synthesizerwriter

'Childhood Remixed' by Pixelh8

2010-06-02T15:10:00.003+01:00

I've always been fascinated by the mixture of mechanics and electronics that you find in toys, and so Pixelh8's first solo exhibition needed little introduction - plus I know Pixelh8 from the excellent Ipswich-based 'Curiosity Collective' technology/arts group.

Titled 'Childhood Remixed', the exhibition is all about making sounds with children's toys, and the complete encompassing project also includes related workshops and talks. I've been to one of Pixelh8's 'circuit bending' workshops before and it was totally brilliant.

The exhibition has several separate exhibits, linked by a common theme of revisiting children's toys as an adult and looking at them with very different eyes and mindset.

Warranty Void is an augmented Nintendo NES console from several generations before the the Wii and people waving Wiimotes took over the video games console market.

An Apple A Day takes toys and leaves the brightly coloured plastic exteriors alone, but subverts the audio internals in ways that range from subtle to extreme. It has to be said that one of the characteristics of circuit bending is that the resulting modifications tend to veer to the more overt end of the spectrum.

My personal favourite (a quote from Zorg, of course) was the chain-saw, possibly one of the most unusual musical instruments I've seen as a children's toy, although some heavy metal rock bands have used angle grinders in performance, more for sparks than sound, and I noticed that this year's Eurovision Song Content featured a robot with an angle grinder in one of the performances too, so perhaps this type of industrial ephemera is becoming more mainstream.

Beat Un-boxed took cute and turned into into a beat-box. A 16-step sequencer driving a multi-instrument percussion set via solenoids - gorgeous!

The centre of the exhibit is dominated by a piece of musical autonomata set off by a big red button. Robots, Meccano and more plastic combine to make a visual and audible melange.

'Childhood Remixed' is open to the public from May 29th to July 12th, 2010 in the Town Hall Galleries, Ipswich, Suffolk, UK. Thoroughly recommended.

'Slango' SoundCloud track shared!

2010-04-03T11:51:00.009+01:00

I think SoundCloud is a great concept. Unfortunately my experience with it as a service has been mixed. I've had upload problems in the past, and I can't get the share to work with Blogger at all (works fine with Facebook, btw), which is why this post is done manually. But I persist because SoundCloud ought to be the perfect solution, and I'm hoping that given time...

Slango1 by martinruss

So here's the track that I wanted to share. It's another rambling piece of electronica, this time inspired by the 1970s. So it's deliberately at a fixed 120 bpm, in a predictable 4/4, in the key of C, with a hackneyed chord sequence, minimalistic arpeggios, no development, etc. I used the ever-wonderful Ableton Live for the sequencing, and the essential Audacity (with Lame) for the final conversion to MP3.

I've also captured this track driving one of my recent visualizers too, and you can see it on my YouTube channel...

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Oh, and as you will see immediately below this, I'm gradually becoming a fan of Oliver Chesler's 'Wire To The Ear' blog, which has a rare resonance with the way that my mind works. Thoroughly recommended!

From synthesizerwriter

Using the Apple General MIDI DLS Sound Bank Synthesizer in Ableton Live

2010-03-17T20:00:00.042Z

One of my rules of thumb is that whenever I can't find something on the Internet, then I try to solve it and then write it up. You are reading this because I could not find any good guide to how to use the Apple General MIDI Down-Loadable Sound (DLS) Sound Bank Synthesizer (an Audio Unit plug-in provided in Mac OSX) in Ableton Live. The plug-in is also referred to as the Apple DLS Music Device, and this is how it appears in Ableton Live.

As with many things in life, there is more than one way to do it.

Here's the simple way:

This is just a MIDI Track with the Apple DLS plug-in dropped into it, and then a MIDI Clip is created, and a few note events added. The result uses the first one of the 16 available MIDI channels in the Apple DLS plug-in, and so you can only use it for instrumental voices - there seems to be no way to change the MIDI channel that is used. So if you only need a single channel of basic General MIDI instrument sounds, then this may be all that you need.

