Sometime last year I wrote about how I had once owned a Moog MG1/Realistic Concertmate. It’s not just that I had no idea what it was or barely used it while I had it, or even that I sold it to some friends for like fifty bucks - it’s that of all the crap I’ve hung onto over the years I had to get rid of that. And every once and a while something comes along to remind me how misguided I was at certain points in my life.

Today this is pointed out via Analog Industries. Alerted to a new freebie sample set from the dedicated geniuses at Goldbaby that utilizes a Moog MG1 run through a bunch of Audio Damage plugins. I’m not on a broadband connection right now so I won’t be able to audition them for a while. But I’m prepared to download and weep.

_{Photo ripped the matrixsynth flicr stream}

Here’s something well worth reading: What Have I Learned, in which our author and blog host, a one James Kirsch (nom de guerre: general fuzz), ruminates on what it means to be an independent musician and self-producer, making music for the shear joy and intellectual satisfaction of it, only to release it to the perceived indifference of the Web.

So, not a prescriptive cataloging of EQ and compression tips as the post title might lead you to believe; no “How to build a super saw patch” here. What we get are some thoughtful excogitation for we project studio jockeys, huddled over our screens of Project5, Logic, Live, et al, filling up our hard drives with sound collections and virtual instruments, inflicting the results on girlfriends, family, newsgroup acquaintances. I’m not full agreement with everything Mr. fuzz is offering but the spirit of it is %100 on the money.

The irony of it is with this one post the general negates a lot of what he was writing about. He has generated a whole lot of feedback, made a lot of people who weren’t previously aware of his music, and collected I’d imagine a bunch of new fans, many of whom would gladly buy his music.

I for one am chuffed to have discovered the collected works of general fuzz. Nice downtempo tunes with a breeze of jazz blowing through the spaces, full of hooks and well-considered instrumental embellishments. Perfect for an early morning work session, such as I’m enjoying as I’m writing this. I’ve paid for albums that weren’t half this good. Click on the album cover above to check out his complete discography.

General, I salute you. (Groan…)

Allow me to present for your consideration one of his fine songs, off his latest release, Cool Aberrations:
general fuzz, “reasonable ability”:

I’ll finish up my series of posts celebrating cross-platform plugins with an elder statesman of the cross-platform plugin world, SonicCharge’s absolutely awesome µTonic (or microTonic).

I bought this back shortly after it was released, or at least when it was reviewed and demo’d in Computer Music. I made the decision like 15 minutes after installing the demo. It is really that fabulous. It is both simple - the presets are by and large brilliant - and really, really deep. To this day I’m constantly surprised by the sonic interest it adds to my music and the sounds I can get out of it - and I use it a lot.

I’m bringing this up for few reasons:

• It fits in perfectly with my cross-OS celebration, natch.
• A few months ago SonicCharge updated all the code for today’s top-o-the-line Macs (and a built a new Vista installer, though the program itself worked fine).
• In conjunction with said update they also released a new folder full of patches.
• To give away a little freebie pack of patches for use with µTonic.
• To make you suffer through a lot of back story.

All of this after the jump.
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Actually, I’m talking about the Sonar feature. You know the one you probably shut off immediate if you’re not using the demo.

And why shouldn’t you? It’s pretty much just a sequential list of shit you assume you know that gets in your way when you launch. “Ctrl+F will resize the project to show all tracks.” Yeah, yeah, whatever, we say to ourselves, let me at the good stuff.

You’ve probably already deduced that it’s just a simple Windows app that reads a basic .txt file. The text file contains no real styling or intricate formating so it’s easy to read and edit. So if you’ve only been using Sonar for a short while take a moment and dig it out of the program folder and read it. There may be one or two things in there that are new to you. But indeed, you can edit this document to say whatever you want.

A fellow named Hink over on KvR had the rather amusing suggestion of a plugin that nagged you to finish your project. I was thinking you could essentially rig Sonar to perform more-or-less the same thing.

I, myself, have hacked it to “play” me Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. This is amusing though not demonstratively useful. And I don’t think I’ve “updated” to the 4th edition; it involves a lot of cutting and pasting or search-n-replacing. (And, sorry, not posting it for all the obvious reasons and it’s a good, simple project if you find it even remotely interesting.)

