyming with Yoland, not just Ma Korg. And while his pride shows through, he also has some great details for us. (In the grand tradition of CDM, I've … not edited those answers. All the news fits, so we print.)

So, consider this a full, detailed preview. I actually think it benefits from some distance from the NAMM show, the week in which everything is unveiled at once. If you miss the din of NAMM, replace all the bulbs in your house with fluorescents, fire up some white noise generators and background crowd sound effects discs, and then buy yourself breakfast at IHOP before charging yourself $500 to sleep over. And stay tuned for when we get to try this thing first-hand.

The original OASYS. It had a sexy metal body that looked like something from a Klingon engineering deck. But have a close look at the Kronos. While it appears descended from the architecture and philosophy of OASYS, down to similar menu pages, its synthesis engines and new features make it a worthy rival to its predecessor. Oh, and it's half as expensive.

What's the relationship of Kronos to OASYS, technically or in terms of learned experience?

There's absolutely a blood relation. Much of the technology that was originally developed for OASYS has made its way to KRONOS (sound engines, UI, etc). That being said, KRONOS has more than enough innovation to stand on its own. It has quite a few performance-oriented aspects that wouldn't have been possible without new hardware. One example is the inclusion of a fast solid state drive with direct access to about 12gb of sample libraries, rendering the blanket spec of "ROM size" totally irrelevant. More on that later. In terms of compatibility, KRONOS can load OASYS Programs, Combis, and Sequences.

What's the underlying hardware engine? (OASYS I know was a Pentium 4 with a custom embedded OS based on the Linux kernel.)

It's a dual-core Atom processor, again running a custom OS atop a Linux kernel. This is a big deal for a few reasons… Read the next answer for details.

It's very apparent how much the Kronos does, and I think typically we end the conversation that way — "look, it does this, this, and this." But walk us through, if you will, how someone might typically uses all of these engines? It appears that there are some significant features there (like the ability to seamlessly change sounds, which certainly is non-trivial on a computer).

Strap in, this'll be the long one…

A walk-through would definitely start with a description of the nine engines. I'll try to differentiate a little than our marketing copy, which as you might imagine, I am starting to recite in my sleep.

1. SGX-1 Premium Piano: This lets you play and modify large acoustic grand piano sample libraries, directly from the internal solid state drive. There are two 4.7gb libraries, a German grand and a Japanese grand. We include 30 piano types based around these libraries, with different response and tonality. SGX-1 lets you interact with the pianos by adjusting lid position, damper resonance, note release (simulating old damper felts), adding mechanical noises (keys, damper rise/fall), and adjusting velocity intensity/bias. Obviously, the big deal here is the SSD playback. It lets us use more velocity layers, high quality, unlooped samples, and gives us huge polyphony (SGX-1 can sound 400 mono channels at once).

The whole point is that SGX-1 provides the most realistic, detailed, nuanced, and flexible collection of pianos that we've ever offered.

2. EP: This engine recreates six different models of electric piano: Four tine-based Eps (Mark I, Mark II, Mark V, and Dyno) and two Wurlys (200 and 200a). It uses a method called MDS (Multi-Dimensional Synthesis) which doesn't have some of the more unnatural characteristics of looped samples, so it responds smoothly as you play harder. Any audible switching between soft/loud, and sweet/strong is gone. It also has the vintage effect models from the SV-1, without taking up any of the internal effect slots. Tremolo, vibrato, all the fixin's from the classic EPs are there.

3. CX-3: This is the software version of our CX-3 tonewheel organ. It lets you use the physical sliders as you would drawbars, and accurately models the chorus/vibrato, percussion, overdrive, leakage, and amplifier/rotary speaker. The fun part for me is how ridiculously tweakable it is. For example, you can basically design your own rotary speaker, as well as the room it's sitting in… And you can add four additional drawbars to the organ, with customizable pitches. I've logged a few gig/studio hours with this engine alone, and I'm pretty thrilled that Urban Sun finally has true drawbar organs to work with.

4. MS-20EX: Taken almost directly from our Legacy Collection software, this recreation of the MS-20 monosynth (now with 40 notes of polyphony) is a point-to-point model of every component from the original design. It was created by the same designers who made the original. You can even run audio input through the frequency-to-voltage converter, and have the synth sing along with you. You can create patches just as you would on the original, except instead of using actual cables, you just touch points on the display.

Put simply, it's an MS-20 that would not pass a screening for performance-enhancing drugs.

Ed.: Careful, Rich, the iPad fans may chime in here … as may someone with some other drug reference, dunno. Readers, see image above.

5. PolysixEX: Along the same lines as the MS-20EX, it's a recreation of the venerable Polysix (only now more like a Poly180). The display lets you touch a graphic representation of the Polysix, and we've also mapped all the controls to the KRONOS control surface for hands-on tweaking.

Just like the original Polysix, the PolysixEX is a great way to get into synthesis. It can be incredibly powerful, but it's also really approachable. If you're new to analog synthesis, it's a wonderful place to start experimenting.

6. AL-1: A more futuristic look at analog modeling. We often describe AL-1 as "futuristic" because of its potential to go so far beyond classic analog synthesis. It's a ground-up design, with massive capabilities. Each instance (two per Program) can have three oscillators, five envelopes, five LFOs, a step sequencer, and various filter types including a Multi Filter, which lets you blend together (and morph between) different filter shapes. One of its most notable features is the Ultra Low-Aliasing Oscillators, which sound pure throughout the audible frequency spectrum.

7. MOD-7: This is a frequency modulation synthesizer based on Korg's VPM architecture. It can read SysEx from classic FM synths (you know the ones), and it lets you go beyond the traditional "choose an algorithm" format, and create your own using a patch panel system. You can also modulate using PCM samples, ring modulation, and waveshaping. All things considered, MOD-7 offers the most programming depth of all the engines in KRONOS.

8. STR-1: This is a plucked-string physical modeling engine. You can design a string, with specific properties like damping, dispersion, and nonlinearity, and then excite it at any given position with a pluck, strike, or scrape. It's very good at replicating string-based instruments like harps, guitars, sitars, etc., but it's also capable of percussion, bell, and wind sounds, plus some really haunting textures that wouldn't be possible for a string to generate in the real world. There's a lot of fun to be had by warping the string's physical properties with the Vector Joystick as you play.

9. HD-1: Our all-purpose, high-definition sample playback engine. Eight stereo velocity layers with crossfading means we can into greater detail than we ever could before. As with SGX-1, we're taking advantage of large sample libraries being played from the internal SSD. With access to nearly 12gb of sample data (remember what Korg did with only 4mb in the M1?), It is a huge Swiss army knife of sound. HD-1 also incorporates Wave Sequencing and Vector Synthesis, from the Wavestation.

One of the big themes of KRONOS is making sound design fun, varied, and inspiring. There is so often a divide between modeling synthesizers and sample-based instruments, so it's pretty exciting to have one instrument that raises the bar in both areas. Having three different flavors of analog modeling is a great example of that. If you want quick and easy, go for the PolysixEX. If you want to experiment with a semi-modular patch panel, grab the MS-20EX. If you want to go beyond "classic" capabilities, fire up AL-1. I end up using the word "playground" very often while describing it.

There's also onboard KARMA, a powerful sequencer with 16 MIDI tracks and 16 24-bit audio tracks, our Open Sampling System, and loads of effects… I don't want to undervalue these aspects, but the fact that it's nine complete synthesizers is definitely a paramount feature.

So, this is all well and good… It's a synthesis monster. You can get lost for weeks, just programming sounds. The real beauty of it, though, is how all of them can work together and feed off of each other.

For instance, we now have a "Set List" mode that gives you immediate access to Programs, Combis, and Sequences from the same display. You can organize sounds and songs into groups of 16 slots. You don't have to duplicate sounds in an empty bank any more, or waste a Combi location just to play a single Program. Now you can make quick shortcuts. This is a godsend when you're playing live.

There are also some "under the hood" operations that really make all the difference in the world for live players as well as studio guys. For example, the smooth sound transitions are a vital new feature that the world has been waiting for. As you're playing, you can now switch to a new sound (regardless of mode), and the last one decays naturally, as if you just reached for a different keyboard altogether. We're able to do this without limiting the number of effects you can use, the number of timbres playing, or any of the other limitations that exist in other instruments.

Here's another one: KRONOS is always performing dynamic allocation of CPU processing power. Each of these synth engines has its own polyphony spec, and when one engine is running low, it will steal voices from another engine that isn't using it. The same is true of the effects, which are running on a separate processor core, unaffected by the synth engines' performance. KRONOS also allocates voices depending on other factors, such as where on the keyboard you're playing, how fast you play, etc.

The practical upshot of all these technologies is that there's no disconnect between you and your music. You never have to think about polyphony, you don't waste lots of time loading samples, you never have to worry about CPU overs. It's just an immediate connection between you and your music. It's what makes it an "instrument" rather than a "system."

If we need to draw a comparison to the DAW world, think of it this way- When you're changing from Combi to Combi, you could equate it to loading a DAW template with 16 CPU-gobbling softsynths and 16 effect plug-ins already assigned to tracks. Depending on your system, that template could take a little while to load. On KRONOS, you can dial through about six Combis per second, and start playing them immediately.

