It takes a while to learn how to really program specific synths, especially as you need get a very deep understanding of the synthesis model. The classical synth model of a generator, filters, envelopes and so on could be grasped, but when you get into the world of additive synthesis, FM, and more esoteric models, it takes a lot of brain power, and especially time, to learn how to program such systems.

Enter the morphing interfaces. The basic idea is that you map four specific parameters to four sections, and move around in this x/y space, and this way — from existing parameters — you could generate brand new sounds. Zebra 2 has this model.

Tonight I also tried out the morphing system in Native Instrument’s FM8, it’s even more wild, you have four different patches, and you could take parts from each one and morph a new sound with a certain spread of parameters you could define. It’s hard to describe it without doing it yourself, but you could really quickly get very interesting FM-based sounds this way.

These morphing interfaces are also good not just for studio use, also for live situations, with a controller you could really create brand new sounds on the spot while playing live.

I wanted to write a song about Boltzmann brains – an odd topic — and needed odd sounds. It’s been a while since I last used Absynth, and the natural inclination when making strange sounds is indeed to first use this remarkable software synth.

And yes indeed, it’s not just odd spectral sounds you get, also odd sounding bass lines, as well as even rhytmic patterns that are not from your standard drum machine setup.

The thing I’m usually struggling with Absynth sounds is that they are so right in the high end, so many harmonics — even with taking down some of the track levels, it still cuts through.

As for the track, it didn’t take long to compose and finalize. This was one of those cases where I did the composition in Logic, and exported 24-bit AIFF files out to Ableton Live, and then reassembled it in a mix-like environment in about one hour. I still need to do a proper mastering and final check-down.

The other technique worth mentioning when exporting from Logic to Live is that I then use the re-pitch mode if I key in the exact same BPM as in Logic. This means that the quality is very much the same, no warping artifacts. I also do this with the drum loops exported.

As for the release, I doubt this could be released as an underground dance track, it’s 120bpm, and has too much oddities happening. Anyway, another reason I have the podcast channel in place to release material that can’t be released through normal channels, anyway. Meanwhile, check out about Boltzmann brains and see what the cosmologists are struggling with just now…

I was listening to the special SonicState Freeware AU Plugins Postcast last night, and it was an interesting ten minutes, of many reasons. Mark Tinley did an excellent survey of existing free plugins, and showed various samples of how they sounded. If you have those and let’s say the iLife GarageBand, you could with little means do a lot of music.

Anyway, it was not just the information that was interesting, it was the podcast itself. Mark tweaked his voice left and right with various plugins, and made the whole podcast a weird and interesting audio journey using effects and all kinds of edits. Just listening to that presentation was a reward.

Which leads to my current vacation deep thought thinkings — it happens when you relax that you start to get insights you don’t usually get when the brain is in high gear.

In this age of mixes and music available in the hundreds of releases each week on Internet, you really need to stand out from the massive crowd. Doing an interesting podcast with information, spoken words, and more radio-entertainment centric and personalized would most definitely help in this regard. My bold prediction is that more producers and DJs will start doing personalized podcasts with them speaking about music, music making, music business, and so on.

I will start something similar shortly, as well, stay tuned.

Maybe you already heard, but Reason 4.0 was announced. If you go to the PropellerHeads web site, and click on the top level image blurb, and then click on the image itself, you get more info about the new features in Reason 4.0, including movies showing how it all works.

For me, 3.0 was not exactly what I expected, but 4.0 finally has the things I wanted to see, like a revised/updated sequencer. The ReGroove Mixer is also an interesting approach to make loops sound more human. They also seem to really like arpeggiators, the new Thor synthesizer has it built in, and there’s a new monophonic arpeggiator, RPG-8, that has cool ideas.

Reason is really like this big monolithic synth rack that you control via Rewire, or then write whole compositions using it only. For me, the later part is somewhat problematic, as I like to work in a more traditional DAW, and getting stuck inside Reason sometimes is limiting. But it’s also a very productive environment for quick-and-dirty work, for example writing game music where the clock ticks…

I placed myself on the beta list, so in case I get a chance to test it, I could write more about the first impressions concerning this promising release. Thanks Propellerheads, I think you are back on track.

The latest Ableton newsletter had this URL with new YouTube video where Robert Henke shows Simpler in action. It’s really worth checking out, as you will get a lot of ideas how to incorporate Simpler into all kinds of projects. Also, Henke talks towards the end about the design philosophy behind Live — simple tools build more complexity, such as a brush for a painter could create complex results.

Samplers are actually sometimes tools that are, at least for me, considered old-fashioned compared with all the new synthesizers available. But they could really be used for all kinds of music sample triggering, like the video shows.

Also, Logic’s EXS24 is really nice, as it has a lot of vintage synth samples. I really miss my old Jupiter-6, and Logic has many Jupiter-8 sounds incorporated. With EXS24’s filtering unit, more effects, and layering, I could even create more complex patterns from the base sample sounds.

