Sound from a Virtual Planet

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

There’s something innately appealing to us about human sounds, the sound of a voice, hands clapping, whistling, vocal beat-boxing. Sound designers have been acutely aware of this, and have used the voice to create innumerable sound effects –the mouth is their secret weapon. One of the first classic sounds from the early days of sampling was the sound a human blowing air across the top of a glass bottle. More recently, Bjork explored the possibilities of human sounds in her haunting work Medulla, where just about all the sounds on the CD are derived from the voice or body. While it’s easy to record the sound of humans, making expressive sampled instruments from those recordings can be a daunting challenge.

This spring, SONiVOX released an interesting sample library aptly named Anatomy. Anatomy is a massive collection of 856 sampled instruments formatted for Native Instrument’s Kontakt 2 or 3. All the sounds in the collection are derived from some sound produced by the human body, and are divided into two categories: man and machine. Sounds that are distinctly human like singing and screaming are in the Man category. Those listed as Machine are sounds that have been mangled beyond recognition to create all sorts of instrument sounds, from drums and basses to pads and leads. While this is not the first time human sounds have been made available in a sample library, the sheer size of this collection is unprecedented.

While some of the instruments included here, like the vocal beat-boxing kits, are what you would expect to find, the real strength of this library is in the range of unexpected permutations that bear no resemblance to the original recorded source. Even sounds that are bizarre or aggressive have a certain appealing quality to them. SONiVOX provides some demos on their website, and here are a couple done by former students of mine from Berklee:

Anatomy Demo 0 - composed by Ben Cantil - 3,228k

Anatomy Demo 2 - composed by Stephanie Olmanni - 2,037k

To further entice you, SONiVOX offers ten of the Kontakt instruments as free downloads that will allow you to load and experiment with these on your own.

SONiVOX Anatomy Free Samples

If there is any critique of the library, it’s that you need to own Kontakt to use it. For the last few years, manufacturers have been relying on various sample players, like Kontakt Player used in the Garritan Personal Orchestra, to deliver programmed content. When you buy a library, the player is included. This has the distinct advantage of insuring compatibility, and eliminates the need for manufacturers to develop the same library for multiple sampler formats. However, for anyone interested in developing their sound design chops, there’s a big advantage to delivering the library as Kontakt instruments. You can open any of the instruments in Kontakt and see exactly how it was programmed; educational opportunities abound with examples of both standard and more exotic programming techniques.

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.

Perhaps the most anticipated software development this spring was the release of the MAX/MSP/Jitter version 5 from Cycling 74, which came out last week. For those of you who don’t already know, MAX is object oriented programming environment for sound, music, video applications. Wikipedia has a very good overview and history of the program listed under Max (software).

A MAX/MSP Patch

While updates over the years have focused on, new objects and support for new OS technologies, the basic look and feel of MAX hasn’t changed much since it’s initial commercial release from Opcode. (Does anyone remember them?) MAX 5 addresses this with a complete rewrite of the entire underlining code, aligning it with current hardware and OS software platforms. A revised user interface includes a variety of on-screen de-bugging tools. Some of these, like a visual display of signal level at any connection, easily translate into powerful ways to learn about signal flow and processing. Visually, objects are much easier to look at, and a new user interface view separates the underlying patch structure from how it appears to a user/performer. Last year Cycling 74 announced an alliance with Ableton, makers of Live, and entire look of the new release of MAX looks a lot like its German cousin.

Pretty cool… That said, MAX (or Reaktor for that matter) isn’t for everyone. If you’ve got some hacker instincts, you’ll be able to get around MAX after working through the excellent tutorials that come with the program. Plan on a few weekends of focused study and experimentation and you’ll be on your way. Cycling 74 has a very good video introduction that will give you a taste of what the program is all about.

With the start of the 2008 Spring semester at Berkleemusic.com, I’m looking forward to the arrival of Absynth in my online course, Sound Design for the Electronic Musician. I spent the beginning of this year revising the course, and I’m excited by the educational opportunities Absynth will provide. So, what makes for a good teaching tool anyway? As with anything, we learn by doing, and you’ll learn from your experience with any electronic instrument. However, in my mind, a tool that’s particularly well suited to teaching is one that helps you make connections with larger concepts or principles. Absynth does that in a couple of useful ways: by using absolute values and providing time and frequency domain displays of waveforms.