Notice here that I've made the Inputs and Outputs visible by clicking on the I-O circle on the far right of the mixer, just to the right of the master volume sliders. What is interesting is that this MIDI Track is behaving exactly as it should - receiving MIDI inputs and converting them into audio outputs. Unfortunately, Live seems to always send MIDI information to the DLS plug-in on MIDI channel 1, and there is no control to change this in the I-O panel. In fact, for this simple example, you do not need to see the inputs and outputs at all.

When you drop the DLSMusicDevice onto the MIDI Track, then you this dialogue box will appear. You can set the controls if you have a specific set-up you want to use, but in most cases you will just close this dialogue. You can get it back using the 'spanner' in the assignable X_Y control block that appears at the bottom of the screen in the Clip view.

But there's a better way:

It is more complex, but it allows you to utilise the full capabilities of the Apple DLS plug-in.

You start in exactly the same way - create a new MIDI Track.

This time, you definitely need to make the Inputs and Outputs visible by clicking on the I-O circle on the far right of the mixer, just to the right of the master volume sliders.

This I-O panel is the key to assigning MIDI channels to the DLS Music Device.

You then drop the Apple DLS plug-in into the MIDI Track. This sets up the DLS Music Device so that it receives MIDI Input and outputs audio into the mixer. But this time we are going to re-route where the MIDI Input is coming from...

(The Apple DLS plug-in is in the Plug-In Devices > Audio Units > Apple folder )

The Track name will have changed to DLSMusicDevice...

And the Apple Music Synthesizer dialogue box will have appeared... Note that the three 'Parameter' slider controls ( tuning, volume and reverb volume ) are global, and so they affect all the DLS sounds.

You now need to add a second MIDI Track... This is going to be used to hold the clip containing the note events, and to control the MIDI channel of those events...

The I-O panel in this new MIDI Track contains this vital pair of controls, which aren't exactly obvious in what they do...

The upper pop-up list control shows a list of the Tracks that the MIDI output from this MIDI Track can be connected to. In this case, we want the output of this Track to go to the DLSMusicDevice, so we select the first Track that we created...

Any note events that we put into a piano roll Clip on this Track will now be routed as MIDI note events to the DLSMusicDevice, which will turn them into audio.

The lower pop-up list control lets you control the MIDI Channel of the note events that are sent to the DLSMusicDevice Track.

Here's a summary of what the two pop-up controls do...

Notice that the 1-DLSMusicDevice in the top pop-up refers to the plug-in being in Track 1, whilst the 2-DLSMusicDevice in the bottom pop-up refers to the MIDI Channel that the note events will be sent on... If the DLSMusicDevice was dropped into MIDI Track 3, then the top box would say 3-DLSMusicDevice. When you select the target Track with the top pop-up, then the DLSMusicDevice plug-in should be obvious - just make sure that you always look at the lower pop-up to check what MIDI Channel you are using.

You can now create a new Clip in the new MIDI Track...

Remember that the lower pop-up selects the MIDI Channel that the DLSMusicDevice will use for this Clip, and the Program Number controls on the left of the Clip piano-roll will select the sound for that MIDI Channel...

Here's the MIDI Channel pop-up control...

And here is the Program Number pop-up for selecting the sound or instrument. Note that you need to love the slider on the right to switch between low and high numbers, just like in any Live selector control with lots of options.

Remember that you can create several MIDI Tracks, assign them to different MIDI Channels (like Channel 10 for Drum sounds) and make the most of the multi-timbral capabilities of the Apple DLS Music Device.

In this example, the top pop-ups all route the MIDI events to the DLSMusicDevice plug-in on Track 1 (shown highlighted in Red), whilst the individual MIDI Channels (set by the lower pop-up) are shown highlighted in green.

Importing, Editing and Exporting MIDI Files

2010-02-27T22:15:00.016Z

Image via Wikipedia

Sometimes you get surprised. It happened to me today and I thought I'd note it down to see if anyone else has noticed the phenomenon.

Like many people, I use a music sequencer/DAW/host software/MIDI and Audio sequencer as a way of turning ideas into music. I tend to use the native file format of the software, because that usually has the most comprehensive support of all the features of that particular (I'll say 'sequencer' and show my age - I was raised in a time when little red lights flashed along sequencers on stage behind people like Edgar Froese or Keith Emerson) sequencer. This is just like the way that a very popular document format is the .doc format, used by Microsoft's 'Word' word processor.

