My new synth, the Moog Little Phatty has 3 Control Voltage (or CV) inputs, for Filter cutoff, Oscillator Pitch and Volume. Analog signals on these inputs will modulate the corresponding parameter. This is the same technology behind those beautiful modular synths, where you have some mad scientist sticking wires all over the place.

I do not have any modular components yet, but I do have Reaktor. This virtual modular synth will let me build complex structures to send arbitrary CV signals to any of the LP’s inputs (thanks to my multi output soundcard). I’m still experimenting to see if line level audio voltages have the same range as typical CV signals.

Anyway, for this mp3 below, I am sending 2 outputs from Reaktor to the LP. One is a midi controlled oscillator being sent to the LP’s Audio-In, which gives me a 3 oscillator synth. The second is acting as an FM modulator for the LP’s filter. It has an envelope and a frequency ratio adjustable through Reaktor.

The first sound you hear is the LP by itself. at :15 or so, the 3rd oscillator appears. The filter FM comes in about :37.

After that I mess with Reaktor parameters for a while and then move over to the LP adjusting it’s settings directly.

The sky is the limit!

Here’s a quick improv with my Little Phatty running through Reaktor’s “fusion reflections” ensemble.

I’ve been in a sound design mode lately, and here is a little resultant improv:

posthaste

I don’t know why I called it that.

The choppy rhythmic thing at the beginning was done in Kontakt 2. The bass tone is provided by a lovingly crafted iZotope Trash patch, which will make an appearance on a real song someday, I swear it. That lovely flute is from Reaktor 5’s amazing Steampipe 2 instrument.

The experimenting continues. This time I was working on new ways of sequencing drums. This sample has one instance of battery 2, playing the ‘Best of Absynth’ kit, being controlled by 3 midi tracks in Ableton Live. Different loops were bound to keys on my typing keyboard, but I didn’t get too crazy with these until later on in the recording. The synth melody is a simple FM7 patch that I whipped up.

The last minute has the BeatRepeat effect, with certain parameters mapped to midi knobs.

I like it, but my recent reliance on BeatRepeat is making me feel cheesy.

battery-a-thon.mp3

I spent a lot of quality time with Reaktor over the weekend.

I had not previously explored the possibilities of its Snapshot-Morph feature (Snapshots are patches in Reaktor-parlance). You can specify two endpoint snapshots, and assign a midi-cc to morph between them — similar to the scene morph on the Yamaha An1x (and many others, presumably. I just happen to have this synth).

Anyway, applying this process to normal synths provides the expected results: radically shifting timbres and crap like that.

Applying it to something like a drum machine creates some warped, mutating grooves. Behold system presets of the drum machine Massive, being so morphed:

massive.mp3

I’ve been wanting to try to incorporate some heavy guitar sounds into my Starfinger songs lately, so I asked my Songfight compatriots if they had any suggestions for getting that sound. Here is a brief document of my attempts thus far.

For the record, I don’t know how to play the guitar. This experiment was really more about seeing what kind of tone I could get out of my crappy Gibson Jr. guitar [ don't ask ].

Anyway, I recorded a simple riff directly into a mixer, piped into my sound card. I duplicated it, and delayed the copy by a few milliseconds, and panned them both in opposite directions. Then I ran the whole thing through iZotope Trash, and fiddled with it until it sounded meaty.

MP3 sample.

Clearly I don’t know what I’m doing, but I thought this sounded pretty good considering the crappy equipment. It’s more of a testament to Trash’s quality than anything else, I reckon.

I’ve been making a point lately of spending a little time each day playing around with the arsenal of audio tools on my Powerbook. I’ve been creatively dry lately, so this allows me to get my musical fix without the need for inspiration.

To celebrate the forthcoming release of Ableton Live 4, I thought I’d spend some quality time with Live 3.

I took a few uninteresting CSound textures, that I had created for Tapegerm a couple years ago, and unleashed Live’s clip envelopes on them. I then set up a send bus with SupaTrigga, which did all the hard work.

I don’t have the source files handy, but here is the result:

live_csound.mp3.

Watch this space for more musical experiments in the future.