Sound from a Virtual Planet

One of the things I like about the NAMM show is that no matter how connected you are to a given part of the industry, there are always things that surprise you. In 2009, it was the return of the Beatbox… as software. MOTU, Native Instruments, and Sonivox all announced products that, in some way or another, are modeled after pattern-based sequencing devices, like the MPC 2000, and to a lesser extent classic the drum machines from Roland. I hinted at my latent infatuation with drum machines in a post last year when I talked about software beatboxes for the iPhone, so now, some months later, comes a wave of products slated for the studio.

While drum machines certainly had their charm, I don’t miss chaining together strings of pattern numbers using a munchkin LCD to put together a demo or track. Once I started using software sequencers, specifically Opcode’s Vision back in the Stone Age, I never really looked back at the Korg and Roland machines I had grown accustomed to. I found it much easier to put together complex rhythm patterns, with variations and changing meters, using a sequencer’s graphic editor. OK, so why the current wave of interest in beatboxes in their various incarnations? While I thoroughly enjoy my iPhone beatboxes, I never thought of going back to the box for my project work. What was I missing here?

As often happens, it takes a student to enlighten the teacher, and in this case it was Ronnie Pelham, a former student of mine who makes his home in Miami doing music and audio for multimedia productions. Last January, Ronnie was working for Native Instruments demonstrating Maschine, their newly announced hardware/software beatbox product. I brought up the sequencer/drum machine issue with him and his reply made total sense. Beatboxes, at their heart and soul are performance devices, and as such, they inspire spontaneity and the kind of creativity that comes with performing. Sit down with a drum machine and start playing. It’s literally impossible to not come up with something new. While the sequencer is a powerful tool for recording and editing, it’s not very interactive. With a beatbox, you can always just try something and if it doesn’t quite work, you can change it on the fly. If you start playing with no preconceived ideas, new rhythmic ideas will present themselves –play something, listen to it, add something new.

Ronnie Pelham Talks About Maschine

The big advance that comes in 2009 with Maschine is that it brings together the physical interface of a traditional beatbox with the sequencing and editing capabilities of software. With this system, it’s easy to edit individual patterns and then use them to build longer musical forms that make up a song or composition. Add to that a library of kits that spans eras and genres, and you’ve got a tool the provides fertile ground for any overdeveloped musical imagination.

I guess it’s back to the box… more to follow.

Native Instruments Maschine Explained

For Pro Tools users, check out Dave Franz’ blog post on Digidesign’s Boom. Boom

Given the state of the economy current conditions taking a hit on discretionary spending, I was somewhat apprehensive about traveling west for the NAMM show this year. While times are indeed tough, I got a sense of overall optimism from many of the manufacturers and product representatives I spoke with. While there will be consolidation and restructuring in management and sales, all agree that development and innovation will continue. Signs of this abounded at NAMM with a number of cool new products. This was an especially big year for Ableton with the announcement of a number of watershed products.

At NAMM 2008, Cycling 74 and Ableton announced a collaboration that would yield new developments for their products. While the goal here was not much of a mystery, this year’s announcement of MAX for Live took the wraps off the fruits of their work. This is indeed big news, and really ushers in a new era for the integration of music technology products. MAX is a programming environment, while Live is performance/production tool; each does what the other doesn’t. With MAX for Live, MAX patches will be able to open in Live, like any other plug-in. There will be direct MIDI and audio input and output connections between the two, and both will share sample accurate timing. While this type of inter-application communication has always been available using Propellerheads’ ReWire technology, MAX for Live will make this much easier, and will undoubtedly spawn a wave of innovative development, particularly in the area of live performance. As is typical with these types of major trade show announcements, no firm release date or price point was mentioned, but my guess is that a final release might happen this fall.