Speaking of DAWs, another great aspect of KRONOS is that it runs as a VST/AU plugin via a software editor. This opens up a whole series of doors for a studio musician… You can run all nine engines at once, 16 timbres total, controlled via the plug-in editor, without using your computer's resources. Whenever you revisit a project within the DAW, the editor software will recall the appropriate settings, so it's just the way you left it. It also has class-compliant USB MIDI and audio I/O capabilities. I'm actually listening to Pandora right now, being piped through via USB to KRONOS's headphone jack.

Artist feedback was a part of this, I know — who did you work with (of those you could name) and what kind of feedback did they give?

We worked very closely with Herbie Hancock, George Duke, Lyle Mays, Jae Deal, Adam Blackstone, Tom Coster, Jordan Rudess, Frank McComb, Jeff Lorber John Novello, Eldar, David Haynes, and Russ Ferrante… Plus a few others. I don't want to (mis)quote them directly, but we got plenty of positive feedback from all of them.

Most of these artists are mission-specific… Some wanted to focus on the EPs, some focused on organs, etc. As a result, KRONOS has lots of signature sounds, representing customizations we made with these artists to tailor the instrument to their needs. This includes key response, tonal changes, effect choices, EQ, etc. We encouraged them to be very specific about their tweaks, because we wanted the resulting sounds to feel like you're borrowing the artist's instrument, rather than just calling up a new Program.

I will say that all of these sound design sessions ended with some variation of "So, when can I get one?"

As you can see, it's easy for me to start ranting… I'm genuinely thrilled to be a part of KRONOS's development, and I can't wait until the rest of the world gets to try it.

More information…

Like I said, this isn't a review – so if you've got questions, fire away.

In the meantime:
http://www.korg.com/kronos

And for some history, here's me writing about the making of the OASYS, way back in 2005 for O'Reilly:

Inside a Luxury Synth: Creating the Linux-Powered Korg OASYS

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Free Trance Tutorial Video Course

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 10:18:00 +1100

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Free Trance Tutorial Video Course

via Waveformless by Tom on 2/9/11

KVR user SoundMagus recently posted this:

"I created a Trance course for Sonic Academy a while back but they went into receivership and couldnt afford to pay me for it, so here it is for free

If you goto http://music-production-videos.com/blog and register you will receive an email with username and password.

Please login with these credentials and then goto this link - http://music-production-videos.com/blog/free-tranc e-course/ where you will see the free course - only the first 3 videos are available at the minute the rest are being uploaded now. "

He has since uploaded more videos and has received a pretty good response so far. It's rare to get this kind of stuff for free, so enjoy!

[via KVR-Audio]

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Music, Like Clockwork: Modular Music Boxes with Rotating Wheels, Inspired by...

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Wed, 9 Feb 2011 09:00:00 +1100

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Music, Like Clockwork: Modular Music Boxes with Rotating Wheels, Inspired by monome

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 2/8/11

Working with music in software means thinking a bit like a music box maker, using sequences to create note and rhythm machines. Nick Rothwell sends a project in which he literally engages the mechanical music box, with rotating electro-magnetic discs and a set of digital devices that recall their 19th-century predecessors. The designs are modular, interconnecting with one another into a little music box ensemble. And in another sign of the influence of the design of the monome, they explicitly nod to that hardware and its community as an aesthetic cue. (I have to admit, though, I'm more envious of this than the new arc.)

At the heart of the piece is a custom-made electro-magnetic rotary sequencer. Melodies are stored on a series of interchangeable, acrylic, 10" disks embedded with small magnets arranged in a regular circular grid. In the same way vinyl records are located on a turntable these disks are centered on a spindle and rotate over a 'play head' made up of a line of magnetic field sensors – effectively replicating but superseding the set of pins on the revolving cylinder that pluck the tuned teeth of a steel comb in the traditional device. Additional units are 'daisy-chained' to each other via single cables and include a self contained and controllable sound source (to hear and effect the musical output) and an animated representation of a dancing ballerina automaton – realised as a modern-day interpretation of the praxinoscope (the successor to the zoetrope – the popular visual parlour toy of its era – but which improved on it by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors).

Inspired by the design of the second generation monome.org controllers these modular components draw on their minimalist design aesthetic and utilise a similar restricted material palette of walnut, brushed aluminium, translucent acrylic, and orange LEDs.

Nick aka Cassiel is part of the Monomatic trio, which:

…was initiated in 2007 as a collaboration, experimental playground and halfway house between the work of Anthony Rowe of squidsoup – art, research and play in creative interaction design using sound, physical and virtual space – and Lewis Sykes then of The Sancho Plan – a progressive audiovisual collective who explore the realtime interaction between music and video. Monomatic has since evolved and the current line up now includes Nick Rothwell a.k.a Cassiel – a composer, performer, software architect, programmer and sound designer.

http://www.monomatic.net/modular-music-box/

The work was shown as part of London's Kinetica, an exhibition of kinetic art over the weekend.

Rotating music box-style wheels is an elemental design in musical machines, which means there are countless works one could mention here. I'll leave that to comments, though, because I imagine you'll think of a few examples I haven't. Fire away.

Here's an early visualization Nick did of an unrelated project, rendered in Max for Live. I love the circular visualization; I've played with some similar sketches myself in Processing, but not in Max. Like a wheel inside a wheel…

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Fennesz és BJ Nilsen A38

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Tue, 8 Feb 2011 12:16:00 +1100

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Fennesz és BJ Nilsen A38

via alone,in a spaceship to Andromeda by sunnoliver on 2/4/11

fantasztikus volt.

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Does Sequencomat for the Now-Defunct Lemur Trump iPad Touch Sequencers? Watc...

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Tue, 8 Feb 2011 08:29:00 +1100

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Does Sequencomat for the Now-Defunct Lemur Trump iPad Touch Sequencers? Watch it Do Ableton, Analog

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 2/7/11

Interactive touch layouts for sequencers are something of a no-brainer – imagine if an analog pattern machine and the deck of the Starship Enterprise had a love child. But platforms come and go. And just because the iPad is the shiny, new thing – and remains the most affordable solution at the moment – doesn't mean you shouldn't learn from ideas beyond just the platform with an Apple logo. Almost a year ago, we saw some compelling sequencer ideas for the Lemur. Sadly, that hardware was discontinued in the fall. But the users keep using it.

Matthias Wille's Sequencomat has gotten far more powerful since we last looked at it. Far from catching up, indeed, he argues iPad apps are falling further behind – and he makes a good case for that. So hardware and software designers, take note.

It does sync, in both directions. It sends just about everything. It can randomize steps. You need the software on the host computer, not just the controller, but put it all together and there's some serious power here. Matthias gives us the overview:

detailed stepvalues for octave, note, velocity, length, CC, delay, steppropability (V2 had only trackvalues for those functions)

switchable randomfunction on each stepvalue for velocity, length, cc … very nice to variate some aspects of a pattern single and multiple track editing

3 clocktype: Master, slave, rewire (and – I still wonder! – my own clock is more stable than most professional DAWs) for sure independent midichannel, timing and tracklength on each track (polyryhthmic patterns!)

100 patterns to save and load in realtime

See the excellent overview video at top – or marvel as it works with an analog setup, below.

I asked Matthias to explain more about why he thought this was better than other solutions out there. He took a break from adding new functionality – freely-definable scales, note and octave randomization – to answer at some length.

I could edit this, but I think you'd lose some of the personality of this conversation, so here it unedited.

Lets start with some common differences:
- sequencomat is a plain midisequencer. it can only send midi… while most (all?) Ipad seq have a sample browser. That makes them more "standalone", and thats the main concept of an app. But to me it makes no sense, cause I have my drumracks inside my DAW (Ableton), so to change the sounds I am triggering I just change the note….
- some Ipad seq also have FX section. again this makes no sense to me, cause I can control that in my DAW by Midicontrolchange (CC) or with another page on my Lemur, which gives me more flexibility.

These both features are more a matter of taste, but it points out the difference of a controller integrated in a bigger system or a standalone you can use everywhere but are restricted if it comes to communication.
Now a list of functions most (all?) Ipad seq miss and even most classical hardware midi stepsequencers have not:

- independent steprange (1-16 steps each track) and timing.
technical this means that each track got its own clock section. Musically it means you can do polyrhythmic patterns…ever overlapping and changing. On typical 4 on the floor music this is meaningless…but if you want to go more experimental…. (Moltons (?) Ipad app (that one that syncs) got something simular, based on quater sections, but only for timing, not for steprange)

- independent midichannel on each track with possibility to change during play and saved within the patterns.
technical it was hard to get rid of the midihung that can appear if you change the channel while a note is played….the "note off" (damn midiprotocol) will be send on the new channel…so I had to cut these notes first. but only these notes, not all on this channel! musically it gives you much freedom, cause while in one pattern track 1 can be an epiano in the next pattern it can be a drumrack. (well, with that freedom some confusion can come in)

- stepvalues for velocity are quite a standard…. but I got also stepvalues for octave, note, length, CC, delay, steppropability.
With "octave" and "note" you can give every step another tone to trigger (most classic hardware seq have that), if you use a well organised drumrack, changing the octave will change the drumsound (different BDs all lay on pitch C) and with changing the note you can change the drumtype (e.g. snare on D).
"Length" is also a stepvalue on some hardware stepsequ, but mostly on a discrete scale (1/4 1/2 1), while I have continious scale. You can set the maximum on the maxpatch for better fine control ranging from 1-16 steps.
You can furthermore control 8 CC-values – each track has one attached, they are boundend in timing and steprange, but not in meaning. You can set the Midichannel and Controllernumber of those independent and – guess what – these are saved within the patterns…so again a lot of freedom in routing.

