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}

Chris Randal, of Audio Damage renown, has informed his readership that he marking his 40th birthday today. Happy birthday, Chris. Welcome to the declining years.

In said post, he anticipated the occasion by noting some of the musical milestones of a particular lifetime. Since there’s nary a bandwagon I won’t jump on, here are a few of mine, though it’s not my birthday:

• #1 Song on the day I was born: “The Sounds Of Silence” Simon & Garfunkel
• First new album I purchased with my own cash: “Duty Now for the Future” Devo¹
• First stadium concert: Grateful Dead, Providence Civic Center²

As a present for Chris why don’t you head over to his label and buy one of his records. I assume he gets to keep all the profits for those (since they’re digital downloads it’s all his, right?) it’s the next best to his requested Paypal cash grab³.

^{1That sounds way more prescient that it probably was. Before and after that anomalous purchased, mostly influenced by my best friend at the time, my tastes were a lot more in keeping for a kid growing up in NH in the 70s. However, I rediscovered the album in my punk rock years and realized how fucking brilliant it is. To this day, one of my favorite albums. And I still have that copy, much worse for wear.}

^{2This was before their mid-to-late 80s resurgence; I happened to be in town the night my cousin was going, and getting a scalped ticket was incredibly easy and cheap. My cousin ended up being a life-long deadhead. I did not. Though I’ve often wanted to cover a Dead song for the academic exercise of it, and simply to be contrary.}

^{3Yes, I know he was joking}

PS: While we’re on the subject of gift giving, I do want to call attention to the two most recent posts from sensible misanthrope Violent Acres that are about the best things I’ve read on the issue: #1, #2

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.
(more…)

Well, not really. This is one of those years when I abstain as much as possible from Christmas. I don’t do this every year, but more than occasionally. As I’ve said, no kids, a family that is understanding or feels similarly. My girlfriend is with her family, and we did our small Xmas before she went away (believe me, I know how good I have it with her) so I can have a day as uneventful as I’d like. I won’t go into a tirade or anything, but suffice to say, while I understand the need for family and communal celebration, the religion/consumerism aspect bring forth the curmudgeon in me.

Also, my good friend just called to tell me that his beloved pet had suddenly and unexpected shuffled off this mortal coil. Sad news.
(more…)

I just noticed that the google banner ad at the bottom of page is spitting up a Rayzoon ad. Since that space is dictated by the whims of google it is completely coincidental. (And unprofitable I’ll add.) But, no. Rayzoon did not pay me to mention their product.

But while I was staring at my navel, just thought I’d say it in case. While I can be bought off with shiny trinkets and baubles, I will never endorse something I wouldn’t actually use, or praise a product to appease some hypothetical advertiser.

That said, I’m open to reviewing your product online or accepting your advertising dollars. Just know what you’re getting into…

he says thereby ensuring no advertising dollars/review product.

Whew.

I blew through some code today, I tell you what.

Oh I had the pieces I’d been working with, but this morning they began to fall into place. So I built on the momentum and just got it all out of the way. I needed to put it to bed so I could move on with phase two of my site.

Improvents/Revisions You May or May Not Notice:

• Improved font readability.
• Much improved login & registration. (Up there, to your right.)
• Cleaned up a lot of the garbage google ads (does anyone ever click through those?)
• Tagging and related posts
• Uhh… a bunch of other tweaks and stuff my brain is too fried to remember now.

There are already little things I’m catching, and there are few big changes I haven’t quite got a handle on, but since I’m my own beta team, and since it seems to work well enough, have at it. Please let me know if you find anything or have any suggestions.

In a bit of a stretch from the material I’ve been droning on about, I’m undertaking a new project.

Welcome to Another Day, Another Album: digital lo-fi culls the collection¹

_{Photo: guardian.co.uk}

Thesis
I have a fairly extensive music collection, be it vinyl, CD, or digital format (MP3s). So much in fact that I’ve hit near stasis actually listening to it. I’m tired of carting it all around, and I need to rid myself of those records I’m not listening to, no longer care for, or where WTF? purchases to begin with. Has my appreciation for music has shifted from one of voracious consumption to a more nuanced appreciation (i.e. I’m old)? Am I as burned out as I sometimes feel? Is there new music for me to love? Do I need to force myself to remember why I began my own audio explorations? Or is this just a lull?

So, in the name of forcing me to confront the pile of aural media I’ve amassed over most of my adult life, and to explore what my music taste has evolved into, I’m going to listen to my collection. 1 album, 5 days a week, (I’m too much of a slacker to really do it 7-days a week) And I’ll be posting my thoughts, reactions, and maybe if I get ambitious embedded media clips.

Methodology
Nothing too stringent, other than simply sticking with it. Full albums, as released, only. I’ll probably try to stick to either CDs or vinyl² simply because I have to get through this pile, but some MP3-format albums might creep in. Most of the reviews will be brief, very subjective, and rated on whatever scale strikes my fancy at the time of posting. Perhaps something more ordered will evolve.

It’s more than likely I’ll be reviewing any albums I pick up along the way, and I may begin to solicit recordings from my travels on the Web. If you have a product you might like me write about please drop me a line. (albumaday - at - digitallofi-dot-com). I’m not promising anything but I’m open to most anything.

Anyway, enough wind up.

Time to begin.

What are we starting with? I think, The Campfire Headphase, Boards of Canada, which was the last full album I listened to all the way through when I (mis)conceived this.

^{1Title subject to change as the mood strikes me.
2I’m going to need to get a working turntable hooked up to my audio rig, but fortunately the Alesis makes this very easy. About this process, more later.}

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.}

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.