The collaborative spirit must be alive and well in Berlin, as collaboration was a big theme for Ableton this year, While the Cycling 74 partnership centered on software, a partnership with AKAI resulted in the APC40 hardware controller for Live. While Live supports a number of hardware controllers that greatly enhance the performance experience, nothing comes close to the tight integration of these two products. AKAI was once the de facto standard for hardware samplers, but the swift adoption of software samplers nearly signaled the company’s demise. While their MPC series is a must-have tool for hip hop production, the company has had a hard time establishing an identity beyond that. In 2004 AKAI was acquired by DJ supplier Numark, and has since focused on developing performance tools. While Ableton indicates that there are collaborations with other hardware manufacturers, AKAI is the first of these to see the light of day. While pricing and availability were not announced at the show, a street price of 399.00 is listed at some online retailers.

Along with their partnerships with other manufacturers, Ableton announced a new service that will be built into the upcoming Live 8. The Share Live Set feature will allow users to upload their projects to a Ableton server, where they can be accessed by any user on the Net. The technology here takes a cue from the cloud computing concept, where data is stored on a central server where it can be accessed and synced by any number of users. While a number of Web start-ups were founded on the idea of providing resources for musicians to collaborate online, this idea has yet to really take off. Live users are by and large forward-looking musicians, and with a reliable infrastructure in place, this community may take full advantage of the technology. In the area of online eduction, this is profound, and this service could become the backbone of a creative music curriculum, beyond simply learning how to use Live. Again, pricing and availability for this service has yet to be announced.

Significant updates have been an annual event for Ableton, and while the prior three NAMM announcements point to new directions for the company, the upcoming release of Live 8 certainly merits as much attention. Ableton updates are always significant, and manage to expand the program without sacrificing its ease of use. The new features in Live 8 continue this, adding requested features along with capabilities users have come to expect. Live’s new groove engine adds groove quantize functions that are commonly found in other DAWs. Their version allows for both MIDI and audio quantization as well as a groove analysis tool that extracts timing information and creates a groove template from it. Along with this is a new warping engine that allows easy manipulation of individual beats within a clip. While this function has always been a part of Live, the new algorithms used here significantly reduce the related audio artifacts –which may or may not be a good thing for those of the “glitch” persuasion. Ableton has been steadily expanding the collection of effects in Live, and the addition of a vocoder and a multi-band compressor, among others, builds on what’s already available. Finally, while some performers use Live as a kind of looping device, it’s always been more clumsy than hardware loopers on the market. The success of many performers who use looping, like New York’s Battles, has brought a renewed interest in this technique. The looper that comes with Live 8 looks like a capable solution, and further strengthens Live’s position as the premier performance software on the planet.

OK, it’s time to make good on at least one of my New Year’s resolutions, and that is to keep up with my Berkleemusic blog…

That said, I wanted to reflect a bit on some trends and developments from 2008, as a kind of year-end round up. I’ll be heading to the 2009 NAMM show next week and some of these thoughts will come into clearer focus. But, for the time being, here are some of the things that caught my eye in 2008.

New Software Instruments: Circle and Alchemy

I reviewed Circle in a bog entry last July, and I’ve been very impressed with both its sound and design. While there are lot’s of powerful instruments available, Circle has really set the bar for the next generation of intuitive softsynth interfaces.

Alchemy, from Camel Audio, came in just under the wire for 2008 with it’s official December 18 release. I’m a big fan of Camel Audio products Cameleon 5000, CamelPhat and CamelSpace. They all provide unique sound design opportunities. Alchemy combines and expands on all of these products, offering the additive synthesis capabilities that Cameleon 5000 is know for, as well as granular and spectral re-synthesis capabilities. What this means is that you can import any audio file into Alchemy, analyze it for its spectral content and manipulate the individual sine wave components, as well as apply sophisticated time stretching and pitch-shifting functions. Alchemy merits it’s own review which you can look for in a future blog post. For the time being, you can check out the excellent introduction and tutorial videos on the Camel Audio site.