Tip of the Day is hindered in that, as near as I can tell, it reads through the file sequentially. Perhaps there’s someway to “switch” Sonar to cycle through this file randomly; do any Sonar users know the answer to this? Are there other programs that can do more or less the same thing. (And, yeah, I saw at least one VST that played it, and it wasn’t particularly well implemented.)

And, to answer your question, Yes, I do have too much time on my hands. Why do people act like that’s inherently a bad thing?

Let me leave you with one more: Destroy nothing; Destroy the most important thing.

Here’s a deal for you breakbeat junkies:

Dusted William Super Funky Ass Drums - an impressive collection of 24bit REX2/wav loops for download for the introductory price of $10. Act fast, as I have no idea when this price ends; I think soon.

I’ve only just begun exploring the collection but I will attest to its quality. Just great sounding beats that have a lot of character but are dry and free of the over-processing that plague these kinds of collections.

This is not a “construction kit” per se, whereby you can mix and match different loops into a sequence which, at least remotely, plays like a continuous drum track. No, these are Breakbeats. But once you really start chopping up beats - snare pattern from this, kick pattern from that - or want to bung it through the DSP of your choice, you appreciate the usefulness of cleanly recorded but vintage sounding breaks. None of that, “Hey, let’s run the loop through a completely over-cranked filter and call it unique content!” Or “Well, let’s make it sound like it was ripped from vinyl by squashing the hell out of it and adding in noise.” No, when I’m buying breaks I want the groove, a great player playing a great sounding kit, recorded well. Making it sound completely over-processed I can handle myself.

That the collection contains both the REX2 & wave files makes this doubly useful. Lately, I’ve come to appreciate the versatility of REX files, though I still can’t bring myself to shell out for ReCycle. So I’m always happy not to be locked into one or the other format.

So, get in while the getting is good. This is a bargain at twice the price.

The high-end DSP plugin company Waves have been, yes, making waves (groan… I know, it’s too easy) with their newest efforts to crack down on those using cracks (someone stop me!), banpiracy.com. I won’t rehash it all when Peter Kirn over at createdigitalmusic.com has been doing a far better job than I could. But a couple of things to note: a.) as far as anyone can tell banpiracy.com is simply a front for Waves and no other developer/company is copping to being part of this “initiative” - i.e. visiting pro studios under one pretense and checking to see if they’re licenses are up-to-date, then suing them if they’re not. 2.) Waves have a long history of actively and aggressively protecting their wares (…I’ll stop, really, I will…) with OS-hooks, dongles, on-line licenses - the works, all at once. Thirdly, even in the high-end audio software market Waves charge a lot of money. And finally, piracy is a problem, even among pro and semi-pro studios. Don’t even argue otherwise. Anecdotal stories demoing cracks and/or later buying cracked software do not a solid case make. I personally had a very busy, albeit ghetto, urban studio brag to me about how much/many stolen software and sample libraries they had, and if I ever wanted they could hook me up.¹

My views on the quality of Waves actual software are as immaterial as they are uninformed. I’m sure they do what they promise and indeed sprinkle Magic Pixie Dust^TM all over your tracks. I’m sure they make tracks warm, and fat, and, erm, whatever other audio buzz-word you want to use here. They sure do make them louder. I, however, would not know. Well, other than what I’ve read from others who know a lot more about this than I, and it’s hard to argue with a list of users that reads like a (very geeky) who’s who of audio production. As much as it’s a money thing, it’s the whole copy protection issue. Additionally, as pretty and impressive as the Waves plugs may seem, if I was going to drop that kind of coin, there are a lot of other options.

So, let’s look at that proposition.
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I’m more or less back to square one. Or, rather, 1.5.

I’ll tell you, I was a lot more sternly judicious in what I installed this time. Because my sample storage was intact, I was able to save myself a lot of time re-installing libraries like BFD and SampleTank. Even still, it was fuckin’ tedious. And there were a lot of recent updates that I didn’t have burned to backup so tracking/downloading files and registrations, logging on the various websites, only adds to the chore.

Here are some thoughts/observations on DAW-oriented pre-crash recovery. This is may be real 101 stuff but they’re lessons I’ve learned.