EXT24 also has many nice drum sets mapped in, such as default 808 and 909 samples, as well as others.

I found this YouTube video about Simmons drums yesterday — and it was great fun watching it, for many reasons.

Simmons electronic drum sounds were the trademark for many Brittish synth pop bands in the early eighties, but other bands like New Musik also used them. They had a very distinctive sound, you should know it by now as one of the electronic drum sound memes in your mind.

Going back to my memories. I was in two bands (actually same members, but two different musical angles) where we needed a Simmons drum kit, and our nice drummer saved enough money to get the first kit in Finland, maybe in any of the Nordic countries. At that time they were custom made, and you had to wait for three months or so before they were delivered. The price was also half-way astronomical.

Anyway, what you could do with them! You had a really unique sound, few bands sounded like you. Today most of the equipment is within reach for anyone, which is good from a democratic point of view, but makes it harder to sound different just based on the equipment you have.

When we arrived on gigs, the sound guys were confused when all we asked for were 12 ports or so in the mixer board — all instruments including drums where connected directly into the board. The only mikes needed were the singer microphones.

Our drummer had to re-learn how to hit the fixed pads, he used to complain about this from time to time. The kick was really strong, you could really push the kick sound out with live gigs, which was great.

Once, at a gig, we could not get out any sound from the Simmons kit, we were desperately looking for the problem cause. The ultimate reason was that one of the light technicians had built a power supply chord that looked like the ordinary chords, for 380V (in the Nordic countries, you have different plugs for 220V and 380V), and we had plugged in the kit into the 380V outlet. Fortunately the electronics did not get damaged, and we found a proper outlet and could start the gig.

tasmaniandevil posted 900 really cool presets up on the KVR Zebra forum. I installed them, and they were nice. But the key thing was what he posted about how they were created. He used the performance page in Zebra2 to map various parameters into the nice XY grid system, move the mouse around, and record the new presets from arbitrary positions.

Anyway, the key point with this posting is that this is a really cool way to quickly create new parameters. Massive, that I checked out yesterday, had a similar parameter view with eight knobs, by assigning various parameters to those eight generic knobs, you could key in all kinds of new sounds, quickly.

I’m sure other software synths have something similar available, so check them out. Just map all kinds of random parameters into such generic control areas, and have fun. The other nice thing with such arbitrary control areas is that you could automate all kinds of parameters while recording the track, so the synth will really sound organic.

Another option to quickly generate new sound are any kinds of random setting generators, Logic’s ES2 has one, the nice thing with this system is that you could narrow down the randomness so the random generator does not touch everything — that usually leads to total synth madness.

Ok, I opened up the box with Massive tonight, and installed the 1.1 upgrade at the same time that was just released.

First impressions. This software synth is indeed massive. Some patches pumped out air from my reference monitors so I smelled the dust, huh. It’s also massive concerning CPU use. With my G5 2GHz dual CPU system I could get six Massive synths running, then it was done. I could even modify one patch and get the system to its knees. Looking at the CPU meters the synth is single-threaded so it pegged one CPU while the other was not doing anything.

Anyway, sound wise, if you are looking for that concurrent Electro sound with biting/strong lead and bass sounds, this might be the one. Only drawback is that I suspect many electro house producers are busy using Massive just now, so the sound will be present in many releases. But the sound is very much like a big analog synth, just moved to the computer side. I need to get the latest Vanguard, I’m behind with the upgrades there, too, to compare.

Quick check concerning the programming side, it’s somewhat more confusing than the Zebra 2 interface (which is very, very elegant, imho), but you could get the job done with this synth, just need to read the manual carefully. The presets have six default knobs by which you could also quickly tailor some special sounds from the patches.

The patch interface was first confusing — its the Kore interface — but then when you got the hang of it, it was easy to use. The problem was that some of the categories didn’t have any samples, so I looked at the empy list of patches for a short time, until I understood what was going on.

Yes, it’s a fun, strong synth. I think they did a clever job of pushing the sounds towards the ‘massive’ side as that seems to be the sound many producers want to key in just now.

As for this synth indeed being resource-hungry, I need to install it on my MacBookPro to see if there’s a difference. But there’s always the option of freezing tracks, or dumping audio tracks from Logic into Live and do more processing with pure audio tracks (something I do a lot of the times, anyway.)

The Logic EFM1 software synth is like this step-son that is always forgotten. I rekindled its friendship after reading a posting on the Big Blue Lounge forum about how to make great bass lines, and one posting mentioned that EFM1 makes good bass sounds. So I had to fire up Logic and check it out, and it was true. OK, another weapon in my bass arsenal — creating good bass sounds is one of the tough assignments with productions.