 
Alchemy Overview

Buzz of the year: iPhone Apps

The next big thing in music technology is mobile computing, and that can include anything from a cell phone to a laptop. The iPhone is really the first truly mobile device to provide a reliable platform for software development and distribution. Like the original Mac, developers are coming out of the woodwork with everything from card games to wedding planners. While I looked at some iPhone drum machines in an earlier blog post, there are a number of other powerful and useful apps available for the electronic musician. While the value of some are not immediately apparent, we’ve only just begun to think about how these will effect our lives as musicians.

Last October, I was in a dressing room, getting ready for a concert when I found that the battery in my tuner was dead. I prepared to head out in search of a battery an hour before the show when when one of my band mates pointed out that there was probably an iPhone app that I could use. A few minutes later I downloaded Power Tuner for about the cost of a Duracell at 7-Eleven and I was back in business.

On My iPhone:

- Beatmaker
- Bloom
- iDrum
- IR-909
- miniSynth
- Mrmr OSC controller (iTunes Store)
- Noise.io Pro
- Power Tuner (iTunes Store)
- SonicLife
- Touch the Wave
- TouchOSC

chromedecay studio look: TouchOSC with Ableton Live and BigSeq from chromedecay on Vimeo. 

Top Free Stuff

Native Instruments KORE Player which I reviewed earlier is still the best deal going. While the sounds included in the original player release are more general purpose, those included in the free KORE Soundpack Compilation offer a number of the more unique and interesting sounds NI is famous for. This is an absolutely must have addition for anyone producing music on a budget.

Surprise of the Year: Korg DS-10

Where did the Korg DS-10 come from? OK, game audio is a big buzz right now, but who would think of the ubiquitous Nintendo DS game device as a cutting-edge, live electronic instrument. Apparently someone at Korg Japan came up with the bright idea of developing a software version of the company’s legendary MS-10, adding a drum machine, a powerful step sequencer, and porting the whole thing to a Nintendo DS game cartridge, complete with cheat codes, BTW. Initially, this was going to be a niche item for the Japanese market, but once word of this got out, the demand became global.

The Korg DS-10 in action.
 

New Instrument: Yamaha Tenori-On

Yamaha’s Tenori-On is the coolest most revolutionary product they’ve come out with since the DX7. While that instrument introduced a completely new way to synthesize sound, the Tenori-On explores a new way for performers to interact with electronic instruments. Regardless of the myriad of possibilities posed in the early days of electronic instruments, the traditional keyboard is still the de-facto interface for playing a synthesizer. Designer Toshio Iwai wanted to create a completely new way for musicians, at all levels, to play electronic music. The result is a very sophisticated handheld system that features a 16 by 16 grid of LED buttons. These control the on-board sample-based synthesis engine as well as a 16-part step sequencer.

 
Jordan Rudess on the Tenori-On

That’s it for now. I look forward to any comments you may have. Is there anything I missed?

Musicians will always figure out some way to use current technology to make music, sometimes in unexpected ways. The idea of using a computer to make music has been around just about as long as computers themselves. Max Mathews wrote the first computer program for music while working at Bell Labs in 1957. Max is really the father of computer music, and just about any sound synthesis done on a computer can be traced back to his early work. The ICMC conference I attended in August provided a great opportunity to see some new ideas about performing with machines.

Laptop performances are now quite common and range from DJ sets to deep, man-machine live interactions. However, we think of these mostly as solo or duo performances that are often largely improvisational. It was only a matter of time before people got around to thinking of larger laptop ensembles, and the technology behind these was the focus of some of the presentations at ICMC.

Perhaps the first, and best known laptop ensemble is PLOrk, The Princeton Laptop Orchestra. The group was founded in 2005 at Princeton University. The ensemble consists of 15 “meta-instruments” that include a rack with an audio interface, power supply, and an amplifier for a six channel portable speaker configuration, as well as a Mac laptop. In performance, each setup produces it’s own sound, so they really can be thought of as individual players in a traditional ensemble. Standard software running on the laptops includes MAX/MSP as well as ChucK, a sound synthesis language under development at Princeton. Composers writing for PLOrk are free to include custom applications beyond this for individual pieces. A variety of alternate controllers is available as well. Continuing with the orchestral model, performances can be conducted in traditional sense, or the laptops can be networked, allowing performers to share information and for tempo synchronization. An excellent paper the chronicles the development and practice of PLOrk is available from their Webpage: http://plork.cs.princeton.edu.