At the back of my mind, there has always been the implicit assumption that if I needed to export the music, then apart from the obvious MP3 and FLAC (or even WAV) audio forms, I would use a MIDI File. Having used and/or reviewed The Music System and Ample on the BBC B Micro, C-Lab's Notator (now Apple Logic and on the Mac), Steinberg's Cubase (now a company within the Yamaha group), Trackman, Dr. T's KCS and Intelligent Music's RealTime (possibly my all-time favourite MIDI sequencer!) on Atari STs, and Pro Tools, Bill Southworth and compny's Total Music, Opcode's Studio Vision, MOTU's Performer, Intelligent Music's M, etc on the Mac, plus a few others, then I knew that you could almost always also save as a MIDI File (.mid these days, although I remember the .smf 'smurf' suffix also being used in the days of floppy disks).

The shock came when I discovered that whilst MIDI File import is alive and well (in most cases: one 'you know who you are' sequencer I downloaded and tried today would not import MIDI Files at all!) the reverse is not necessarily true. Apple's Garageband is one example where you can't export a MIDI File, although apparently you can import the Garageband file into Logic and then export it as a MIDI File. Even my current favourite, Ableton Live, only exports MIDI Files of individual phrase clips, and not complete songs. In many cases, trying to find out exactly what the MIDI File capabilities of a specific piece of music software were was not easy. It seems that some people expect you to buy and then find out, which is a little sub-optimal for me. My preference is to have the manual downloadable (or browsable on-line) so that I can find out before I buy.

Once I realised that sequencers didn't seem to be quite as MIDI-frendly as I expected, then I've been hugely glad that I still have my trusty old Pro Tools set-up that lets me do type 0 and 1 MIDI Files, edit program changes, tweak controllers, and lots more. That old Mac G3 suddenly became something I'm going to maintain as long as I can. (The Hex Editor shown here is the one that I also use to check what is in a MIDI File: Hex Fiend)

I'm very tempted to compile a table of the Import/Export capabilities of 'sequencers', so if anyone has any information, I'd be happy to collate it here!

Wavetable Sound Effects 0v03 - Update!

2009-12-21T16:03:00.004Z

After getting my head around some of the features of Max again (like having to make sure that you use 2000. to indicate a float instead of 2000 which is an integer), I've now updated my Wavetable Sound Effects Max For Live (M4L) instrument to version 0v03. The intermediate 0v02 version was superceded during testing of a different wavetable device that I'm still working on...

This new version has much the same principles behind it, but now allows finer control, and has better LFOs. The new LFOs include a 'Shape' control that samples the waveform and gives a kind of Sample/Hold effect, plus there's now a frequency modulating LFO for each LFO, which extends their usability quite a lot. I also added three new wavetables, so there's lots more sound generating capability. This device is intended to be explored, much as one would do with the analogue synths of old like the EMS VCS3... So feel free to explore.

You can find it on the Max For Live dot Com library site here.

Max For Live - my first device!

2009-12-06T22:23:00.005Z

It's been a long time. My invoice for Max 2.01 is dated the 27th of June 1994, from the days when you got a huge ring-binder of information and Max came on floppy disks! I've been a little distracted since...

After a few days of re-orientation, I've now got my first M4L (Max For Live) device in a releasable (usable but not perfect) form. It is a wavetable-based (always loved PPGs, as I've said before) sound effects generator, which isn't something that is exactly mainstream these days. Nothing clever inside: a wavetable scanner, some modulation, and some wavetables which, of course, I made up myself from samples that I originally made for my Korg Electribe S Mark II.

You can find it here ( http://www.maxforlive.com/ ), at a web-site that allows those of us who haven't been invited into the beta trial of the official Ableton sharing system.

As with any effects generator, you will need to provide an acoustic environment for it, so add your own preference of spatialization, imaging, echo and reverb. The two slightly misleadingly named wavetables cover grungy sounds (Vox) and sweepy sounds (Sines) - future versions will add some more tables, but there's already plenty of scope for making lots of wierd noises already. As with any sound-generating device, the best sounds come with time, so be prepared to spend some time with it, learning what it does.