With "delay" you can delay each step in triggering and therefore create a groove. Swing would be to delay every second step. But you can go much more in detail… cause you can also control the amount of delay for each step. The predefined range is 0 – -50msec, but you can set it to whatever (-2000msec?) on the maxpatch for more experimental settings. The delay of a step is also reflected in the steplight, giving you a visual impression of the groove.
With Steppropability you can set some activated steps to only be triggered in lets say 30% and therefore create some variation of your pattern. Each step independent on each track, all saved within the patterns. The stepvalues reflect more "unlikeliness", cause the higher they are the more unlikely it is that the tone will be playsed (if set at all in the stepmatrix – sure). The unlikeliness values are compared with a random value that is triggered on 16th, 8th, 4th, 1 bar, 2 bar or 4 bars. Setting this to higher values will cause the same variation several times before changing. To give you visual feedback of the actual propability status (on/off) there are little LEDs on each step: If they are off – no tone.

- stepvalues for velocity, length, CC, delay got a "range" control on the left side. So you can control the range (e.g. 40-66 instead of 0-127) while the relative difference of the stepvalues still work. So you can fade in velocity…. Of course, that range is also saved within the patterns, independent for each track.

- stepvalues for velocity, length and CC got a randomfunction you can switch on for each step independently (!!!!). so if you want the velocity on step5 of track2 to variate, just push the little switch under the stepvalues. Or the length of step9 on track3? Or both? Or all? Every time those marked stepvalues are triggered they generate a new value. But remember – the output will ever stay within the range. (which makes a random much more usefull than plain 0-127) With this function you can surf on the border between total control and random. Thats what I love as an artist….discovering this border of controlled random. And this stepwise random is really a bomb…it makes this static thing "alive"!

- single or multiple track editing. Normally you step through the tracks and choose a function. But what if you want to change the values of more than one track at once? No prob, switch to multiple track editing, choose more than one track (chosen tracks become red) and all values you enter will be routed to all tracks. (Funny, but this concept is not common sense…maybe because with mutliple track editing you can get no more feedback – what should be displayed if the values differ?) So you can change tempo or steprange of different tracks at once (nice breaks). Or fade in the velocity of a couple of tracks with the range object. Or the CCs (!). Or even the propability if you set the random value to "manual", this will cause fading in the "density" of a pattern.

- all of this saved within 100 patterns handled in realtime. jumps are done immediately giving you a good feel for interacting. But you can also activate a "automatic pattern chain", like play pattern 2, 3, 4. In random order or reverse? No prob. Jumping on 1/4 bar – 1/2 bar – 1 bar – 2 bar – 4bar….your choice. You can also "exclude" single tracks from pattern jumping if you want.

-step and track mute – independent from patterns for breaks…

-a X/Y pad for controlling a CC on each axis and /or triggering notes (vertical velocity, horizontal speed (syncable!)) all with nice ranges attached to the borders to control the min and max output.

-and finally 3 clock options: master, slave, rewire.
I had rewire only first on V1 but never was satisfied with the results. Especially Abletons Midiclock (using it as master or as rewiremaster) was f***ing bad. As long as you do not reach 50% CPU power it is ok, but after that it turns unstable…sure, these are only Milliseconds…but damn, they call it "Live" !! Some of my users told me, that Cubase is much better. But I decided to build my own clock. I did not rely on max standard clock, I build it from scratch…with very nice results. Now all users confirm, that my clock as master is the most stable one. (I still find it confusing….me building a better clock than Ableton?… the background might be, that ableton drops the clock first before they drop audio, while on my maxpatch the clock has the highest priority)

So – cocky or not – if it comes to plain stepsequencing, SequencomatV3 eats them all

In a future update I will rework the pitch section: Octaves and Notes will be defined by the user. that means scales instead of 12tones each Octave. not only major or minor…nooooo…. free defineable scales – you just enter your keynote and the halftone steps. And for sure – then the random-stepvalue-switches makes also sense and will be there (I cutted it on octave and not only because it sounds so inharmonic on 12 tones)

An essential ingredient in getting all of this to work – a Max/MSP patch works with functionality back on your desktop host.

Okay, that's all well and good and fantastic – but the Lemur is now discontinued. So I was curious what Matthias' plans were – would he consider a future beyond the Lemur?

Yes, sure. But not the Ipad.
I thought about going on it…. my core engine is done in max, so why not make a touchOSC surface? Because TouchOSC (as great as it is) is generations behind the Lemur. Not only physics…hey, I do not use physics in my sequencer… but many control objects are missing (range!), leds are not handled in vectors (as far as I get it), there is no light interaction independent from on/off state, no moveable containers (well, I think in the last version they added this, not sure) and so on…. so it will not be simpley changing some paths in the maxpatch – if so I would have been already there, kickin some ass – it will be completely reconstruct everything.
And I do not want to do that if I then have to sell it for 10$. This pricetag of apps makes the Ipad unattrative to me. Not because I am a greedy guy, but because it isn´t worth it. Most users need support for their midisetup. Even this support will be more effortfull than 10$. And furthermore there is still that bidirectional communication issue. The Ipads WiFi can handle over 1500 values each pattern in realtime? Hahahaha…lol, never. It is not made for that.

So instead of competing with all these Apps, I think of giving my Sequencomat a control surface directly in Max and wait for more and more touchscreens coming to couple with any PC or Mac. Just as a 2nd monitor. As my sequencomat never was ment as a standalone, this fits much better. But we will see…this will not happen within the next half year. See, I am so happy that I have my dreamsequencer here… after the next update I will chill and make some music again. Because this is something I missed all the last 1 1/2 years… having time and energy for making music again and not only coding…. (and this is also a reason, why the music in my demovideos is a bit uninspired or boring…)

I'm way over my word quota, so I'm going to leave it at that. But while sometimes I actually prefer a simpler touch device, even I think the guy has some good points here. Keep in mind that we're talking the combination of the touch layout, the touch hardware, and then the software on the host. The iPad could certainly accomplish a lot of this (though not over an Ethernet cable), and we should assume the iPad is, in the long view, just the leading edge of a large wave of tablets.

So – discuss.

http://www.tonvibration.de/SequencomatV3.html

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Make an Album in February Or Bust: The RPM Challenge, and Deadlines are Good

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Thu, 3 Feb 2011 09:54:00 +1100

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Make an Album in February Or Bust: The RPM Challenge, and Deadlines are Good

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 2/2/11

Photo (CC-BY-ND) tianhua.

Record an album in the month of February, and have it in the mail by March 1: that's the RPM Challenge, and so far, some 6,000 acts have already delivered. Nathan Groth writes us with details (and apologies for late posting here, since that means you have… less time).

Long time reader of CDM. I'm also a coordinator of this little thing called the RPM Challenge, which is now into year #6. I think you may find it interesting and we would love to get some coverage in the hopes it may entice more people to get involved. I also think it's something the CDM community would find appealing.

While it's not geared specifically towards electronic or experimental musicians or usage of specific tools, it does represent a little local event that has gone global, while still running entirely (100%) by volunteers and donated server space. The website is also powered by open source code. With no corporate sponsorship, it's managed to curate one of the largest free music collections on the internet, plus it's a really neat idea!

It began as a idea based on National Novel Writing Month, and it was a strictly local affair in Portsmouth, NH at first. Over the years it's gone global, attracting people from as far off as Tokyo and McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Despite the reach, though, the great thing is that it's managed to be strongly local as well, and in that really lies it's power- it's managed to walk a fine line between an amorphous- internet based event and a strongly local one at the same time.
Enough babbling from me, I'm just an excited volunteer.

rpmchallenge.com

The competition is global, and there's a global listening party on March 26 – I hope we'll check in there. Do let us know if you get your music posted; Synthtopia posts the same call so perhaps we'll have a number of music tech blog-reading producers out there.

I'm not sure February will be right for everyone, but you'll know if it's right for you. As for the question of whether a month is enough time to produce an album, in some cases, it's actually harder to take longer. When I talked to Gold Panda back in October, he described the three weeks he had to make "Lucky Shiner" as the very element that made the production possible and satisfying:

I looked after their dog over Christmas and had my whole studio set up there. I have a really short attention span, so most tracks are done in a day, and then I'm bored with them. And if they turned out good, then they're good, and if I think that they're not really finished or whatever, then they get rendered to the hard drive and put into iTunes and sit in there forever.
I was never really a big fan of dogs before, so I kind of had this bonding with this dog called Daisy. She'd wake up really early and wake me up, and I'd take her for a walk, come back, start making tracks. And then after an hour or so, she'd want to go for a walk again or play. Every time I was getting into it, she'd kind of stop me and we'd go for a walk. It stopped me from overworking things, and I think that's what made it — [the album's] more simple and more direct. It was good to have a distraction while I was doing it.