PLOrk

The Worldscape Laptop Orchestra (WLO), at the University of York in Great Britain, takes another approach to the ensemble concept. The WLO consists of 50 laptops, donated for the project by Apple Inc. All sound produced by the orchestra comes from a central servers that’s also to sound source for a multi-channel speaker system. The challenge here was to provide reliable wireless connectivity between all 50 laptops and the central server. For this, they choose 802.11.n Wi-Fi. Given this architecture, the role of each performer here is to provide input for a piece that’s essentially constructed on the server. The laptops themselves were equipped with sound generating capabilities solely for the player to get some sort of feedback from their input. The group’s debut was in November 2007 when they premiered three compositions. These ranged from an improvisation for solo trumpet and WLO to a kind of game piece, where players seek targets that appear at various locations on a projected world map, courtesy of Google Maps. Gestures from the orchestra players result in a simple musical output, reminiscent of early video game sound, that makes up the piece.

Worldscape Laptop Orchestra performing Swarms

Although we think of cell phones as primarily communication devices, they’re probably the most ubiquitous and accessible computing devices on the planet. Researchers at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, CCRMA, used this as the basic premise for MoPhoO, the Mobile Phone Orchestra. The ensemble is made up of sixteen Nokia N95 smart phones, courtesy of the manufacturer. While the device is capably equipped with audio, video, Bluetooth and a 3-axis accelerometer, the real strength of this particular model is that it runs on the open Symbian OS with a C++ development kit. While assessable, the presenters from Stanford noted that the platform still needed some work to be reliable and intuitive for music applications. Those attending the lecture were given an impromptu demonstration by four MoPhoO players seated at various positions around the hall. The slow moving gestures and the resulting simple tones reminded me of a kind of space-age theremin recital. Later in the week, MoPhoO performed a short evening “club” set. There was something eerie and magical about the players dressed in black performing what seemed like some sort of primeval sound ritual. Cool…

MoPhoO - The Mobile Phone Orchestra

While the portable ensembles described here are currently out of reach for mere mortal musicians, the ideas explored here point to some new and interesting ways to create compelling performance experiences in the not-to-distant future. So, put on your thinking caps and starting dreaming.

My summer didn’t quite wind down this year. During the last week in August, I had the opportunity to travel to Belfast, Northern Ireland to attend the International Computer Music Conference. Sound cool? While many of you might envision workshops on Ableton Live and other musical applications, I’ll report that the commercial applications we all know and love were nowhere in sight. ICMC is largely an academic conference that focuses on cutting edge research and applications. For me, it really was a great opportunity to connect with a wider community of musicians, composers, and scholars who were asking interesting questions and pushing the boundaries of art and science. I’ll be looking at some more specific topics in my next few blog entries, but for now, I’ll start with a brief introduction.

As with most academic conferences, the five days of ICMC were filled with paper and poster sessions, where researchers presented their findings, panel discussions, and of course, lots of music. In all, about 250 works were performed that spanned a broad range of styles and compositional strategies. Most of these fell into one of two categories: electro-acoustic or acousmatic.

Electro-acoustic performances are an extension of traditional concert settings, where acoustic instruments are either accompanied by or interact with multi-channel sound sources. At ICMC, these types of performances took place in a concert hall setting. For those of you new to modern concert music, there is a long, proud tradition of forward looking composers, anxious to integrate electronic sound with traditional acoustic instruments, hence the term “electro-acoustic” music. This dates back to the ground breaking work of Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 1950s.