• Know you’re sequencers’ default audio storage location. Even if you immediately change it, or have been working from the same per project directory structure for years, make sure you check it during backups periodically. I know that mine had accumulated a fair degree of crap over the years for various reasons. I corrected it when I came across it but never really addressed the WCS. So I’m not sure how deep the damage, and hopefully it will be mostly on projects long ago abandoned, but nevertheless…
• Futher this: When working with plugins, particularly softsynths, and you’re shutting a project down for the night, it’s a good idea freeze/render/bounce/whatever before closing out. If it’s a complex multi-out instrument you could just bounce to a temp track, just so you have guide. I’ve had this nip at me occasionally just as it is, you load up some synths and it has suddenly detuned itself or reset all its parameters. But when you start changing plugin addresses it’s a really recipe for things breaking.
• Maintaining a simple text file of all your registrations and address information will only get you so if you’re audio rig isn’t connected to the internet. A thumb drive is essential. Nevertheless it’s still cumbersome.
• Some companies need to take a good look at their web-based registration strategies¹. And thank you to those companies who make it easy.²
• Keep your drive image software up to date. Otherwise it’s just useless.
• Do not attempt to “slipstream” your install unless you really know what you’re doing.
• Simplifying is not over-rated.

I also misplaced my Sonar 2 CD case serial number (perhaps temporarily; I might be able to dig it out yet, there’s some boxes in the closet…). So I don’t have the Timeworks EQ and Compressor at the moment. While I certainly have a lot of things that can replace ‘em ably, I used them a lot for many of years.

So, yeah, a lot of this is due to my glacial working pace. And my stubborn refusal to hook my audio computer up to the internet teat.

So, I’m looking at my hard drive crash as my computers way of telling me it was not happy, and I needed to streamline my process. I plan to get a good disc imaging program and make a good clean go of it.

^{1Spectronics comes quickly to mind while I wait to hear back from support on just how to re-authorize StylusRMX. But there a couple others whom I won’t slag off here.}

^{2Anybody who generates their serial number from a unique user name or user account - Melodyne (particularly sophisticated), SonicCharge, AudioDamage - and while NI I believe is machine based they’ve pretty much nailed the engineering of the activation control (YMMV).}

^{Photo courtesy of Jim Hankey. (See comments.)}

Loudness wars aside.

This morning I decided I’m no longer going to refer to my final stage before burning to CD or ripping to MP3 as “Mastering.” Cause really, what I’m doing probably in no way resembles mastering. It’s “Finalizing.” Yeah, that makes sense.

Someday, I look forward to actually getting a finished CD mastered by someone who knows what they’re doing, has a good acoustic space, and won’t squash the crap out of it.

Until that time I do it myself. (Right now I’m looking forward to finishing a CD.)

For a long time I’d brought my bounced 2-bus mix into SoundForge and worked from there. I’ve always mixed low so I always have a fair degree of headroom in which to work. Using the plugin chainer I would run the wave through Vintage Warmer+GlissEQ+dbMasteringLimiter - though I’d switched to iZotope Ozone mastering limiter included with version 9.

But with the new version of Sonar, I’ve set up a much more flexible finalizing template. I can having two tracks of different mixes running through 2 busses that I can mix and match, so I can play with different DSP chains. To be honest, I pretty much run it through the same sequence; though I’m using the new Boost10 included in Sonar which is a really great plugin. Plus Sonar has great dithering options. And with my new Sonar-template setup I can run all kinds of eye-candy and tools - VintageMeter, analyzers, and now this.

Ozone has an option for killing intersample overs, but as quickly as I gained that knowledge I it became unavailable to me as it’s tied to SoundForge. So this will slot in nicely to my new finalizing template. So, yea! for SSL for this nice freebie. And some day I’ll have the resource to get one of these.

Cheers to AI for the heads up.

While Audio Damage gets ready to unleash the next and final plugin in its mod trilogy, I’ve had a chance to put their last creation, Fluid, to the test.

As I said previously, my experience with chorus units has either been of the cheap(er) guitar pedal variety or whatever came bundled with my software or “onboard” with my softsynths. In other words, the expected watery wooshing. In other words, something I didn’t use deliberately very much. In other words, it’s certainly been on synth patches or amp I’ve used but I’ve never thought to myself, “Gee, you know what this needs is a chorus.”