It's a familiar scenario – both the three weeks, and the smaller periods of time are a kind of "timeboxing." (See my story on the Pomodoro Method.) I hope to talk more about productivity this week and next, so feel free to bring up ideas – and let us know if you're taking up the RPM gauntlet.

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Handmade Effects, Grungy Goodness of the Gallolizer, and DIY Hardware FX

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Thu, 3 Feb 2011 09:51:00 +1100

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Handmade Effects, Grungy Goodness of the Gallolizer, and DIY Hardware FX

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 2/2/11

The Gallolizer is a handmade multi-effects sound mangler, an array of dirty, delicious sound-destroying effects in a single handcrafted box. It's the work of a Spanish engineering and art collective called MP19, an Arduino-loving, free software-using, open source group of artists who turn those platforms into the kind of grungy sounds that make them happy. (And that, of course, is what it's really all about.)

But before we talk specifics, check out the video. We long ago departed the world of high-fidelity sound; this is digging your toes straight into the mud. I'll wait.

Got it?

Good – now onto technical details. Part of what allows the various dimensions of sound in the Gallolizer's repertoire is the sharing of schematics. Long before open source was even a term or fully-formed idea, hardware makers routinely borrowed ideas from schematics – it was hard not to – and apart from cases of gross abuse, the process was more or less a fact of life. Open source hardware and Internet sharing has since formalized that process, and made it a whole lot easier for beginners to try out making projects, thanks to ample and friendly documentation.

As a result, the Gallolizer is a window into a whole world of electronic sound ideas a tinkerer can try out. Here's how designer Gonzalo Garcia describes the ingredients:

An Arduino Bitcrusher based on Kyle McDonald's design (http://www.instructables.com/id/Lo-fi-Arduino-Guitar-Pedal/). We had improved the output for line level on all modes and a bit of warm in overall sound with some transistors in the output.

Ampeg Scrambler clone, based on 2n5306 darlington transistors for adding some darkness to bass and bass drums. You can transform hi-hats and snares in a more crispy sound.

Germanium fuzz is basically a NPN germanium transistors fuzzface for process sounds and add some germanium hiss.
LP Filter is based on Diego el de León's design (http://esquemasnoise.blogspot.com/2008/12/wilson-low-pass-filter.html) for a low pass filter and based himself on a Ray Wilson's design. Incredible resonance and a bit of analog distortion.
LoFi Delay, based on Rebote Delay from tonepad (http://www.tonepad.com/project.asp?id=51), with the infinite feedback mod and improved output for a bit of warm. We are planning to add a modulation mod to this nice delay.
Arduino Reverb based on lab3′s design (http://interface.khm.de/index.php/lab/experiments/arduino-realtime-audio-processing/), with an improved output for less noise and more warmth, based on transistors . We also add a mix control for controlling the amount of effect.

Kyle McDonald's Arduino-based lo-fi guitar pedal.

You can't buy a Gallolizer – it's a one-off design, unless you want to try to make them an offer. But the effects unit component will be released as a PCB and as open source hardware. It's funny, as I had also just been looking at Kyle's design (Kyle is such a Renaissance visual and sonic inventor, it kind of makes my head hurt), so this could be ripe for exploration. And there's no saying this is only for those who want to become avant-garde noise artists – everyone can use a little grunge sometimes, regardless of musical idiom.

Not open source hardware, but as it happens our friend Tom Whitwell (of the sorely-missed Music Thing blog) is doing beautiful DIY work of his own based on a project from musicpcb.com. He's also exploring techniques for housing and is making some lovely, tasteful decals, too, as you can see in the picture. I'm hoping Tom will share some of his work.

Photo (CC-BY-ND) Tom Whitwell. Click through for some Flickr chatter, and Tom trying to make me buy a Eurorack or something. (I'm broke. Seriously.)

Echo Base PT2399 delay pedal on Hohner Pianet T by MusicThing

Got DIY effects projects of your own, or requests? I'll also see if we can't find a good beginner project for everybody. I wouldn't mind an effects box to go with my MeeBlips.

Other wonderful projects:
http://mp19.wordpress.com/

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Arc: New Music Controller in Video, Detailed Q+A with monome Creator Brian C...

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 09:53:00 +1100

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Arc: New Music Controller in Video, Detailed Q+A with monome Creator Brian Crabtree

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 1/21/11

Can minimalist controller design make even two knobs into a digital instrument? We'll soon see. The arc, the new controller from monome designer Brian Crabtree, contains just two high-resolution encoders (known to us in everyday usage as "knobs"). It makes no sound; every minute rotation and a push-button action are telegraphed to a computer. Everything that would make it musically interesting, then, is up to the makers of interactive software on the computer. At their disposal are interactive, brightness-adjustable LED displays that ring those encoders.

At US$500 (or $800 for a four-knob model), the results aren't cheap, challenging even loyal fans of the grid controller monome. What you get for your dollars, at least according to the creator, is materials and handmade construction. The case is made out of solid, sustainable walnut, the facing from aluminum. In grainy Internet video, it may look like there's plastic around the rings; it's not – it's glass. The slip mat is felt, sourced from small farms. I almost hesitate to point these things out, as it might make it seem as though the arc is expensive for the sake of being expensive, and that wouldn't be fair; ultimately, it's the arc's small-quantity, handmade, local construction that drives up the price, relatively speaking, in the iPhone world in which we live.

Anyway, whether you buy one or not, I think it'll be the question of how software can rise to the challenge of the arc's provocatively-minimal design that's more interesting. Brian has shot a first video experiment with one demo, in which you can see those LEDs providing feedback with the software, showing the position of loop points. Even this video only scratches the surface: Brian hopes that this won't just be a monome companion, but that some will find ways of using it on its own.

A recent post on the official monome site provides additional details:

256 steps per revolution, with integrated push button
64 leds per ring, each led independently has 16 levels of brightness
arc two: 6" x 3.5" x 1.5"
arc four: 10.5×3.5" x 1.5"
Ordering Feb. 18, ships first week March
Initial run: 50 of each. (Yeah, that'll sell out fast, even in this economy.)

A design like this rightfully raises questions – even doubts – so I've spoken with Brian to see how he sees his latest creation.

arc, alongside a monome. The combination is likely to be the most popular, if for no other reason than the arc's appeal to the monome audience. But creator Brian Crabtree says that isn't exclusively the intent of the design. All photos courtesy monome.

CDM: Who is this for? Is it primarily a companion to the monome, or might you imagine people using it as a controller on its own?

Brian: fundamentally it's for people who are interested in exploring new methods of interaction. the arc is simply a high-resolution encoder and a bunch of lights. like the open decoupled grid, it's a blank canvas which provides the same opportunity to invent, share, and generally think differently about process.

while certainly it makes sense integrated into larger systems or paired with a grid device, i'm hoping the extreme constraints will also prompt ambitious, minimalist performance tactics. and it's not simply a fancy volume knob. the visual feedback has sufficient depth to facilitate much more exacting use of the input. i do see the possibility of interesting two-knob applications that make good use of visual feedback and various modes.

Price seems to be a debate no matter what things cost, so let's ask it another way – realizing many people aren't familiar with what goes into manufacturing and how that impacts price, where does the cost of an arc go? What are the major sources of its cost, specifically?

like the grid devices before it, the arc had several tricky design challenges. it's often more difficult to achieve a minimalist aesthetic, which is perhaps counter-intuitive.

the materials, sources, and people we chose to work with account for the cost. the enclosure is milled solid black walnut, harvested in central pennsylvania. aluminum work, anodizing, glass cutting (that is not plastic), laser cutting, sheet metal fabrication, circuit assembly, and pcb manufacturing all happen in the eastern US. we're deeply invested in our local economy.

there's no one part that makes the device expensive– it's the total number of custom parts that seem somewhat cheap on their own– and there are a lot of them. i'll be sharing some photos of the construction process when we get a chance.

of course, there's the fact that these devices are hand-made in very small batches– we don't get huge discounts on quantity orders.

but comparing prices is a bit silly– we're not really competing with yamaha or novation or the like. if you truly appreciate what goes into these devices and what they do (and don't do), i think you will find the pricing fair and reasonable.

With just two encoders on the main model, there's a lot of focus, obviously, on just these controls. In practical use, as you get your hands on this thing, how much do you find having the additional resolution makes a difference? Can you really make movements small enough to take advantage of it?

tiny movements can be tracked– 256 steps per revolution– and the large knob allows for greater physical control. high resolution is a major benefit. there's room for more subtle gesture in controllers, and i'm hoping room for thoughtful, slow, and maybe even quiet musical contours.

the integrated pushbutton allows for press-sweep-release gestures, toggling, or however the application would like to interpret the data. in a way it doubles the input streams per knob– turning while pressed, turning while depressed. with the correct app design this feels remarkably natural.

How are those messages sent via OSC?

there's a simple format similar to other monome devices. we're about to release a new serial-osc server (called serialosc) which will make for a much more plug-and-play experience.

encoders send out delta values: +1, -1, -2 for example. they don't have an absolute position, so it's up to the software to count and transpose these values. it makes for much more interesting translation of what knob movement means– for example you could map a single "tick" to be 1 normally but 0.1 when holding the button down– coarse/fine movement.

the led ring has a flexible and detailed set of messages. set a single led, set all leds to one value, set a range of leds to a value, or send a whole array of 64 led values in one OSC packet. these optimizations allow for incredibly fast refresh rates, resulting in very smooth animation.

the leds support variable brightness with 16 values per led. i see a lot of potential here– layers, waveform mapping, background vs. foreground, reactive metering…

As I recall from our conversation, USB connections are different than on the monome, yes? Will you use USB class for control as well as serial-over-USB? How will the arc connect to software?

we're using ftdi again. long boring story! some other time.