Acousmatic performances are really listening experiences that use electronic sound exclusively. While this is essentially what goes on in a dance club, acousmatic music typically incorporates sound from both acoustic and electronic sources, set in a more abstract musical form that explores the nature of the sound rather than use more conventional musical elements of melody, and harmony. The exciting part of this really comes from the multi-channel playback of these pieces, commonly referred to as diffusion. While this can be done in the mix of a piece, a composer will often control the distribution of sound through speakers as part of the performance. The inspiration for this genre comes, once again, from the early days of electronic music and the work of Pierre Schaffer and Edgard Varese, who were among the first to create pieces from recorded sound sources.

SARC

The conference host, Queens University, Belfast, is home to the Sonic Arts Research Center, SARC. The performance space at SARC is a remarkable environment designed for 3D sound diffusion. Yes, I said 3D… While most of us are familiar with 5.1 surround sound at this point, SARC offers 48 channel playback from four levels. There are eight speakers at standing ear level, eight speakers suspended above, eight on the ceiling, and eight positioned below. Below? OK, the floor of SARC is a metal grid, with speakers pointing up from the “basement” below. Subwoofers are suspended above and positioned below. The best pieces we heard in this space were nothing short of amazing, providing a truly immersive experience that challenged all expectations of how we listen to sound. The research being done in this field is closely tied to psychoacoustics, and the result is an aesthetically satisfying merger of art, science, and technology.

While jet lag is usually a challenging part of returning from Europe, the hardest part of getting back home from this trip was listening. Listening in stereo. Call it SARC lag…

I love drum machines. This particular infatuation began when I got my the original Roland Dr Rhythm as an antidote for the hours I spent playing with drummers who had more interest in fills and rolls than keeping time. It kept me honest. There’s something hypnotic about the unrelenting dependability of drum machines, and the best of them have very intuitive ways of programming rhythm patterns that inspire exploration and even performance. As I got more into using computers, sequencing programs and samplers replaced Dr Rhythm, offering a near infinite pallet of sounds and programming flexibility, but somehow they lacking the immediacy and convenience.

Enter the iPhone. I got mine the day after it was first released (2007 – iPhone Classic). When version 2 of the operating system was released earlier this year, the most intriguing new feature was support for 3rd party applications. While I didn’t expect to see versions or Reason or Live on my phone – yet, I was curious to see if music applications would be toys or useful mobile tools. So, what are the coolest apps I’ve found? Drum machines, and there are three winners I’ve come across so far.

Some of my all-time favorite drum machines were made by Roland. Dr Rhythm’s big brothers all turned out to be classics. While the TR-808 has developed the most cache, The TR-707, and TR-909 were more than worthy successors. The IR-909 from Roventskij literally puts a TR-909 on your iPhone. This first version does a great job of capturing most of the features from the original, while adding five additional sample sets from classics like the TR-606, and the TR-808. So how does a classic drum machine take advantage of some of the iPhone’s unique features? Try changing tempo. You hold the tempo button and tilt the phone forward to raise the tempo, tilt back to slow it down. Cool… With this, I’ve re-kindled my drum machine flame, and the coolest thing is that anywhere I can bring my guitar, I can practice with a minimum of effort, just pull out my phone.

 
The IR-909

While the IR-909 can store four patterns, there’s no provision for chaining them together to lay out a song form. This was a powerful feature of the original and essential if you were a songwriter. The iDrum from iZotope has the answer with a really cool system of colorful squares that represent patterns. These are easily chained and rearranged by touching and dragging these icons. Tap a square, and you’ll be able to edit the pattern with each instrument represented by it’s own square, each with sixteen steps with programmable dynamics. The iDrum was originally a desktop Mac application that designed to offer an intuitive drum programming tool for GarageBand, or any other Audio Unit compatible sequencer. iZotope has done a great job porting the original app to the iPhone, taking advantage of the multi-touch interface. Both the desktop and mobile versions of the iDrum can work together, sharing data, and saving songs as ringtones. Given iZotope’s track record of developing powerful DSP applications, we should see some interesting things for the iPhone from them in the future.

iDrum for iPhone

While both IR-909 and iDrum are drum machines in the strict sense of the word, Beatmaker, the "mobile music creation studio" from Intua, is a surprisingly full-featured application. Here, there are pages that allow the user to design their own kits, sequence and chain patterns, and even add a limited pallet of effects. Beatmaker is designed from the ground up to be integrated into the process of producing music by allowing the user to freely import and export data and samples. At 180 MB, the install itself is quite large for a mobile application, but includes a sizable collection of factory sample content, including signature kits from artists like Richard Devine. Both Beatmaker and iDrum come with on-screen help as well as PDF manuals.

