wire to the ear

Dave Smith has now officially released his new synthesizer the Mopho. It’s got a 100% analog signal path and it retails for $399. At this price it’s competition for soft synths.

Here are the specs: Two oscillators, One classic Curtis low-pass filter (switchable 2- or 4-pole), Analog VCAs, Three envelope generators (ADSR plus delay), Two sub-octave generators (one octave down and two octaves down), External audio input with feedback, Four assignable performance controls per program, Gated 16 x 4 step sequencer (one sequence per program), Arpeggiator, Fully programmable (includes free downloadable software editor for Mac OS and Windows), 384 programs, I/O: MIDI In, MIDI Out/Thru, Audio In, Left and Right Audio Out, Headphone Out.

Here’s some videos from the keybdwizrd:

DSI Mopho Demo #1 from Michael Walthius on Vimeo.

keybdwizrd - DSI Mopho Demo #2 from Michael Walthius on Vimeo.

Considering the price of this thing if your a person making music with only software you should consider grabbing one of these. Bringing audio into your DAW from the outside world really expands your color palette in interesting subtle ways. I’m going to pick one up for sure.

When producing a song I can spend a good 20-30 minutes working on creating a single ear tingling transition. Usually I make transitions when the song is almost finished. The reason I wait until the near end of the song’s creation is two fold. First, I like to hear the entire song from beginning to end and as I do so my brain tells me, “This is the spot where something is needed!”. Second, I use the audio of the full song’s mix to create the effect. You can here the kind of transition I am talking about at :06 seconds right before the vocal starts:

Here’s how it was done using Ableton Live:

• I rendered one bar of the full song exactly where the transition is going to be placed.
• I created a new Audio Track.
• I delete the audio on all the channels where the new transition will be (cut a hole).
• I drag my rendered clip into the arrangement on the newly created audio track and place it horizontally where I created the hole.
• Now I play back the song. It should sound just like you have not done anything yet.
• I experiment by loading different effect plug-ins on the new audio channel where the rendered clip sits. I try and find some heavy mangling plug-ins to really make the transition stand out.
• I re-render the clip with effects on it. I will usually do 4 different variations.
• I delete the plug-ins and the original plain rendered clip leaving a blank channel again.
• I drag in each of my rendered variations one by one replacing them with each other and listening to figure out which one is the most interesting fit.
• I also reverse each variation (in the Clip View) and listen to how that sounds.

Usually by this point I have a wicked sounding transition. In the audio sample I above I also cut and repeated the last 4 sixteenth notes and automated Ableton’s built in high pass filter to sweep down.

This process may seem like overkill but its the minor sweet effects that are the icing on a good song.

Here’s the heads up on some free patches I came across today. They are from a generous person who calls himself Bearnaomh. He has patch sets available for Rob Papen’s Blue, Native Instruments FM7, the Novation V-Station and a set for the Linplug Albino.

Grab all of Bearnaomh free patches: click here

I believe these are a bit old but since they are new to me maybe you don’t know about them yet either. Bearnaomh also has a few tunes of his available check out. This is a good reminder that if your a musician making some free patch sets is a good promotion tool. Besides naming the patch set after your artist name you can name the patches after your albums, songs, website urls and ex-girlfriends.

Some people like to keep their own created presets a guarded secret but I don’t see any harm in sharing. Success and originality is all about the context the sounds are used in. Remember 99% of people who will download your freebies will probably only ever make a 16 bar loop at most.

I have two free sets of patches online that I created. You can grab The Horrorist soundsets for the TimewARP 2600 and Korg Legacy MS-20 on my record label’s studio page: click here

Have you made any of your own presets available?

What’s that plug-in? No that’s not the new Audio Damage Automaton. Notice the Ableton Render bar? What you see here is Quinn, the best Tetris clone ever made. I’m certainly not going to just going to sit and watch a lime yellow line go from left to right.

I used to jump online and catch up with my favorite blog or forum. However, today’s rendering is pretty quick and by the time I get to something worth reading it’s time to go back to music making. Quinn fits the the bill perfectly. I have it set up to start with a certain amount of “junk” or messy blocks. I try to get the screen to a point where there are no more holes before Ableton is done rendering. Quinn is free and barely takes up any CPU cycles.

Quinn is OS-X only: click here

So what do you do while your DAW renders?

Here’s some video from a Rave called Tunnelvision which happened sometime in 1995. As you can see the event takes place in a public tunnel and lasts until 7:00am which causes the locals to complain. However, surprisingly the promoters secured all the proper permits so the event was not shut down. Between scenes of people dancing (which are hilarious) you get a glimpse of the local news coverage of the event.

I started playing events like this in 1992. I would bring a Roland TR-909, 2 TB-303s, SBX-80 Sync Box, a small Boss 8 channel mixer which when pushed distorted in a delightfully frighting way and a Shure SM-58 microphone to yell at people with. Sometimes I would let people come on stage and twist the knobs on one of the 303s.

This video is fun to watch but the events in New York were far more crazy.