Also, to prove my (silly) theory that most of minimalist music is done using FM synthesis, and while helping my son understand cross products in mathematics, I fired off a track using only EFM1 synths and one Ultrabeat drum sequence. It’s called Cross Products. I don’t know if I will release it, but it was a fun 30 minute exercise, especially running away from the drudge teaching about cross products…

As for good bass lines, FM makes sense, a lot of the low end rumble only needs to be somewhat pure sine waves with a some transitions, so FM synthesis makes this easy to achieve. You could then add more characteristics with additional FM synthesis on top.

Anyway, if you have Logic, and have not tried out EFM1 before, check it out. It’s a nice surprise.

Hey, I just got Komplete 4 and Massive from Native Instruments. It was a special deal — nice to work in the right division (pro apps) inside the fruit company. Massive is this new software synth that has very strong and analog-sounding oscillators and much more — good for electro house. Komplete 4 has just everything else: Reactor 5 that in itself could be used to build extremely complex synth setups, Absynth 4 for athmospheres, Kontakt 2 with gigabytes of samples, Battery 3 with tons of drum kids, Pro-53 that is a Prophet-5 virtual SW synth, and much much more!

Phew. I still remember the days when I had a Roland Jupiter-6 as my only synth and I used it for months, if not years, as the only synth. So now it’s just a matter of putting all my gear into use.

Let’s see, I have Logic 7 with all the synths, Reason with its arsenal, Zebra 2 that I could use for the rest of my life, Chameleon 5000, Octopus, and more and more and more… The best in this massive amounts of material is to just take one or two synths at a time, and use them for a month, and move on to the next one. So far that strategy has worked well, when I kind of get tired of one of them, I just switch to another ‘workhorse’ and use it.

But for anyone else, please, there’s no need to have tons of gear. What happened in my case was just a good deal, and I always wanted Reactor, anyway, as it’s this lego box of putting together all kinds of strange and new kinds of synthesis engines. And I wanted to write good PR about Native Instruments that provided me with this gear that I promise will be put into heavy use.

No, this is about Propellerheads’ Reason, not about reason in general — not that reasoning makes sense.

I think I purchased Reason over three years ago. At that point it was an interesting package to try out, a self-contained studio. Over the years I used it less and less, mostly as I got more involved with Logic and Ableton Live use, and had less use of Reason of many, eh, reasons. In addition, I didn’t like the 3.0 version, the value with that upgrade was not that sensational.

But I always kept it around, recently on my wife’s iBook. I wanted to start working on electro house tracks — a combination of gritty synths and really clean house drum loops, so I just fired up Reason while watching TV. I added Subtractor and Matrix editor pairs, up to 12 at the end. And in the Matrix editor I used 32 bars and hit command-R to make initial random patterns, including velocity, and then even out so most of the tones hit about the same key, but not always. Matrix is neat in the sense that it really munches MIDI information around in the random mode, and you could get very unexpected and interesting sound patterns.

Then I just dumped out all the material as 24-bit AIFF files, and now I’m in the middle of taking the stems into Ableton Live and do more middle-level programming to fit things together, and then of course roll in those clean house drum loops. It will be interesting!

Anyway, Subtractor has that nice gritty electro vibe sound that I was looking for, so I got the job half-way done now. It’s also neat to have a system that works on a 1GHz iMac, just like that. So I have renewed hope to use Reason even more in future.

Ok, did some more film music and I used Octopus the FM synthesizer to lay out a sequence background, using as a default startup one of the sequencer presets. It’s easy to make really gritty and over-the-top sounds with FM synthesis, one has to be careful. I had to finally go in and tame the beast, change some of the operator settings and make things more mellow. Some like this kind of over-the-top FM modulations, other hate it. Hard to know. Best not to push the luck.

It’s usually easiest to just change the modulator frequencies or the filter settings in the FM synthesizer itself to tame it down. The second best is to play with the equalizer, try to find the spot where the overtones hit very high, and take this frequency down. This is where very good tools such as Elemental Audio InspectorXL comes to picture. I don’t use Inspector that much, but when I need it, it’s very handy. I could quickly narrow down the problematic frequencies.

Some have very good ears and could just by listening find the sore frequences. Me myself, I’m always surprised when I see inside Inspector where the problem frequencies really are manifest.

Purchased Octopus last night from Linplug. It’s a hybrid FM and additive synthesis. The user interface reminds me of Star Trek the Next Generation.

Anyway, it has a lot of nasty FM sound effects in combination with making odd harmonics by changing the additive levels, and you could import wav files for more odd combinations. I’m personally not a big fan of clean FM synthesis, never owned a DX-7, neither liked Ableton’s Operator, but this is a very good FM approach. Gritty sounds are more fun.

So inspired by this synth I put aside the other projects and I’m now working on Nocturnal Digits, a combined future hiphop and minimal techno compilation! More later.