Ed.: FTDI refers to a chip manufacturer. Long story short, this involves having a USB device act as a standard, non-USB serial port, which involves drivers. (Fun fact: those drivers are now rolled into recent kernels on Linux, which makes life easier for free software users.) The arrangement works, and in the past people have appreciated the performance they get out of the arrangement. It does (likely) knock out the possibility of using your arc with an iPad.

Don't try this at home: the arc's more complex design means it's not as suited to be a kit, says Crabtree. But you can expect a similarly open community and attitude from its designer.

Why only two (or four) encoders, and not more?

you can already get more encoders elsewhere, but without resolution of input or output. we generally don't like reinventing things that already exist.

for this project i think having too many elements detracts from the focus. we'd prefer a high degree of detail.

What patches have you seen created so far for this?

that's a funny question given only one prototype exists at the moment! but the monome forum seems to have already brainstormed several pages of possibilities– one user even created a flash app for realizing detailed diagrams.

the community really surprised me on this one. i figured new apps would come about quickly once the actual devices were out in the wild, but never did i imagine apps were getting first versions before the hardware was ready.

The first run is limited, but if it's a big success, do you anticipate making larger runs later?

certainly, though we'll follow our same methods which have proved successful over the years– releasing in editions, and trying to create enough to meet demand but not much more. it's still just kelli and me building, and it's not great to have extra parts laying around.

Brightness you noted was addressable; how would you control brightness on the LED rings?

/enc/ring/set n x s
where n = encoder number, x = led number, s = state/brightness (0-15)

Presumably if people wished to add, say, accelerometer and/or tilt, they could do so? (This wound up creating interesting variations to control on the monome.)

i've done a huge redesign of the electronics, modularized and standardized. we're working on a tilt upgrade that should be a matter of plugging in a small ribbon cable.

Will any component of this, beyond bundled software, be released under an open source license, or is it already? (I think perhaps the USB chip you're using already is?)

i'm looking at licenses (some which you referred me to) and expect to post firmware and schematics and everything. it's not realistic for people to make a DIY version (complicated boards, insanely tiny parts), and we won't be making a kit version (though we will have an encoder module that will plug into the new mk).

most importantly, the protocol will be open source. both the serial and OSC protocol. so smartphone emulators and arduino clones will be possible and encouraged.

Because the hardware is not available under an open source license and cannot be freely redistributed, I wouldn't call monome or arc "open source hardware." At the same time, it's different in significant ways from conventional proprietary hardware, and it does have genuinely open source protocols and software. Perhaps "modifiable" is another word. Without getting stuck on labels, how would you describe what the monome is? And you've talked about some other priorities you have that exist outside the open source discussion that seem they also merit conversation; can you comment on that?

i agree, it may need another name.

i'm slightly ambivalent about the label "open source hardware." it's come to mean more than simply having the sources available, which was my original goal. people should absolutely know how their equipment works and be able to modify it if desired. it's turned into a different conversation, about freedom– the most anonymous free-market sort of freedom. and this is a good conversation to have, but it somehow left the realm of sharing and went somewhere else. i wish more people were interested in discussing resource use, materials, and local economics– these are very real issues concerning physical goods. the open source hardware debate seems to have inherited too much from the open source software ideology.

overall i'm a proponent of communicating with people. if you'd like to use someone's work, contact them and chat about it. licenses are only a starting point.

Side note – OSC messages + Arc

TheAlphaNerd posts via comments this excerpt of Brian on the forums. This should be considered a draft of the OSC implementation, but I think is interesting nonetheless.

To simplify this… there are 64 leds per encoder. There are 16 stages of brightness. Leds can be changed as a group or individually

"most of this is still tentative, could endure minor refinements before the end of the month.

in short:

from device:
/enc/delta n d
where n is encoder number, d is change (ie 1, -1, +2)
/enc/key n s
where n is encoder number, s is state (0,1)

the refresh is incredibly fine and fast, so unless you're really throwing the knob, you rarely get beyond 1 or -1 on delta.

that said, it's "up to you" to keep a counter when writing your own apps. i'll be making a bunch of "helper" apps and templates to provide high-level functionality to app writers.

one thing to consider– being able to set rotation limits (setting ranges), "chunking" the display into 16 sections, having the rotation speed (fine vs course) be set by the button press.

what about a rotating led cycle that's an LFO (or sample playback)? turning the know pulls at the velocity like a turntable. push down the knob and it applies a friction brake. hold it down and spin one way to give it a serious push, let go and it runs free.

etc.

protocol to device:
/enc/ring/set n x s
set led x (0-63) of encoder n to state s (0-15)
/enc/ring/all n s
set all leds of encoder n to state s (0-15) like /clear on monome grids
/enc/ring/map n d[64]
map array d (64 values) to encoder n, like /frame on grids"

It's still early days for the arc, as it awaits production and more patches and creativity. I hope to offer more on it as that happens.

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LFO Everything, Max for Live, and Attribution

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 08:38:00 +1100

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LFO Everything, Max for Live, and Attribution

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 1/24/11

This afternoon, I feel obligated to offer some explanation. Following my post about Julien Bayle's LFO Everything module for Ableton Live, several readers and a forum thread on the Ableton Live forum raised concerns that a portion of Julien's Device was adapted from another developer's work without attribution. Heated discussion on the Live forum spilled over into our comment thread. I was contacted by Edward Majcher, the developer of the original patch in question, entitled Device LFO, and have been in communication with Mr. Majcher and Mr. Bayle since. This would certainly qualify as a violation of the Creative Commons license under which Device LFO was released, as it would infringe upon the intellectual property rights of any non-public domain patch. Over the course of the weekend, several readers on the Ableton forum were able to demonstrate what Mr. Majcher had told CDM, that a portion of Device LFO was reused in LFO Everything without being attributed. (See the two threads, if you wish: the original LFO Everything thread, and one following allegations of plagiarism.) I was unaware of any of these concerns when I originally posted the article.

The portion in question is not the entire patch, but a specific subpatcher that handles parameter control in Live.

Mr. Bayle has since confirmed to me that he used a portion of a patch in LFO Everything that was not his, failing to attribute it to its original creator. He describes the incident as unintentional, and says it was not malicious. He has released a 1.6 update to LFO Everything, replacing the parameter control components with a new JavaScript technique, and he has made the rewrite open source under a Creative Commons attribution license. (Mr. Majcher separately verified that the new technique is original to Mr. Bayle.) That said, it was certainly not my own intention to point to a patch that in any way infringed on another's work.

Mr. Majcher expressed a desire to move on from the incident, and as the original developer, I think the best course of action is one that benefits his work and the developer community as a whole.

I can say that the tone of discussions on the forum (and to some extent comments on this site) have become what I would characterize as emotional, independent of the parties directly involved. I did not wish to add to those discussions. I know Mr. Bayle, I've performed on a program with him, I can verify he's an experienced and capable developer, and he's in the past contributed to the Max community and music making community at large. I am not arguing his original release was in the right, and I don't defend the way he responded to the situation, but I'm sorry to see that it's happened. Having been introduced to Mr. Majcher's work, I'm equally impressed by his output, I'm very sorry indeed that his work was appropriated without credit, and I'm sorry that I was not fully confident of the sequence of events until today.

Looking beyond this particular case, to avoid this happening in the future, it's hard to over-emphasize the importance of careful attribution, particularly when things like Max patches are routinely constructed from snippets lying around your hard drive. Whether or not you believe Mr. Bayle was in the right, it is all to easy to do something similar. I do not see this question as directly connected to whether or not something is "open source." Whatever the license – including popular free software licenses like GPL, BSD, and Apache – whether open source or proprietary, any work that is not explicitly public domain requires attribution. Any work in the US (and many other countries) automatically receives copyright protection. This is an area about which we all must be very careful, both for legal and, more importantly, ethical reasons. Whether any of us is perfect, we can, at least, endeavor to do better, and to communicate with other developers. That's not a direct comment on this case; it's simply a lesson worth taking away, whether you're an "open source" developer or not.

Also, independent of this issue, since readers brought this up, CDM can't cover everything, our coverage isn't perfect, and not every single blog post should be considered an endorsement. Maxforlive.com has a superb library of Devices and resource, and worth exploring. If there are devices of particular interest, do let me know about them; we have an open comment form. Feel free to send in tips more than once if you feel strongly; my inbox is a crowded place. Even before concerns about LFO Everything, I heard from readers who felt I had omitted other work somehow by design. That is, believe me, never my intention.

Thanks to those who were directly in touch regarding LFO Device and LFO Everything.

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Give Ableton Live its Missing LFO: Max for Live Device Modulates Everything

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 08:56:00 +1100

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Give Ableton Live its Missing LFO: Max for Live Device Modulates Everything

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 1/19/11

Ableton Live users have wanted an LFO for a long time. Using basic wave shapes, you'd be able to modulate anything in a set, from clip parameters to instruments and effects, producing shifting timbres or rhythmic patterns or anything you'd like.