But most of all, have fun! This is a free present to you all.

Karaoke Concatenated

2009-12-02T18:19:00.005Z

Ever wished that you could listen to just one line from a karaoke performance, and then jump forwards to the next performer? (Yes, I do realise that this would require either highly efficient stage control, or some sort of super-sized sushi restaurant conveyor belt, but read on!)

Well, this is now what you can do on a promotional web-site that is part of the launch of the new 'Lips Number One Hits' game for the XBox.

Try it out here.

It's interesting to hear a song where each line is sung by different people - you could describe it as a form of hocketing - but it turns karaoke into much more of a spectator sport, and it turns up the fun factor too. So if you are an armchair commentator, then it lets you significantly increase the frequency of informed comment. Unfortunately the video-booth is no longer touring the United Kingdom, so you've missed your chance to be featured singing one line of Lily Allen's 'The Fear'.

The title of this post is also interesting: quite a tongue-twister!

Max and Live: Aptly Named!

2009-11-22T13:25:00.004Z

It isn't often that big things happen in music technology these days. The market has been pretty mature for some time, and apart from refinements, it has been pretty quiet - as have I! This isn't a coincidence - I stopped doing synthesizer and sequencer reviews when I figured that we were at more or less the peak of technological development, and it has been quiet ever since - just gradual minor improvements and the 'things discovered/invented ages ago finally becoming possible/affordable because of increases in processing power' effect.

So it is really good to be alive and present at something truly huge: Max for Live.

Why is this a momentous event? Because it is the first time that what I call host software, and others call DAWs or sequencers, has changed the way that it fundamentally works. Up until now, the sequencing/audio software that acts as a host for audio/instrument/processing plug-ins (VST, AU, etc) has not allowed you to do anything much with how the hosted plug-ins have worked internally, or how they have integrated into the host - the only route has been to write your own plug-ins or your own host software ( or go down the Reaktor route). But Max for Live changes that, forever.

I'm expecting wonderful things to come out of this...

Pure Magic-netik!

2009-11-10T23:47:00.006Z

I've enjoyed a full subscription to the excellent PureMagnetik website for the past year, and I have to say that it has been completely worth the money. The quality of the samples, sounds, instruments, effects and racks in the down-loadable Micropaks has been uniformly superb, and I thoroughly recommend it for anyone who uses Ableton Live, Kontakt or Logic.

So it gets my coveted 'Thoroughly Recommended' award, and would qualify for the rare and fabulous 'extra' star, if it weren't for one glitch in an otherwise faultless performance:

I had a problem with one of the 'Amp' racks in the 'Model C' (Hohner Clavinet) micropak, where I got no sound at all from it. I posted a message on the support forum (The Board) but got no replies at all, so I'm not entirely happy with the support, but then this is the first time I've needed it!

For the next year, I'm going to make some samples, sounds, etc. of my own for Live, so watch this space!

Back from the Future?

2009-09-30T08:42:00.005+01:00

On the 17th of September, my son came in from an evening appointment all flustered. (What follows is pure tech-movie-geek stuff almost totally distanced from music or sound synthesis, so you have been warned!)

"We've just seen a DeLorean!" he exclaimed.

Apparently he had been in a car with some mates on the way home, and going around a roundabout a car had pulled onto the roundabout ahead of them from the left. One of them noticed that it looked unusual, and my son got his iPhone out. They didn't get very close, and had to turn off at the next roundabout, but my son did get some shaky pictures of what seems to be a DeLorean DMC-12 sports car...

Trying to take photos in a car which is attempting to catch up with an albeit legendarily allegedly slow sports car is never easy, and the photos go some way to proving this!

Of course, if this was CSI-world, then we would be able to digitally 'enhance' the photos, get the numberplate, see the driver's face, extract a 3D model, notice that the front left tyre was slightly deflated, etc. Unfortunately...

Waveform explorations...