Most synthesizers use arbitrary values for parameters. By arbitrary, I mean that a given value has no correspondence to an objective measure of a particular setting. For example, in Reason we can set a filter cutoff frequency to 85, but 85 what? Don’t we usually use Hz to describe frequency? As far as I can see, the values used for the parameters in Reason are totally arbitrary. By and large we’ve gotten used to this way of working with synthesizers and even in some effects processors. Take a look through your collection or virtual and hardware synths and see what you find.

Two things contribute to this, first is the legacy of analog instruments, which serve as the model for many current synthesizer designs. Back in the days of the Mini Moog, there were no display readouts of values. You used your ears and adjusted a parameter to taste. Any frequency values on analog gear is an approximation anyway, and it’s just not possible for a potentiometer to set a specific numeric value. Second, while the arrival of digital control and MIDI meant that absolute display of values like filter cutoff was more of a possibility technically, manufacturers often didn’t see the need. MIDI control has a range of 128 values in most implementations, so it can only address 128 specific values in any range. While a MIDI parameter value of 87 might correspond with a specific frequency, manufacturers often spared the user those details. Yamaha in it’s DX line of instruments was a notable exception here.

To my knowledge, the first synthesizer to fully implement absolute values for parameters was the Kurzweil K250, introduced in 1984.* Filter cutoff frequency was displayed as Hz, levels as dB, LFO rate as Hz, and time values, including envelope segment durations, in seconds. This made it a particularly powerful teaching tool, and it was a staple in the Berklee Music Synthesis Department labs for years, followed by the K2000 series. Absynth follows in this tradition by using absolute values for any parameter.

One synthesis concept that’s difficult for many students to grasp at first is the relationship of wave shape to spectrum. Early analog synths usually had two or three waveshapes available in their oscillator sections. With the arrival of digital oscillators and wavetables, synthesizers offered a greater selection of single cycle waveforms, however these were often displayed numerically. We see this in Reason’s Subtractor where waveshapes beyond the basic geometric staples are selectable by numbers 5 through 32. While a description of timbral characteristics can sometimes be found in the instrument’s documentation, we often don’t see the shape itself or the actual spectrum, the number and level of individual partials.

Waveform Display in Absynth

Spectrum Display in Absynth

As in most software instruments, Absynth has a number of waveforms available in it’s three oscillators. In addition, you can create and save your own waveshapes use the Wave Window editor. This unique editing environment lets the user select between the familiar time domain waveform display or a frequency domain display that shows the number, level and phase of individual partials. You use a pencil tool to simply redraw a waveshape in one window and the change in spectrum is displayed in the next. Conversely, when you change the level and phase of the displayed partials, you switch views and see a new shape. Pretty cool…

While Native Instruments boasts of many more exotic and even revolutionary features in Absynth’s promotional materials, absolute values and graphic displays are some of the basic features that make it a powerful tool for learning about sound. Hello Absynth…

Multi-segment Envelopes in Absynth

* While the Synclavier, Fairlight and perhaps other high-end systems incorporated absolute values, I’m thinking here of instruments that mere mortal, working musicians might be able to afford.

Native Instruments’ free KORE Player is now out and available from their Website. To get going with this, you’ll follow a link for your platform, Mac or PC, and fill out a short form. You’ll get an e-mail message with a time-limited download link and a registration number. Be warned however, the download is over 600MB, so you’ll need lot’s of bandwidth to even think about it. Oh, and by the way, your best bet is to attempt this in the early evening, Eastern Daylight Savings Time, while the Germans are asleep.

Once on your desktop, the install is easy. The installer puts everything in it’s designated place, and KORE can be opened as a standalone application or instantiated as an AU, VST, or RTAS plug-in. Even though the KORE Player is free, you’ll still have to register with Native Instruments using their Service Center application and the registration number provided with your download link.

The free player application comes with an assortment of 50 Kore sounds to get you started. This is an excellent collection of both useful "bread and butter’ sounds, like sample-based drum kits, as well as the more exotic types of electronic sounds NI synths are known for. These sounds are not left-overs, and you could do quite a bit of music making with just this starting collection. However, it’s actually kind of a teaser, since the real power comes with the additional Soundpacks. These are premium collections with 200 patches in each, that cover a broad range of styles, starting at 59.00. Unfortunately, the weak dollar will continue to put customers in the US at a disadvantage with this and any other European product.

