If you’ve gotten in on the Project5 2.5 bandwagon, point your browsers here: Alesion Arp presets/patterns. These invaluable tools, authored by the venerable user “b rock” (Tom Brockway), expand the capabilities of P5 immensely.

As labeled is a set of arpeggiator patterns and their attendant construction kits for Project5 2.5’s very useful in-line arpeggiator. To get the most out of ‘em, and for install info, go to the handy Project5 wiki.

Basically, these two downloads are two of a piece. The Arps are just that, and expansion of the arp preset patterns provided with P5. By themselves these would be a great gift. It would take many, many hours to begin to explore them, considering all the variation you can already squeeze out of the P5 arp.

But, b rock, genius that he is, went a step further and provided us with 500 .ptn files that he used to create the arp presets, and a tutorial on how to utilize these. I’m just starting on it and already they are immensely helpful.

I assume if you have Project 5 2.5, you’ve already downloaded these. If you don’t have P5, come on, it’s a $99 download these days.

I’d be a poor music tech blogger if I didn’t mention that Summer NAMM ‘07 is under way. Loads of announcements, much of which I don’t give a shite about - most of it actually. Who knows, maybe something will come of it, but mostly it’s just interesting to see what kind of gear will be being hocked by Guitar Center, Sweetwater, et al. And if something else catches my eye I’ll try to mention it.

But there is this weird little bit (well, weird expensive bit): Timbaland Special Edition MiKo. So signature software installations? Forgot about the ultimate usefulness of the MiKo computer/keyboard thing. Can there be any advantage to using the exact same software setup as a famous pop/hip hop producer that you couldn’t get rolling your own with the $3500 this will set you back?

Really, I’m curious.

It’s a thread that crops all the time at KvR and other places synth enthusiasts kill time on the internet: Does [X] synth sound like the Access Virus? Now, I’ve only ever heard a Virus insofar as I’ve certainly heard music that features it, and frankly I couldn’t care less about this line of thinking. And it has cropped up the U-he forum, someone challenging users to build Virus patches on Zebra 2. (There are already a couple Virus-inspired banks in the user’s patch links if you’re so inclined.)

That’s really neither here nor there, more just context. Urs logged on to explain, in good humor as always, that there are a lot of things you can create with the Z2 that you couldn’t with a Virus, but by and large, not the other way around.

However, as I said somewhere else, Zebra 1.0 was specifically designed to overcome the flaws that I found in my Virus A. Zebra was designed to sound organic, mellow and expressive. Later on it became modular and added hybrid aspects such as additive synthesis and physical modeling-ish stuff. Over the years the Virus seemed to become a bit more mellow as well - if one wanted to. And Zebra gained options to sound a tad more aggressive. Or just somehow smooth.

It’s easy to create a sound in Zebra that’s crap. Happens to me all the time. Doesn’t happen that often in the Virus. That’s because the Virus has virtual analogue parameter ranges within a virtual analogue flexibility. For the same reason that the Virus pretty much always sounds “good” one can’t really dial anything into it that’s not virtual analogue (including PPGish). Thus, for the broader range of stuff you get out of Zebra (or Absynth, or Tera, or XYZ) you have to pay the price that there’s a lot of crap inbetween the beautiful spots.

-Urs

Like I said, I don’t really care if Z2, or any other soft-synth, can really emulate a Virus, and I think comparing hardware to software synths is a fools errand. But I was interested in the idea of taking a great sounding synth and inadvertently making a lot ugly sounds. This is harder with a fixed path, virtual analog synth (though possible), but with a modular or an extensive modulation matrix it can be pretty easy. I’m a master at it.

I’ll admit it, I mostly just deconstruct and fiddle with patches. I play a patch, it inspires a song, or I think of a synth that might be great in a song and find a patch that vaguely compliments the space I’m looking to fill; in both cases I chip away at the programming to see what makes the sound tick, make it a better fit for my purposes.¹ But ultimately I write music not sounds. And cheers to those true synth programmers. There are a lot of really talented sound designers and synthesizer enthusiasts out there who really know how to massage an interface and make useful patches. I’m happy to reap their largess.

Of course I do endeavor to learn my instruments better, and spend time creating my own patches & banks. And I am pretty comfortable in programming Sonic Charge µTonic from soup to nuts, as well as being pretty proficient at impOSCar. But when it comes to more complex synths, I’m pretty much at the mercy of those who program sounds for it, be they for the factory or user patches.²

But to Urs point, I can make a useful, interesting patch sound like crap in a few mouse clicks. Of course getting there is half the fun, and finding your way back to something different is half the learning experience.

What’s your favorite method of sound design? How do you approach it?

^{1I even had someone critique one of my songs on garageband.com several years ago for using a pre-programmed sound; and, indeed, it was one of the first few presets in the default Rhino install, pretty much un-altered. But hey, a guitar through a Marshall sounds identical throughout thousands of records and rehearsal rooms. It’s what I did with the sound that’s important to me. And frankly the audience I’m interested in wouldn’t have any idea what synth I was using let alone what the default bank was.
2I know, there’s the whole school of though about really learning one synth but I’ll deal with that in another post. This one is too epic as it is and for what it is.}

The online sample shop LoopMaster.com has a new collection out that specifically targets those creators who love to drop funny/interesting/off-beat bits of movie dialog into their productions. It’s called, sensibly enough, Movie Dialog.