Beatmaker

What these mobile apps really bring the to table is the ease with which you can do useful musical tasks. Part of the charm of a drum machine is that it’s a completely self contained device that does one thing, and does it really well. Drum machines were one of the first of a generation of electronic instruments, and likewise, it looks like they are leading the pack of mobile music applications.

At the AES convention in NYC last year I had a great conversation with a friend of mine at M-Audio. We were talking about what would be the killer lifestyle device for a musician. Gary, the iPhone is it.

I’m not big on television. As a matter of fact, about the only screen time I get is when I’m captive in a hotel room on family trips. As I’m now headed home after twelve days in Scotland, there one TV image that keeps coming back… a Samsung cellphone commercial where a DJ captures the sound of different sporting events, loads them in a beat box and loops them, making a very cool groove with these “found” sounds. See below:

At the beginning of the twentieth century a composer named Luigi Russolo authored a manifesto called The Art of Noises, where he called for a new pallet of sounds for music that would reflect a more modern time. The early 20th century way of pulling this off was to bring bells, sirens, and motorized gadgets on stage with an orchestra –check out George Antheil’s Ballet Mecanique. While this served as the inspiration for a minor musical movement in the 1920’s, the whole idea soon faded away. That is until samplers came along in the 1980’s. Once the sample genie was let out of the bottle, everyone from rappers to synth poppers made music out of any sound you could imagine.

So what makes this Samsung commercial so compelling to me? It’s really remarkable that an idea that was so radical in the last century can now be put front and center before a prime-time, mass market audience on mainstream TV. The idea that you can grab just about any sound, loop it and make music may be familiar to electronic musicians, but putting in front of the summer’s biggest ad market is pretty darn cool.

Has anyone else seen this?

Last week I participated in Berklee’s annual Music Technology Weekend Workshop…. basically an MTEC lovefest. This year’s group was the best in recent memory, with lots of enthusiasm and great questions. My sessions this year included a basic sound design workshop using Native Instruments Reaktor, a session on remix techniques using Pro Tools, and one on various and sundry plug-ins I call "Plug-ins You Never Heard About in School." While many of the participants at these sessions are up on the current crop of music technology products, I’m always surprised to see that there is little knowledge of what’s available outside of the mainstream industry. So, every year I scout out interesting plug-ins, that for many are off the radar, and come up with a collection of things that are unique, providing capabilities and twists that you might not see in higher profile commercial products.

One of my big points when talking to anyone about plug-ins is that anyone can build a well-stocked collection without breaking the bank, and most of the plugs on my annual list are either free or cost a nominal amount. There’s a perception that since the cost of commercial software can really add up, mere mortals have to make do with a limited pallet or, god forbid, use cracks. Not true. You just have to do a little digging and be prepared to put up with a few bumps in the road.

Now, before you get ready to load up you plug-ins folder, there’s a few things to keep in mind. Some of these plugs are beta, works in progress, or shall we say, etudes… As such, you have to adjust your expectations, and perhaps do a little head-scratching to understand what they are doing. With some of these, that might not be entirely clear to the developer. In some cases, these may not work with current operating systems, and some may just crash inexplicably. But, the rewards here are sound possibilities you won’t find elsewhere, and to a sound designer, secret weapons are everything.

What you’ll find below is a listing of the plug-ins we had a look at during my MTEC Summer Workshop presentation. As luck would have it, the August edition of Electronic Musician magazine has its own listing of cool plug-ins put together by their staff editors. You’ll see some overlap here, as well as a few things from the Windows world that I haven’t mentioned.