2009-08-31T20:27:00.005+01:00

Waveforms are often used as visual metaphors for sound. In actuality, the shape of the waveform is a poor representation because you can only see the top 30 dB of the harmonic content - the rest is hidden in the thickness of the line that is used to draw the waveform and other difficulties of trying to represent a large dynamic range in a medium that has only a tiny dynamic range (a waveform diagram). But the metaphor is useful, and as long as the sound is the important thing, then crude waveform diagrams are acceptable as symbols.

Image via Wikipedia

Possibly the most interesting use of sounds that were presented as waveforms was in the early 1980s, when German synthesizer pioneer Wolfgang Palm and his company, PPG (Palm Products GmbH) produced a series of leading-edge 'wavetable' synthesizers that used digital techniques at a time when analogue was king and Yamaha's DX series of FM synthesizers were being developed in Japan. Digital synthesis in a popular and affordable form is often credited as appearing with the DX7, but PPG's 'Wave' series of wavetable synthesizers used (for the time) sophisticated digital sound generation with analogue filtering and enveloping. By changing rapidly from one waveform to another - called sweeping' through a table of waveforms (a wavetable) - the sound generation produced much more complex and evolving sounds than more conventional synthesizers of the time with sine, square, sawtooth and triangle waveforms. I was hooked, and I've been a champion of wavetables ever since, although I also have weaknesses for FM and additive synthesis too, and I'm very confortable with subtractive synthesis.

So when I heard that a new Live Pack was available for Ableton Live, that provided lots of waveform samples and used Live's Instrument Racks and Simpler sample replay engine to produce wavetable-like sounds, then I downloaded the demo, auditioned the sounds, and liked what I heard. Very soon afterwards, I bought the complete set: Waveforming, from MESA+ (and not to be confused with the Dutch Nanotechnology research institute).

Waveforming provides 66 multi-sampled wave-samples, 270 Instrument Racks (plus Simpler Presets) as well as a few drum kits, sound effects, and sample songs (provided as Live Sets, so you caan delve into them and see exactly how the sounds are used in context!).

The sounds cover a wide range, and fall into very few of the classic wavetable cliche traps. I was very impressed with the breadth of sounds, and their usability - I was able to find timbres to fill all the niches I wanted, and overall the sounds seemed fresh and very usable (as well as offering lots of customisation options through macro controls, and lots of room for making new sounds by using the supplied samples). Of course, sound is very much a personal thing, and so these are my own subjective opinions, but I think I'm going to use the Waveforming sounds a lot!

Thoroughly recommended - try out the demo and see if your ears like it too!

SS&S III Glossary

2009-08-17T00:24:00.004+01:00

The glossary from the first and second editions of my book, Sound Synthesis and Sampling, is now available online - at least partially. I am still adding entries, and expect to be finished soon. Then there are some graphics to be finalized. Until then, I thought that you might like to get an advance view before anyone else.

The SS&S III Glossary is at: http://sites.google.com/site/sssglossary/

SY99 Floppy Drive Replacement Update

2009-08-02T18:10:00.007+01:00

I've just updated the section of my web-site where I document my experiences with the SY99 floppy disk. New, better-quality pictures, tables, lots of links, and a lot of information. A veritable SY99 floppy-fest, which may also be useful to SY77 and V-50 owners.

Theorbo, Chittarone, etc

2009-06-19T09:25:00.003+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

Music from the 1600s is one of my favourite areas. Improvisation as found in Divisions and similar 'Medieval Jazz' (not my favourite term) is fascinating, particularly because it shows that there's nothing new, and that virtuosity has long been a good selling point.

Synthesizing real instruments can be tricky, but rewarding. But finding the right source material can be difficult. So I was very pleased to stumble across a very nice piece by Johann Kapsberger when it was played on Classic FM, the UK classical music FM radio station. Following up the air-play, I found this web-site:

http://www.guitar168.com/Kapsberger.htm

which contains a wealth of information on players, lutes and their cousin instruments like the theorbo, chittarone, etc. I do love the names of old instruments!

The other side...

2009-05-16T23:46:00.008+01:00

There are two types of blog: words and pictures.

I already have a 'words' blog ( blog.martinruss.com ), and I realized that I needed one which had more pictures, more media, more music, and more synthesis in it.

So here it is! Welcome to the Other side.