Julien Bayle, the Marseilles-based (certified) Live guru, ambient musician (as protofuse), and builder of the protodeck controller, has built a solution. "LFO Everything in Live" is a Max for Live device that allows you to control any parameter anywhere in Live using LFO waveforms. Features:

Tempo sync toggle
Multiple waveshapes – new ones added this version – or draw your own.
Route an LFO to another LFO to another LFO, etc., for some sophisticated signal chains.
Lifetime free updates.

You'll need a recent version of Live – 8.2.1 required – plus a copy of Max for Live. But if you've got those two things, prepare for some serious LFO goodness.

The tool is normally EUR8, but anticipating some interest from CDM readers, you can get it for EUR6 and go buy yourself an espresso (or two) instead. Use coupon code CR3AT3 (first fifteen buyers only – you might ask nicely to extend that)!
http://designthemedia.com/products/abletonlive/
Follow Protofuse/Julien on Twitter, Facebook, and if you have opinions about what kind of hardware he should be building, take his survey

I'd still like to see an LFO as a default device, and for Max for Live devices to be easier to distribute to users who don't own a copy – as well as for more M4L patchers to use a GPL license for patches they're selling. But this looks like a terrific solution, nonetheless, and could really change the feeling of working with Live. Great work, Julien!

Pictures:

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Cubase 6: Amidst Familiar Leapfrog Features, A New Approach to Note-by-note ...

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 08:25:00 +1100

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Cubase 6: Amidst Familiar Leapfrog Features, A New Approach to Note-by-note Expression Editing

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 1/18/11

Users of Cubase seem to be a kind of silent majority. Web data suggests this may be the most popular DAW on the planet, thanks to Windows and Mac support, over 25 years in the business, and the absence of any particular hardware requirements. But the Cubase users I know, while fiercely loyal, just aren't as evangelical about their choice. "Oh, yeah, I use Cubase."
One basic problem is that Digital Audio Workstations have been locked for years in leapfrog-style, me-too feature battles. These mature, do-everything, kitchen-sink products add tweaks that evidently matter to their users but are hard to make exciting for anyone else. Digital Music Doctor, echoed by Synthtopia, went so far as to ask if the DAW was dead. Some might wish as much, but I doubt it. DAWs in the last decade were engaged in feature-for-feature competition, but the same was true in the 90s and even, particularly on the Atari ST, in the 80s. Perhaps fueled by an overabundance of smart audio programmers, certainly by the inexhaustible potential of music's complexities, we'll never reach the DAW singularity.
Case in point: Cubase 6. There are new features here, but they could only be termed, as Steinberg PR does, "new and revolutionary" if you hadn't seen nearly-identical features crop up in rivals like Apple's Logic and Cakewalk's SONAR. You get automagical features by which audio drum recordings are supposed to be as easy to edit as MIDI, new comping that's supposed to save you time, and countless "workflow" enhancements. In the never-ending quest to attract more guitarists to music production, you get some built-in amp models and stompbox effects. There's a tiered set of offerings allowing different features at different prices (here reduced, at last, to two basic choices, a EUR600 full edition or slimmed-down EUR300 "artist" version).
In fact, I'm tempted to copy and paste ad copy from recent updates to some of Cubase's competitors and see if you can tell the difference.
The reason the DAW isn't dead – or even this number of DAWs – is that I suspect a lot of these features do work pretty well. And while they look the same on paper, in practice, using Cubase, Logic, or SONAR doesn't feel quite the same. Music producers are so loyal because they are tuned into those subtleties and naturally creatures of habit, eager to satisfy their creative appetite. So, the cycle of DAW life continues, and the circle is unbroken (so long as something catastrophic doesn't happen, like Gibson buying Opcode and Studio Vision).

Familiar features, done Steinberg-style

The features, while not unfamiliar in competing DAWs, do look impressive, and they could be good news for Cubase users:

Enhanced transient and tempo detection for easier, glitch-free drum editing and more musical detection
Phase-accurate audio quantization and drum replacement. (Actually, a key point here – without phase accuracy, you can create some nasty artifacts quantizing audio.)
Track edit groups turn comps quickly into tracks. That we've seen before, but Cubase does have a nice feature for editing those groups simultaneously.
A built-in set of guitar effects called VST Amp Rack.
64-bit support on both Mac and Windows.
New time-stretching algorithms. (These seem to crop up in every version upgrade, too.)

Don't get me wrong – implementation is everything. It's really impossible to cover a DAW just based on a product announcement. In fact, I think it's difficult to cover a DAW without spending some weeks in production actually using it, even in terms of an upgrade, which is part of why it's hard to write DAW reviews.
To Steinberg's credit, in the promo video included here, they do make an effort to contextualize these features in an actual recording session. While comping is unquestionably terrific, I'm not entirely convinced everyone wants to quantize audio drum recordings. But otherwise, these are fair points, and you can bet the reason these features show up in so many DAWs is in part because users ask for them. User needs are complex, challenging, but also very often similar. DAW developers have little time to analyze their competitors, so I don't think copying features is commonplace. More likely, users keep asking for the same things.

LoopMash, now fleshed-out and performance-ready

Now we know Cubase has features similar to its competitors, and why that might be, there are additions in Cubase 6 that are unique.
One feature I'd even go as far as calling "weird," and that's Cubase's LoopMash. It's a really unusual approach to loop editing and slicing. Slicing and looping and new file drop and such isn't new in and of itself, but Steinberg's interface is genuinely different. Performance controls mean you really could use LoopMash in a performance for stuttering, sliced-up loop triggering. "Hey, what were you using? Was that Ableton?" "No, that was LoopMash in Cubase 6." "What? I couldn't hear you. I'm going to get a vodka and Red Bull."
Seriously, if anyone does try using LoopMash, I'd love to hear about it. Ableton Live is a great product, but having every laptop musician on the planet use the same software is boring.

A revolution in MIDI editing?

Buried among these other features, though, is a new approach to editing notes. It's called VST Expression 2 and Note Expression. Normally, in MIDI editing, you have a lane of note events and then a separate lane of controller data that determines how those notes are played. The issue with this is that it's more in line with how a synthesizer works than how anyone thinks musically. In fact, if the two lanes get out of sync, you can easily wind up with a pitch bend happening in the middle of a note instead of the beginning, or the wrong note.
The basic notion of Note Expression is to make expression happen on a note-per-note basis. Cubase even has a nice interface by which you can click a note and edit the controller data for just that note.
Aside from making editing easier, this is really a big deal as far as how Cubase's editing interface interacts with samples libraries and scores. (That, in turn, may explain why Hans Zimmer is quoted as being so excited on the Steinberg website.) In the old MIDI editing paradigm, you wind up having to do some complex acrobatics in order to get extensive sample libraries to behave the way you want. With some help from VST 3.5 and VST Expression 2, this note-by-note editing can be extended to making MIDI events in the sequencer work better with those big choral and orchestral sample libraries.

Scoring should also be vastly easier, since notation also assumes note-by-note expressions of various kinds. In the past, translating a MIDI sequence to a score has required thinking in two different ways; this helps change that. Accordingly, Steinberg has also added a "Dynamics Lane" so that you can see dynamics (forte!) alongside your MIDI events while sequencing.
Not all composers really want to work this way with scores, period, but for those who do, Cubase 6 is a big advancement.

The question I have is whether this new-fangled editing approach will take place outside of Steinberg. The narration in their promo video attempts to answer this:

"The only limitation is your imagination. Well, that and you do need a VST-compatible instrument. But remember, we invented VST, so we've got you covered."

Actually, the problem is just that – Steinberg invented VST. It's a de facto standard, one controlled entirely by one developer. It competes with other standards (AU, Avid's TDM and RTAS, and Linux's rising star LV2). Third-party VST developers often don't invest in the latest plug-in standards, especially because other VST hosts that aren't Cubase often don't support them. (Cue ranting developers here with more reasons they don't like VST.) And we're still communicating with plug-ins not only with VST, but with another de facto standard, albeit one with the input of more than one vendor, MIDI. Phew.
So, "we've got you covered" can either mean that Steinberg makes this easy for other vendors to adopt, or that it instead becomes their way of driving more sample library business to their HALion sampler engine and not competitors like Kontakt.
Whether it's "revolutionary" or not, though, it is a truly new idea in editing. And as should be plainly obvious by now, new ideas in MIDI editing – for better or for worse – don't come alone that often. So I do look forward to seeing more of this editing concept. It is news, after all.
And I hope some of my Cubase-using friends stop being so silent, and tell us how this all works in practice as they get Cubase 6 in-hand in the near future. Since the DAW isn't dead, I'll wager that will be useful information. What would happen if we got past the marketing descriptions and really learned from users? That might well be revolutionary.
All photos courtesy Steinberg.
Cubase 6: What's new [Steinberg]

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The first Sample Based Instrument

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:00:00 +1100

HERE is a link to a wiki entry on the first sample based instrument and its from the 1930's!!!!

The Father of Drum Machines and the Father of MIDI Talk About Design and the...