I’d like to do something a bit different with this blog entry. Instead of me giving you a rundown of these or let on to which happen to be my favorites, I’d like you to download some of these on your own and post a reply to this blog entry with reviews of your favorites.

In addition to the plug-ins listed here, check out the comprehensive listing found at: www.dontcrack.com.

And most of all, have fun!

We often think about technology in terms of new features, capabilities, or techniques. In electronic music that translates into the quest for products that offer new synthesis techniques or unique implementations of existing ones. It’s something I like to call the “secret weapon syndrome.” (More on this in a later entry…) In all this, we often forget the user interface –how we work with a particular tool. This is probably the least sexy topic one could raise when considering a product, yet when you come right down to it, it’s probably one of the most important. It’s really what determines if you’re going to open something occasionally, or if you’re going to use it every day.

I always look forward to checking out new synths, and my interest in Circle from Future Audio Workshop started when it was first announced at Musikmesse this past spring. One of the big selling points for this synth was it’s user interface… so, what’s up with that? The basic premise here is that sound design is really an easy process and that the instruments you use should be easy to understand and use. FAW is a collective of programmers from across Europe led by Gavin Burke with headquarters in Ireland. While Circle uses a standard subtractive architecture, the instrument was designed from the ground up to clarify the workflow of using the instrument. There’s a great interview with Gavin on the Create Digital Music (CDM) website that provides some insight into the instrument’s design and the thinking behind it.

I use synthesizers to design sounds as well as to teach and learn about the techniques involved. Circle excels at both. One of the most confusing aspects of sound design can be modulation routings. In modular systems, this is done using patch cables. While these systems make a clear visual connection between a source and destination, things can get confusing when there are many routings, and the patch starts to look like a spaghetti dinner. Anyone who’s worked with the Nord Modular or done any patching on the back of the Reason rack can attest to this. There are five possible internal modulation sources in Circle, and any of these can be configured as an envelope, LFO, or a step sequencer. Each source is color coded, and to make a connection you simply drag a colored circle to the desired destination. In a fully formed patch, it’s very easy to see exactly what is controlling any destination.

A big part of interface design is consistency. Synthesizer controls generally fall under one of two categories, amounts and levels or durations. In Circle, you click and drag up to increase a level, drag down to decrease. Simple, yes? We most often see time values in setting the duration of an envelope segment. Here, it’s done by simply dragging to the right to make the duration longer, left makes it shorter. You can contrast this with the vertical sliders used for envelope controls in many hardware and software instruments such as Reason’s Subtractor. This is consistent throughout Circle except for the rate control in the built-in arpeggiator which is controlled with a horizontal slider.

While sound is an aural experience, we can learn a lot about what we’re hearing through visual displays. In Circle, the motion of LFO waveforms is clearly displayed. While there is a healthy selection of sixteen LFO waveshapes, each LFO section allows two separate shapes to be combined into a single composite again, clearly displayed. In the envelopes, a ball traces the progress through the timed segments. In the step sequencer, progress through the steps is outlined as each colored step turns white as it plays. While these may seem like obvious features, they are things that you aren’t typically seeing in other software instruments, making Circle very easy to use.

Behind the user interface, there’s a very robust subtractive architecture with some twists. There’s quite a variety of timbral possibilities in Circle, beyond the geometric basics, using the oscillators in wavetable mode. In each of these, two waves can be combined, similar to what we see in the LFOs. While the envelopes in Circle are standard ADSR shapes, step sequenced control and the variety of waveforms available for periodic LFO control makes it possible to create the kind of rhythmic patterns one gets from the multisegment envelopes in synths from Native Instruments.

So what’s on the frontier for electronic instruments? It very well could come from the kind of thinking behind this first offering from Future Audio Workshop. I can only imagine what may come from future products that use more complex synthesis architectures. FM made simple anyone?

