Sound from a Virtual Planet

All to often we segregate synthesis into two broad categories: subtractive synthesis, where the source of sound is some sort of geometric waveshape, like the typical square wave or sawtooth, or sampling which starts with digital audio file. However, things always get interesting in a boarder town, and some really creative and interesting sound design comes from the crossbreeding of these two types of synthesis. Unfortunately when it comes to sampling, the main focus of commercial sound libraries is usually in emulating existing instruments, often either drums or orchestral families. The goal of these is to provide the most realistic recreation, and indeed many current libraries, in skilled hands, yield stunning results.

So far this year, two products have emerged that take a very creative approach to working with sampled sound and serve not only useful instruments, but as inspiration for further exploration– Plectrum from Vital Arts, distributed by Ilio, and Anatomy from SONiVOX. I’ll start with Plectrum and cover Anatomy in my next blog entry.

Plectrum is the brainchild of sound designer extraordinaire Geoff Gee, who cut his teeth creating many of the factory sounds for the Kurzweil K2xxx series of instruments. I first met Geoff when he did a presentation on creative sound design with the K2000 at Berklee. For this, he started by recording the sound of a match strike into the synth, then proceeded to mangle the source into a series of strange and wonderful sounds. Geoff has a remarkable ability to listen to a sound and imagine a world of possibilities, as well as the technical chops to come up with useful results. This is one of he hallmarks of a great sound designer.

Several years ago Geoff and his family left the Boston area for a farm in upstate New York, home to Vital Arts, the umbrella organization for the creative work he and his wife pursue. An old farm is a rich source for all sorts of natural found sounds, from plucked stings, glass objects and breaking twigs. Undoubtedly, Geoff had a field day (no pun intended) sampling his new surroundings. Some time later he came up with the remarkable collection of instruments that became Plectrum, using the powerful synthesis capabilities in GVI, the GigaStudio Virtual Instrument sound engine. One of the real strengths of this collection is that it’s designed to be very playable. On top of his sound design prowess, Geoff is a virtuoso pianist and everything he programs reflects his passion for expressive performance.

Geoff Gee talking about Plectrum at the 2007 AES Convention in NYC.

I got my first preview of Plectrum at the 2008 Winter NAMM last January. The floor of a trade show is not the best place for listening, and wasn’t till Geoff paid a visit to Berklee last month that I really got a chance to listen carefully and really hear what this collection was about. Geoff put Plectrum though it’s paces in a good listening environment and talked about the process of collecting and designing the sounds. Altogether there are 185 different instruments organized by category. While this is not your General MIDI sound set, Plectrum covers a wide range of musical functions, from exotic bass patches to pads, and yes, plucked instruments. The real standouts here are the namesake plucked sounds. Here, he’s done a remarkable job of creating sounds that are completely new and fresh, while at the same time, sound familiar.

Vital Arts MP3s Plectrum Demos

As of this writing Plectrum is only on the PC, but since Tascam has recently released a Mac version of GVI, it’ should be fully cross-platform very soon.

One of the high points of the Spring 2008 semester in the Music Technology Division at Berklee was a week-long visit from electronic musician Alessandro Cortini, best known for his work as the keyboard player for NIN. A visiting artist always presents a great opportunity for both students and teachers to get a better idea of exactly how people are working in the field. As with most visitors, I didn’t really know what to expect. I saw Allesandro play with NIN when the came through Boston in June 2006, and I did a bit of research, finding he was also part of a production/performance team called modwheelmood, but you don’t really know what someone’s going to do until they’re on campus.

Alessandro Cortini

I knew that Allesandro was doing a lot of work with modular synthesizers so I was keen on having him discuss strategies for integrating said devices into the composition/production process. On Monday afternoon he arrived to my composition seminar with his Buchla 200e modular synthesizer. What followed was a master class in the architecture, aesthetics and compositional strategies behind working with this wonderful instrument.

Alessandro Cortini’s Buchla 200e Modular Synth

There are two schools of thought regarding electronic instruments. These stem from the thinking and designs of two pioneers of early commercial synthesizers form the 1960s: Bob Moog and Don Buchla. Moog, working on the East Coast in upstate New York, felt that electronic instruments should be played by musicians, and his designs focused on the keyboard as the main connection between the player and machine. Buchla, on the other hand, was in a more free-thinking environment that was San Francisco, and he felt that the synthesizer should encourage a completely new way of developing and exploring musical ideas. (You’ll notice that Allesandro’s 200e has no keyboard controller.) From these two schools of thought came two early examples of commercially released synthesizer music. Just about everyone has heard of Wendy Carlos’ Switched On Bach that used the Moog Modular, and remains to this day, one of the best selling classical music albums of all time. Around the same time, Bay-area composer Morton Subotnick released an album called Silver Apples of the Moon, which was a showcase for the Buchla and the kind of music-making it encouraged.

Needless to say, in the mass market, the standard keyboard controller is the dominant interface for electronic music making. However, there are always those who are looking for new, unexplored or under-appreciated ways of manipulating electronic sound. Fast forward to 2008 and we find Cortini, who’s original calling was as a guitarist, touring and collaborating with Trent Reznor and NIN. Although he covers classic keyboard, bass and guitar parts on the road with NIN, his real passion is creating unique sound textures and rhythmic patterns that are used throughout the show.
While modular synthesizers are designed for studio use and are generally don’t stand up well to life on the road, Allesandro had a system built specifically for touring by EAR–Electro Acoustic Research. Onstage, there’s a Pro Tools system running backing tracks used in the show, and the EAR modular system gets it’s timing from it, so the rhythmic patterns it generates will always be in tempo. While this might seem like an obscure technical concept, Allesandro easily demonstrated how this was done in my Advanced MIDI Production class where he clocked his Buchla 200e to Logic.

During his week at Berklee, Alessandro talked a lot about using a modular synthesizer to generate musical ideas. The heart and soul of this comes from the different ways that a modular system controls musical timing. In general, this comes from a combination voltage-controlled step sequencers, and LFOs (low frequency oscillators), where the LFOs control tempo, rates, and rhythmic divisions, and the step sequencer produces control for pitch and other levels. Both of these sources are used to trigger envelopes that shape the sound. While this might sound simple, the routings and possibilities available in a modular system staggering. Check out this clip from YouTube of Allesandro tweaking his Buchla 200e. NIN fans might hear some vaguely familiar patterns and sounds.

In future posts I’ll be referring back to Allesandro Cortini’s Berklee visit. You can hear his work on both modular synthesizer and guitar on the new NIN release Ghosts I-IV. There are some cool studio shots of the sessions up on Flickr.