This is obviously created by raiding the public domain and combing through this pile of delightful, strange and awful (sometimes all at once) heap of cultural ephemera. There are all kinds of great bits of dialog or narration to be found in these old films, be they commercial, educational, governmental, or promotional. So they’ve apparently taken the best of some of these and chopped and cleaned them. And since they are charging a fair price, I think this a good idea.

I just wish I had the sense and resources to have gotten there first.

Really, I’ve been doing this for several years now, ever since I discovered the Prelinger Archives at archive.org. Prelinger is a fascinating guy and did a great service to the public domain by collecting/rescuing a huge pile of ephemeral films, donating them to a few organizations and then releasing them back to the public, via archive.org. (Check out the recent Harper’s article on him and his wife for a great look into a couple with a unique vision.) Since they are free to use, spindle and mutilate at will, well, go to it.

1. Download the least compressed version your internet connection will allow. And if all you’re after is the audio, you’re probably safe with the 256kb in most cases. I haven’t been able to discern much difference with the audio. (If you’re after the video, well, HiRes is where you’re going to go, but some of the longer films are pretty large.)
2. Watch the film, but pay attention with your ears. Listen to the soundtrack, sort of breaking it up as you go along into discreet samples. Don’t just listen to dialog/narration, listen for clangs, clicks, stings, hits - what have you - there’s all kinds of fun stuff you can sample.
3. Rip the audio via any number of shareware/commercial/free video programs; I use QuicktimePro. I save it as a 16-bit, 44.1 wav file, because let’s be honest, you’re not really getting any audio quality even if you troubled to download the least compressed version on the archive.org ftp server.
4. Use the audio editor of your choice to chop and clean your samples. SoundForge has a deep set of noise reduction tools, but there are many alternatives. Unless I’m way mistaken you could do most it in Audacity.
5. There you go, start dropping these into your projects at will.

Further bonus fun can be had by using pitch manipulation/correction software to really warp these movie quotes into something sonically unique. I use Melodyne, but that’s not what you might consider cheap. Try dblue’s Glitch VST for some true weirdness.

It’s likely that LoopMasters used other sources for their collection - sometimes you can find dollar DVDs that are public domain films. Note there are a lot of other films on archive.org but not all have the same open-source license as Prelinger, which are mostly industrial films, so make sure you’re clear on what you’re downloading. But really, it will be long time before you exhaust the resources offered to you by Prelinger. Either that or you rely too heavily on movie dialog and you might think about actually singing.

Any other places you like to download public domain movies?

The estimable Peter Kirn @ CDM has a link up to an on-line guitar tuner that looks pretty elaborate. I can’t really test it out myself since my music rig is kept far away from the internet and all the attendant software goes with keeping it connected cleanly. But it got me thinking about my go-to software tuner, APTuner.

Sonar has a tuner plugin included but to be honest I find it doesn’t grab my signal cleanly enough to be very reliable - i.e. it sometimes takes several heavy plucks before the “LED” begins to dance, and once it does it goes away too quickly. (This problem may be less with my new audio interface where I can independently crank the gain of the inst-level input.) But since you can add additional programs through the tools menu, it’s easy enough to wire the stand-alone APTuner to Sonar. (If anyone needs instruction in this let me know and I’ll whip up a post.)

It’s got a large display needle, that is sensitive and accurate and it’s easy to select from the alternate tunings.

However when I went digging for a link I discovered that I had been using the v1.0 line of the shareware. It’s gone through a few revisions. Somewhere along the line it got married to the Windows GDI+ and it doesn’t look quite the same.

I’m not sure how I feel about it, and since I just downloaded it myself, I can’t attest to the functionality being as good. But I do plan on giving it a spin, and if they didn’t ruin it in the process I’ll kick up a few bucks to the developers. If not, I’ll stick with v1.00 which works a treat for me.

Oh yeah, Windows only apparently. But if I’m remembering correctly there is a pretty slick tuner for the Mac; maybe one of those widget things.

EDIT: All over now. Moral of this story: always - always - check the live site after mucking around on your development server! After 10-plus years of said mucking about with the innards of websites you’d think I’d have known to do this.

Because of a over-written CSS file, the display for this blog is has gone completely off the rails. What’s more, I am not at my studio, and have no access to my work files - in fact, I’m in the sticks typing this on a dial-up connection (remember when we all used to work this way? It sucks!). I will hopefully get everything back up and looking spiffy tomorrow afternoon.

In the meantime, I am going with a bog-standard WordPress template. So all the content is here, it just looks like crap.

What’s even more frustrating is that it’s probably been a few days that it’s look like ass. So anyone who visited during that time saw a mess of type and some really weird formating. Visitors I cannot afford to lose, such as it is.

Arrg!

Sigh.