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 10:30:00 +1100

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The Father of Drum Machines and the Father of MIDI Talk About Design and the Tempest

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 1/13/11

In songwriting, there was Rodgers and Hart, Gilbert and Sullivan. In music gear design, it's hard not to assign a similar degree of expectation to the pairing of Dave Smith and Roger Linn.

Between them, these two designers have been a major part of what music technology is today. Dave Smith pioneered MIDI (even giving it its acronym), the first microprocessor-based instrument (the Prophet-5), the first programmable polyphonic synth, and other innovations at Sequential Circuits. Add to that landmarks in physical modeling research (at Yamaha) and the first PC soft synth. Roger Linn built the first programmable sampled-sound drum machine and with the LM-1, LinnDrum, Linn 9000, and his work on the MPC60 and MPC3000, introduced workflows and ideas in drum machines we now take for granted. It's not easy to overstate the contributions of either designer.

Putting two minds like that together can easily raise expectations, but it can't magically create a product. And so as these two embarked on a collaboration on a drum machine four years ago, the resulting project didn't immediately get off the ground. But at NAMM 2011, the first real, functioning product – complete with a ship date this year – finally sees the light of day, thanks to a reboot that re-calibrated the designers' own expectations and process. As Steve Jobs once infamously said, "great artists ship."

So, with shipping in sight, what happens when a MIDI-fathering pioneer of synthesis and the pioneer of the modern drum machine work together? And what do they view as important to design? The answers were, to me, insightful, even if you don't expect to pick up the new Tempest drum machine.

Indeed, they had so much to say, that I'm going to largely let them speak for themselves, unedited. These really speak to the core of how Roger and Dave have thought about their creation; there's no marketing filter. Either you'll find these ideas appealing to you musically, and it'll be something you want, or you won't. And unlike at NAMM, you don't even have to hear them shout over the din of a trade show hall to listen to their story.

First, be sure to read up on the specs of the Tempest:
Tempest, Roger Linn + Dave Smith Analog Drum Machine, is Official

Concept behind the Tempest

Roger: I think the things that have carried over [from the original collaborative design] are the real-time performance instrument aspects. I always saw the need for something that was not just an off-line editing machine, but in which the idea of composition was tightly integrated with performance. So that's what the operating system is about on this one – to try to do that with as few controls and as a tight a package as possible, and to have those controls work in multiple modes.

Dave: There are two purposes of this instrument. I think one purpose is what Roger covered, which is usability, and what a drum machine should be doing these days. But the other half is sound. If you're happy with samples, we can't compete with a free piece of software that gives you a billion samples and a full-screen interface that lets you program it however you want. That's not what this is about. This is a musical instrument, and the sound is tightly coupled with the operation, and it gives you a much wider palette of sounds because of the analog side. But you can use samples when you want to, and you can combine the two to come up with all kinds of new sounds.

From my point of view, if it didn't sound new and different and better, then there'd be no reason to do it. I certainly wouldn't have done an all-sample drum machine, because my interest is always in the sound area. If the sound is like everything else, it kind of bores me, and there'd be no reason to do it.

The collaboration:

Roger: Basically the entire user interface, data structures, file types … as far as the interface and the way that the machine works as a drum machine, that's entirely me.

Dave's really a hardware guy much more than I am. I'm not a real hardware engineer; I've put products together, but under duress. I can't really design a circuit very well – I did circuit design on my earlier machines, but it's always harder for me. And it's just not fun for me.

I live in Plato's world of ideals. Dave loves to live in that world of imperfect copies on the surface of the Earth. It's just a matter of what makes you happy, what's fun for you. The truth is I've never really liked hardware, it's just that when I made products earlier on, you needed hardware. I prefer to live in the computer, the efficiencies of the computer, the connectivity, the screen, the ease of writing software. The only reason to have hardware is for the human interface.

I like design, and I like to be close to the musician's experience. [Dave] likes to be close to the circuit. On this, the first thing he did was design the voice board. He didn't really care about my 3D models or drawings; he had to touch and feel it. He has the physical gene turned on and I have the virtual gene turned on.

It's actually very nice, because we cover opposite ends of the spectrum, and I think it's what made this product work is that we're covering both those sides. I agonize over the user interface and the data structures and the files and the interactions of the controls. I like solving multi-dimensional problems where you've got time involved, as you do with the sequencer, and imagining myself playing the device before it exists. He likes the circuit boards, and he likes writing the low-level firmware.

The synthesis engine

Dave: Large parts of [the Dave Smith Tetra] are in that there are the same two analog oscillators and low-pass filter and one sub oscillator, and we have feedback like we did on the Tetra and the Mophos. The additions are that each voice has four oscillators — two of them are analog and the other two are digital. The digital oscillators are really samples as opposed to oscillators, but they can go either way. We'll probably be putting the Prophet VS waveshapes in there also. So you basically have four different sound sources per voice. We also added the high-pass filters which none of our other synthesizers have.

[The high-pass filter] gives you a lot more control when you're mixing analog sounds with samples. Sometimes the analog stuff gets a little bit too bottom-heavy. If you're not careful, it'll get a little muddy after a while. But the high-pass does a great job of letting you tweak that when you need to.

Sequencing and real-time control

Roger: The sequencer is event-oriented. In each note event, you've got four bytes that you can feel with four different pieces of information. For example, for all notes of the snare drum, byte one could be pitch, byte two could be the filter, byte three could be decay, and byte four could be pan. People who are not very technical can just touch it.

The touch strip lets you override parameters as it plays, or record parameters. This is something that I first made on the MPC60, the variation slider. So it's not really new, but it's turned out to be an effective thing. Instead of one, we have two, and each of them as two different sets of assignments, so you can toggle between them.

The idea is that all the changes you make in real-time are recorded into the sequencer if you're in record mode, or changing them live if you're playing live.

The way we designed these, they're both position and pressure-sensitive FSRs (forse sensing resistors). It's a two-dimensional sensor.

An instrument you can play

Roger: What is cool about this is, with these sixteen beats, you can go in and out of record on them, do any editing that you want, use any sort of pad mode for your recording or play live with the tunings or adjusting the voices or adding and recording note effects – and note effects you can also save beat-wide parameter changes – and do all that, and you never have to stop. The only time you have to save is when you're saving to flash [memory], but I think that's the only thing. I think even the edits can be done as a background task. And of course you've got real-time erase and all that stuff and single-level undo.

You can actually do real-time creation, and I think that's the nature of working today, is that a DAW as an editor is kind of an old-fashioned statement. Editing and performance are ideally the same thing.

That's what I've tried to do with this is to try to say, what's the virtuosic music instrument that we could create if we're trying to make a drum machine?

What differentiates the sound

Dave: lot of it is a matter of how you program it. A lot of people have already found that on a Tetra, because it's multi-timbral, you can get some pretty interesting drum kits going. And on this one, we went just a little bit further with the high pass and the samples and a few other little things here and there. We have five envelopes per voice, because envelopes are pretty important when you want to tweak a percussion sound. The LFOs go up a lot higher in frequency, so you can actually use them to do some FM-type effects with the oscillators. And then just the programming, people approach it more like a percussion instrument, so it takes more of that flavor.

Groove and voodoo

Much has been made by MPC users of that instrument's groove, but Roger – the guy who actually made the groove – routinely discounts it as being anything special. I raised an eyebrow when Roger mentioned in his copy for the Tempest that he used his "bag of tricks." He explains here precisely what he means – a must-read, incidentally, for MPC fans.

Roger: There's a lot more voodoo in the press than actually exists. Even on my earliest drum machines, all I did was make sure my samples were trimmed tightly and wrote my software so that the software responds tightly. Swing is just a matter of accurate percentages.

My bag of tricks is basically taking away all the stuff the software sequencers give you — options for that no one knows how to set. Back then, in the earlier days, sequencers just weren't very good for timing because the OS would always get in the way. These days, you can get great swing if you know what yuo're doing. The problem is the software interfaces make it so hard to get what you're trying to get.

For swing, what I do is I use my percentages. You can do fifty percent up to seventy-five percent. And what that means is, for every eighth note, it's the percentage between the first sixteenth note and the second. 50% means straight time, 66% means falling on triplets, 75% … is going very slow for a jazz groove. It actually falls on 32nd notes. Most of the time it's 50%, 66%.

There's no other trick than that. The thing I think made a lot of my early drum machines sound good, at least starting with the 9000, was that you had the pressure-sensitive pads coupled with the note repeat feature. I called it note repeat, people called it rolls. It was mostly not for doing rolls, but just doing good … sixteenth-note grooves. If you just play it by varying pressure, it's pretty easy to get it right. You couple that with nice swing percentages – something around 58-60% is really pretty cool. I think it's pretty easy for most people to get a good groove.

The Tempest and its place in drum machine history

Ask a marketing person about a product, and you'll get a fairly dull answer. Ask someone who's been around the industry as long as Dave has, and you definitely get an answer with some personality.

Dave: When you say analog drum machine to people, it can mean almost anything. A lot of people instantly think of the old Roland stuff, and already a lot of the people who have been playing with this machine have programmed a lot of the classic 808-type sounds. So we can cover that kind of analog.

And then we can also cover the poly-synth kind of analog, because it is a real programmable analog voice. It's not the stripped-down Roland version from way back. And then you get the samples, so between all of that, you get a pretty wide palette to work with. It sounds a lot different than if you did the same thing on a Tetra or a Prophet.