Did you know that by default iTunes is mucking up the sound of your recordings? I’m not sure with what version this started with but iTunes when first installed has its Sound Enhancer turned on. This is fine for easy listening but if you don’t know it exists it can wreak havoc on you mind when you play your own recordings.

I first noticed this when I was mastering my last album. I was listening carefully to a song called The World Will Know Us which had some alternating panned tom fills. In my DAW the toms where perfectly tickling each ear as they bounced from left to right. Later I put all my mastered songs into iTunes and was playing with the order of the songs to see how the album should be best arranged. When The World Will Know Us came on something was very wrong because the panning was strange. The toms seemed pushed to the center right ear only. I rerendered and remastering the song and again the same thing. It was pure luck I discovered that the iTunes Sound Enhancer was on and it was the culprit causing the phenomena. One good fact is iTunes remembers your settings each time you upgrade to a newer version.

“Sound enhancer is absolutely the STUPIDEST thing… App-hole also have it set to ON by default.. I have to send the following disclaimer to all my clients who listen to mixes on iTunes “Please be aware that iTunes had a setting in the preferences, under the “Audio” tab which engages something they like to call “Sound Enhancer”. This setting will increase the L-R component of the stereo signal and supress the L+R component. What does that mean? It means that anything which is only on the left, only on the right or has significantly different information in the left and right channel will be made louder (cymbals, percussion, BGVs, guitars, ambiences) and anything which is identical in the left and right channels (therefore “mono”, Kick Snare, Bass, lead vocal, etc…) will be much quieter. Please be sure that the “sound Enhancer” is OFF before you call to complain that you cannot hear the lead vocal in the chorus, etc…” Apple are ****ing idiots about pro audio…” zmix, Gearslutz.com

Have you noticed this yourself?

Look closely here and let’s pick out the synths. I see a Korg Monopoly, Roland V-Synth, Dave Smith Instrument’s Prophet 08 and a Nord Rack. What’s the big white one on the left? A Yamaha workstation? Also there could be a TR-606? What’s the keyboard front, center on the floor? A Yamaha CS? What’s the instrument to the left of it? Oh…

Do you keep one of THOSE in your studio?

If you liked that one here’s another. I didn’t post it here because it’s cruel (it is hilarious though): click here

via wherearethedogshumping

Here is a simple tip that most people overlook when mixing down in Ableton Live. If you hover the mouse pointer above the faders and below the sends you can grab the dividing line (see the pink arrows) and drag upwards to make your faders longer. I also like to click the Show/Hide triangles (see the red arrows) and hide the Browser and Clip Views.

If you want to focus on an individual channel you can drag it wider or if your running out of room you can make tracks super thin (see the orange square). You can also Show/Hide the In/Out section, Send/Returns, Track Delay Info and the Crossfader by clicking the small icons at the bottom right of the interface (see blue arrow).

I like to mix by ear as I am making the song. Then I create a mix view like above and see if anything strange is happening like the snare being 6db louder than everything else (it happens all the time!). With the channels fully stretched you can make tiny adjustments in volume and fine tune what your ears were telling you.

I love graphic design. Even though I am far from professional I have a legit copy of Photoshop, a Wacom tablet and I am always learning from online design tutorials. However, as with music making it’s not the tools that counts it’s the inspiration. The Well Medicated blog has a great post up, “50 Amazing Gig Posters Sure to Inspire“. The next time a promoter shows you a lame flier for an upcoming show your doing send him over to that collection.

The Of Montreal poster was designed by F2 Design. The other poster that appealed to my inner geek is this one for a Beck concert designed by The Heads of State:

I remember when I was 17 ripping down Front 242 posters in the East Village (NYC) so I could put them up in my bedroom. The glue they used was nasty stuff and I usually ended up with a poster that was 20 pages thick! I really like the basic all white poster with large black bold Helvetica type proclaiming a band will be taking over the city on a certain night.

Don’t forget it if it’s your own gig to grab a few posters before the show to give out to fans.

To see all 50 posters: click here

The massively hyped new software synth from Eric Persing’s Spectrasonics has been released. It’s called Omnisphere and I like that it’s a hybrid sample and/or synth machine. In fact this baby comes with over 40GB of content. I want to spend a weekend creating a song “limiting” myself to only Omnisphere. I would maybe even use just one instance (it’s 8 part multitimbral).

“After many years of development, Spectrasonics is proud to release the brand new flagship virtual instrument Omnisphere. This epic ‘Power Synth’ breaks completely new sonic ground by combining a wide variety of hybrid realtime synthesis techniques, an epic library of remarkable ‘Psychoacoustic’ sounds, and many innovative features that have never been seen before in any hardware or software synthesizer. The new instrument is the first to be based on Spectrasonics newly developed STEAM Engine.”  - spectrasonics.net

The first thing you should do is head over to Spectrasonics and watch the awesome 7 part video episodes they have online. Then prepare to depart with $499/€379!

Most of us have a good stock of software and hardware sound sources. Do you think Omnisphere offers something new?

More info on the Spectrasonics site: click here