Here’s another music blog to feed into your RSS reader: Audio Lemon. Lots of gear-related YouTube clips and bits about classic synth gear as well as some software related stuff. Seems regularly updated.

The Audio Garden is a music software site created from the ashes of the The Patch Arena (where users could trade patches for various software instruments). It has the patches, plus a quickly growing list of articles and other resources for computer musicians. Definitely worth your time.

Are there any other music sites I’m missing?

Without going too deeply into it, I don’t like ReWire. Perhaps since I don’t use Reason, or I just don’t have the patience for it, but in the end, the amount of time it takes to get P5 into Sonar is almost not worth it for my purposes. Add to that the recent P5 update added a whole level of complication to just setting up a project if you have a multi-out audio interface (I do). So I’ve been puzzling over a working alternative while I plug along in Project 5.

The reason I need to get a project started in Project 5 into Sonar? Mixing mostly, but at some point I hit a limit in what I can manage in P5. While I can sculpt a complete track in P5, its limitations to my way of working eventually get in my way. Even with the improved busing structure of the recent update, it’s just not as easy to get really get a complex mixing structure. Of course, I never sequenced an Atari or used a tracker, so what do I know? But there are also cases where I need to take a track to the next level and its faster for me to work in Sonar, where I can render and manipulate audio files much more fluidly.

If you are looking to bring a track into Sonar via ReWire - and it works for lots of people - there’s a couple of things to keep in mind, and over at the P5 Wiki there’s a really well-plotted method. There’s really nothing I can add to that.

For me I’ve got it down to two methods:

The first is similar to my Slick Trick for Mixing BFD Groups: Basically, bouncing down solo tracks of the various elements of the mix. Solo, say, the kick track, and File \ Export Audio to a working folder (I use a newly created project folder in my projects structure. These tracks can just be imported into Sonar. This is basically how I would prepare audio files were I ever to need mixing them in a studio other than my own. But with Sonar, achieving this much more simple in that you can basically sculpt the audio output in the “Export Audio” dialog and get a folder full of 24-bit audio files all cued to the project start at once. In Project 5 2.5 it’s a pretty manual process. But this would be a pretty fool-proof method if you have an arrangement you’re very committed to.

The 2nd method, is similar to this, but on a more micro level: It would be handy if Project 5 2.5 were set up to export both audio & midi clips with one or two clicks. Alas, this is not the case, though this is a minor inconvenience at best. If you are reasonably comfortable with re-assembling your project back in Sonar, or whatever host you’re using, this is by far the most versatile method.

• First save all your synth presets and effect settings, or any multi-sample instruments. If if you’re using an out of the box preset don’t assume it will carry over, so name and save a preset of each plugin with the project/song title. (If you’re really anal you can save them into the project folder, but for me that’s too much navigating for what’s a simple step.)
• Re-save the P5 project, being sure to check the “Save audio in project folder” business in this dialog. If you’ve already built the project in a unique folder this is already taken care of. If you haven’t this is where you’ll find the audio clips that make up your project.
• Next export your MIDI, or .ptn files. Sonar can read either, and since there’s a dedicated keyboard shortcut (Shift+S) for the latter there’s no reason not use this, unless you think you might need the MIDI clip at some other point for some other context. If so, or you can only work with the MIDI file, you’ll find the menu item when you load the clip into the Edit window. So, save out each pattern used to the same folder with the audio clips.
• Create you new project, match the tempo up, and start dragging in the bits and bobs.

I’ve done each, and each works well depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. I can definitely see where you might want to do both, or a combination of the two: a few complete tracks that you’re more or less happy with, and a few that you would want to tweak and edit further.

Of course if you have complicated tempo changes, in which case the whole process would become that much more difficult.

To continue my shameless campaign to become a poor man’s Analog Industries, I was inspired to dig into my Google Analytics statistics. And indeed it is revealing.

First, if you choose to look at a certain way, it’s unnerving how big the footprint we leave across the Web actually is. I know there are ways to lessen it, but, really, unless you are practicing some deep hacker fu, it’s just a fact. That and the Google Analytics GUI has gotten really, really slick.

But really the biggest revelation is that I do indeed have readers, meager though you may be. So, hello to my RSS homies. Drop a comment every now and then. Certainly I’ve got to be saying some stupid shit that inspires you to make jokes at my expense.

Anyway, I have site upgrades in the works, and a lot of posting - apparently - to get busy with.

Sorry to get so meta.

Cheers.

(Did I actually just say homies? Yep. Man, I’m old.)

Genre nomenclature aside, there’s a thorough conversation with Thomas Dolby over on CDM.

Not a huge Dolby fan, though I certainly liked that Submarine song back in the day, but I’ll recognize that he did a significant amount to popularize electronic music, albeit of a particular strain. I’ve seen some YouTube stuff of him talking about his current rig which is entertaining in a gear slut sort of way. And he now has a CD of him playing with a horn section, and I maintain that any band with a good horn section is automatically more interesting. (And, no, two sax players does not a horn section make; usually that’s just two band geeks who lucked in a ska/swing/jam band. And besides, they’re woodwinds.)

And, of course, he has a blog.