The old style analog drum machines – there's the Roland style, which nobody bought when they first came out because they didn't sound very good compared to the drum machines at the time, and it only became fashionable much later. But the earlier drum machines, like the ones we made at Sequential, we were basically just taking samples and running them through analog filters. They weren't really configured like this as a fully-programmable analog voice.

We're trying to cover all of the bases. Operation-wise, you can program it Roland-style, you can program it MPC-style. From a sound point of view, if you want to stack oscillators to make a big sound, which is what people tend to do a lot on the MPCs, to make it sound thick because you stack a lot of voices, we've got four oscillators per voice, and two of them can be samples, and if you want to throw in some low-frequency triangle waves or something you can do that, too. So we don't need the huge voice counts of the MPCs to do the same thing. The idea was kind of a one-size fits all instrument that can cover all types of musical styles, so it's not shoehorned into one or the other — I guess what you'd call the two different camps.

It's been so long since there has been a new drum machine out there of any kind. Even the monomachines have been out for a while, so it was time for something new — and a different take on it.

Price and value

I mentioned to Dave that, given the ability to use a Tempest as a synth module as well as a drum machine and take advantage of genuine analog signal path, the price would make sense to at least some prospective buyers.

Dave: You can already plug in a keyboard and play it as a six-voice analog poly synth. It is definitely dual-purpose in that sense.

The street price on a Prophet is a little more than this, and this has a more complex voice than this does. If we took the pads off and sold it as a six-voice synth, it'd probably cost about as much as it does. I think it's a good price for what it does.

Roger: The thing can actually double as a six-voice keyboard synth. It has all the same voices that the Tetra has. I guess it's like a Hextra.

The pads and their layout

Roger: I really like the two by eight layout; I find it really cool to work with. All the pads are right on the front between your fingers. It's the ideal compromise between the 4 x 4 and the 1 x 16 layout. And since this does both step time and real-time programming, it makes it very nice. The other thing is, when you're using the pads for tunings, you can select a number of scales – it can be two octaves of major, two octaves of minor, chromatics, two bass strings, two octaves of pentatonic minor, pentatonic major – it actually works out very nicely for doing pitch parts.

Who's it for?

Dave: I think anybody should like this. The old synth guys from the 80s should like this, because it's a good, old-fashioned poly-synth drum machine. The electronic guys should like it – a lot of people already use our stuff, because if you want an analog poly-synth these days, there aren't many choices. The hip-hop guys will always appreciate a new sound, and they always love anything Roger did, for that matter. It's funny, I've been through this cycle so many times. And it's really hard to predict ahead of time, because so much of this is just a fashion thing, where if the right people decide this is the thing that everybody has to have right now, then it will go crazy. If that doesn't happen, we'll still sell a lot, but it can make a pretty big difference. And those are the kinds of things you can never predict

So far, the handful of people who have played with it have liked it a lot, which is a good start. We won't know until after we start shipping.

Philosophy of design

Dave: Concise instruments to me are very important. A Prophet doesn't do everything a synth can possibly do, but it has just the right number of knobs for direct control, and the right number of features that make it easy to get your head around it. At the same time, it's incredibly versatile. People who go too far down the software path where every year there's a new version and new submenus — it's more features, you can't argue, but it just gets silly after a while. So I try to avoid that. Ed.: Since this line was misunderstood in comments, part of this came out of Dave not particularly liking software – which I found especially amusing, as Roger describes not particularly liking hardware. I think these two are yin and yang, Bert and Ernie, in a good way. -PK

For me, an instrument should be concise, it should have a lot of personality. Software never has personality, if you ask me. And it should be fun to play. Software often isn't fun to play.

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A Custom Shop for Music Gear, a “Third Deck” DJ Controller, and DIY Hardware...

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 10:26:00 +1100

Sent to you by marcel via Google Reader:

A Custom Shop for Music Gear, a “Third Deck” DJ Controller, and DIY Hardware Secrets

via Create Digital Music by Peter Kirn on 1/11/11

Dave Cross thinks more about the design of DJ gear than even most passionate electronic music enthusiasts. Aside from stints at DJ Times and Ableton, this is a man who wrote an honors thesis on the history of the DJ mixer [PDF]. Then again, maybe it's more a matter of the industry being painfully behind. In, 2006 when he designed his beautiful, vintage-styled Briefcase into the chassis of a 70s Sony mic mixer, there were few MIDI controllers for DJs even on the market.
Times have changed, and in the mind-numbing cycle of industry products, it's likely this year's NAMM trade show will include a deluge of controllers from DJ manufacturers.
That has left Dave to focus not on making the next mass-market hit, but on assembling a high-end custom boutique for controllers he calls Sixty Works Controllers. Based in Madison, Wisconsin, Dave's business couples consulting with hand-built, all-custom hardware, one client at a time. (He also advertises that he reads "all those dorky magazines and tech blogs" – hey, wait a gosh-darned minute…)

As he gets his business going, Dave shares two stories that may interest. For one, he's assembled his notes on building DIY hardware if you want to make your own – which, for many of us, is part of the pleasure of electronic music making today. He also has a proof of concept in a one-off design that bridges the world of laptops and traditional DJing. As those aforementioned DJ manufactures try to meld computer and deck, Dave's "Third Deck" does the opposite, assuming DJs will want to segregate the computer portion of the rig. Here, Dave shares with us his outlook and goals.

On the Third Deck:

It's not available for sale. Its primary purpose was to showcase a controller so specific in its design that it would make no sense to build it en masse. It's a dream controller for one imaginary person – the staunchly anti-digital DJs I meet who don't want the laptop to "infect" their traditional two-deck ways. If you look at its functions, you'll see it's pretty limited in scope. That's intentional – it was made only for this specific purpose.

I'm far from anti-digital (in case that wasn't painfully obvious already), but I have to admit, I find the simplicity of the Third Deck inspiring. Built to work with Ableton Live and carrying a minimal complement of buttons and knobs, it allows the laptop to disappear into the shadows. Scene and clip triggering, basic effects, and tempo controls remain (both coarse and fine). The emphasis is absolutely on DJing, not instrumentalism, but the underlying concept could apply anywhere: it re-casts the laptop as hardware and forces the user to do more with less.

The Third Deck
Since it's not available for sale (unless Dave reconsiders), that leaves custom jobs to create the solution specific to a DJ client.
On building a custom shop in place of a new "manufacturer":

Putting it in practical business terms: I want a company that prioritizes service and support over volume. I don't want to compete with X company that makes thousands of a single device. I want to make products so out-there, so custom, that company X isn't willing to make them.
There are custom guitar, drum, motorcycle and car shops out there. I want to follow that vein with controllers.
I think my greatest challenge is going to be in educating potential customers to stop thinking in terms of "could I make that work for me?" and more towards "what would be perfect for me alone?"

Dave's 2006 Briefcase used a vintage housing to add style.

Dave is of course aware (and even credits) others in the field. There's even a page dedicated to "the competition." But I do think Dave is in more uncharted territory: the tech blog DJ Tech Tools, for instance, isn't just doing one-offs, while builders like Livid both make gear for wider audiences and without necessarily focusing on DJs. Anyway, I'm sure there's room for more; while you wouldn't guess it reading sites like mine, the surprising truth is that most musicians and DJs simply aren't aware of the craft of controller-building and use.
What to expect as a Client
Ah, but perhaps you'd like to try this all yourself.
On sharing DIY knowledge:

The inspiration came from Moldover, after a breakfast chat. He helped me realize that all we had learned over the years – in terms of controller building – was not some secret. Treating it as a secret, and building a business around that secret ("60 Works can build you a custom controller – something you couldn't do on your own….") would be foolish. 60 Works is the service and the expertise – not the core knowledge behind DIY controller building.
Another reason I wrote it – as a defensive measure. My products are going to be expensive. Expensive enough that most visitors will not be customers. I wanted to give them (and myself) an 'out.' They may not be able to use my services, but at least I'm giving them the resources to start the journey on their own, if they wish.

Read that article to learn the fundamentals of building your own hardware, including an overview of available DIY components and "brains" (the microcontroller that process inputs), and even how to connect knobs and faders. As you get deeper into the article, there's some useful practical advice that you could otherwise learn only through experience.
http://blog.60works.com/archives/143
I'll be curious to hear what people think of Dave's effort, and if you have anything to add (or any further questions) after checking out the DIY story.
Meanwhile, because the Third Deck sounds to me like some sort of DJ crossover Ray Bradbury short story, I'll have to let my imagination run wild…
http://blog.60works.com/
All photos courtesy 60 Works.

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explanation to come!!!

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 21:15:00 +1100

some pictures from me installing a ib-m208p from an akai s2000 into an MPC 2000 CLASSIC pluss aditional mod to plate.

MMMMM

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Thu, 8 Apr 2010 20:50:00 +1000

aJKSHFAKFHA

brrr!!!!!!!!!!!

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Thu, 8 Apr 2010 20:41:00 +1000

tesing google books embeding

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:50:00 +1100

IDM forum radio

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Wed, 3 Feb 2010 14:28:00 +1100

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testicle

marcel.feillafe@gmail.com (Marcel Feillafe) — Tue, 2 Feb 2010 13:04:00 +1100