But the first thing I strapped Fluid across sounded so markedly better it was really quite astounding. I was working on a remix project, so the synth pad was already a fixed audio file, and since I was stripping the track of all its more traditional rock/pop elements, I was shifting the focus to the synth parts. I routed all the synth pads to a bus and put Fluid in the bus FX. As the attached audio clip of the solo’d bus track demonstrates, a fairly static synth part became a swirling, harmonically rich sound.

Fluid on the Synth Bus

Note about the demo clip. This is a synth bus, but after I heard how beautifully Fluid gave movement to the track, I sent the vocal “double” to the track as well. I was originally going to remove the vocal for this demo clip, but listening to it I thought it would be far more interesting to leave it in, to hear what Fluid did to both parts. While in the dry clip the vocal is slightly more “present,” keep in mind that this isn’t the “main” vocal bus, so the slightly blurring of the transients doesn’t really effect the full mix. But what is noticeable to me is that the vocal part of that bus doesn’t just get washed into the rest of the sound on that bus. So while the synths take on a more characterful sound, the vocal retains its clarity.

There had been this one glitch that had crept into my audio production that I had been working around for months.

In Sonar 6 certain plugin went missing from plugin menus. So we had gotten this great plugin manager but I was losing menu access to a lot of my favorite plugin instruments. I first noticed with microTonic, a synth I use a lot. I could see it in the list of installed VSTs, and I could add it to the menu editor. But in the actual menu they just weren’t showing up. Oatmeal & V-Station were two others I know of off the top of my head that went MIA. I could get to some through track templates (yea for remembering to create them), but some were apparently lost. to Sonar. I was hoping 7 would be the magic number and it would all be good. Nope.

And not only that, there were a lot of ghost plugins showing up in the Sonar plugin manager and SoundForge, listed weirdly, some of which probably dated back to when I was using the fxpansion VST wrapper.

Yet I was hesitating going back to a completely blank slate, wiping the system and buiding from scratch. Why? A lot of reasons I suppose: because it would have been tedious reinstalling all my plugins - digging out installers, updates - not to mention having to reregister a whole lot of ‘em, but also because I was just curious to see if I could figure out what was wrong.

So in frustration, I ripped all my versions of Sonar off the computer, along with a whole lot of old software. Old Project 5. All those versions of Sonar I had going back to version 2 - outta there. Gone. I didn’t touch my plugins too much, including Dimension Pro and Rapture, but I washed the registry several times with two different registry cleaners, including by hand. I was careful but thorough.

But no luck. The plugins were still not showing up in the menus and the ghost registry entries were still there.

So I started thinking of strategies to clean out my plugin folder. I knew there was a lot of detritus in there. I’m pretty good at deleting what I don’t want, but it was way too easy to tuck stuff out of the way and not really think about it. Freebies I thought might be cool, mag-ware I might have used once or twice, some of lesser SynthEdit creations. I whittled it down to just the commercial plugins and the free/donation-ware I know works and use a lot. I created a 2nd vst folder that sits right next to the current where I moved everything else. So I can still use these miscellaneous VSTs in other programs; perhaps bring some into Sonar using eXT as a plugin. I also tossed any overall folder structure (”c:\program files\audio_plugins\instruments\samplers\..”) and went with just splitting them up by developer and project (”c:\program files\audio_plugins\u-he\zebra2\..”).

Then, with the very helpful configuration information that the Plugin Manager provides, I used a block of CLSID numbers to ferret out where they were sitting in my registry. (I used Registrar Lite 5.5.1 if it’s helpful.) Just a huge block of dead info. So scappled it out. Did a complete update on XP (using the quasi-illegal post-SP2 updater).

So now my Sonar 7 is a lean, mean plugin machine.

Seriously, it’s easier sorting through them, rescanning them, changing properties, and the whole plugin manager just operates faster. Whatever your platform, whatever your host, I highly advocate getting a good handle on what’s going on in your plugin directory.

I’m not a big advocate of moderation when it comes to plugins - whatever you can afford, why not? - but there is something both cathartic and useful in really simplifying your plugin structure.