Summer for me means that my schedule slows to the point where I can indulge in some of my guilty pleasures…. Fishing perhaps? Not quite. I’ve always been interested in building things, or at very least taking things apart and trying to put them back together. When it comes to electronic music, there are two really great toolkits available for building software instruments: MAX/MSP/Jitter and Reaktor. My April 26 blog post talked a bit about the new version of MAX, so I’d like to give you a quick look at Reaktor.

Reaktor is perhaps one of the most misunderstood products in the musical instrument industry. Everyone has heard of it, but everyone seems to have a different idea of what it is. I like to think of it as a combination of three different things that users will all make use of differently. Reaktor is a collection of software instruments, an object oriented programming environment, and membership to big fellowship of users. It’s really the first two here that throw people. While Wikipedia provides a good history and overview of Reaktor, there are a few basics to understand before you get started.

First off, Reaktor is a commercial product from Native Instruments. The package contains the software and documentation that will get you started. Reaktor is not a single synthesizer per se, but a player that comes with a collection of factory Ensembles, each it’s own self-contained software synthesizer. Each Ensemble is made up of one or more Instruments, these are typically some sort of synthesizer, effects processor, or a step-sequencer. While this may seem somewhat confusing, these are exactly the types of components that make up a commercial hardware synthesizer. So, your new Virus TI might be thought of as an "ensemble" of instruments in Reaktor-speak.

Opening the program, you need go no further than opening Ensembles either as a standalone software instrument or as a plug-in, to experience Reaktor. More adventurous users will want to dig a bit deeper, and that’s where things get a bit more involved. Ensembles are viewed in panel mode, where only the user interface –knobs, sliders, buttons, and displays– are visible.

A Reaktor Ensemble in Panel View

Structure view shows how the ensemble is made. On the top level, you’ll see the various instruments used, but clicking on any of them will reveal the components and connections that make up that instrument. This is where the programming work in Reaktor is done.

A Reaktor Ensemble in Structure View

The individual modules you see can represent anything from a simple math calculation to something more akin to a synthesizer module, like an oscillator or envelope generator. Fortunately, Reaktor comes with a wealth of objects, but more importantly, you can build and save your own, as well as share them with other users. Which brings us to the Reaktor community.

Native Instruments maintains an online database of user submitted Ensembles. Currently, there are about 2700. The community of Reaktor users that contribute to this resource is nothing short of amazing and there are submissions here from novice users all the way to legendary mad scientists. Bob Moog said in the film Modulations that building electronic instruments was "hot-rodding for the 90s," and Reaktor and the community that supports it is a software version of exactly what Bob was talking about.
For those of you getting ready to take the plunge, here are a few thoughts to get you started:

Tips for Learning More About Reaktor

1. Learn all you can about using the factory instruments. You will be amazed at the clever synthesis architectures that you’ll find. However, the documentation for many of the factory Ensembles is rudimentary at best, and you should plan to spend a good deal of time mastering any of the instruments.
2. Start simple. Start by building simple subtractive instruments and work your way up by adding features to your creations. There’s a quick tutorial in the user guide that will get you started.
3. Analyze and create your own variations of the factory instruments. This is where you can start hot-rodding your own ensembles. Here again start simple with swapping instruments and then component modules between ensembles
4. Look through the collection of Reaktor patches on the Native Instruments website. Here, you’ll find countless variations on basic synthesis tools that in many cases will offer different approaches to the same basic design.
5. Make friends and ask questions. Many Reaktor users are online in various discussion boards and are often quite willing to help newcomers. Find other musicians in your area, where possible who have been using the program and share your knowledge.
6. Lastly, have fun. Use the ensembles you hack in your music whether it be in the studio or live.

Links to Online Support Resources

Reaktor Tips
NI Reaktor User Forum
NI Reaktor Tutorials
Reaktor-Phile
Sound on Sound Reaktor Tips part 1
Sound on Sound Reaktor Tips part 2
Reaktor Wiki Tutorials