All-in-all, the KORE player is a great way to expand your pallet and get some fresh sounds into your electronic music.

Postscript…. On March 13, 2008, NI announced a server upgrades to accommodate the increased traffic.

OK, it’s a month later and people are still asking me about the coolest stuff I saw at the Winter NAMM 2008. So I guess I’ll have to come clean with my top 5. For those of us looking for big music technology news, trade shows are more or less sleepers. These days, fewer manufacturers time their release cycles to trade shows. Even Apple, who tries to set their trajectory in January with Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote, is more about getting products out the door as soon as they’re ready. So, for most music technology companies, major releases and announcements have already hit the street by January. There are some exceptions…

Although I got scooped on this one by my friend and fellow Berkleemusic blogger, Dave Franz, at the top of my list is Spectrasonics, who know a little something about drama. They skipped NAMM altogether last year while working on "something really big." The fruits of that labor saw the light of day at NAMM this year when patron saint of sound design Eric Persing rolled out Omnisphere.

Spectrasonics has been quite successful at creating powerful and evocative sampled instruments such as Atmosphere, Trilogy, and Stylus RMX. These were based on the UVI sound engine which essentially is a platform for sample playback. With the next generation of instruments, the company wanted to develop their own sound engine that would expand on sample playback and get much deeper into synthesis techniques such as granular, waveshaping, and FM. They came up with something they call the "Steam" engine. While the synthesis and modulation functions here are deep, Spectrasonics has made them immediately and easily accessible to any musician. The sound library itself is massive, comprised of the greatest hits of all their previous libraries along with a collection of new and unique samples. They showed one such sampling session for their demo where an upright piano was set on fire and carefully recorded as it went up in smoke. The sound quality was fabulous and the design was ingenious with things like a Farfisa organ graincloud sounding at once unique and familiar. The only downside of their demo was the September 15 release date. With such a build-up I didn’t meet anyone who didn’t want to leave the show with a copy tucked under their arm.

One of the biggest buzzes at the show this year was the Euphonix MC line of hardware DAW controllers. While primarily known for their high end digital consoles, Euphonix is coming out with a more modest line of products that uses their Ethernet-based EuCon DAW control protocol.

These new surfaces, the MC Mix and MC Control, are aimed at the project studio user with 999.00 and 1495.00 price tags, respectively. Currently, their main competition will be the Mackie Control units. However, a sleek, compact design, well-designed functionality, as well as the responsiveness of their high-speed control will make these units serious contenders.

Next on my list is Access. While it took a couple of years to perfect the technology behind the Access TI (totally integrated) line of Virus synthesizers, these instruments have become one the must-haves in current electronic arsenals. This year Access introduced an entry-level, stand-alone module version of the Virus TI called the Snow. To top things off, Richard Devine spent the weekend holding court at their booth, evangelizing the Virus and the newly released Atomizer companion software.

The software works alongside the Virus OS to beat slice audio input coming into the Virus, map the slices across the keyboard and provide addition processing controlled by the mod wheel and pitch bend. In the capable hands of Richard Devine this became a powerful, real-time performance tool. It looks like Access is pushing the envelope of what we can expect from a hardware synthesizer to include functions that we’d normally associate with custom laptop performance software. Atomizer will be free to all Virus TI users.

Korg had one of the coolest gadgets I saw at the show, and the closest thing to what one might call a glitch instrument. The new Kaossilator Dynamic Phrase Synthesizer takes a small Kaos pad controller and adds 100 different sounds and phrases.

An internal sequencer allows the user to assemble simple melodic/rhythmic fragments and manipulate them with the pad. The device itself is pocket sized, and while it offers little in the way of connectivity or pro features, it’s really fun to play, and downright addictive.

Somehow NAMM brings out the guitar player in everyone, and this year, Mackie’s new HotWire guitar amp was what did it for me. Legendary designer Greg Mackie reputedly spent years on this design, and the result is a remarkable combination of high and low tech in a great sounding amp. At the heart of this is analog tube circuitry. Not just one circuit, but a number of them, so that in fact, when switching between the various amp modes, the actual circuit routing changes, along with the selection of tubes used. Think of it like having a collection of tube amps at your disposal, where you can easily switch between them. In addition, the amp comes with a collection of creature comforts from a tuner and metronome, to on-board digital effects. The amp sells for 1500.00 and is expected to be available in March.

Winter NAMM 2008 Top Five Roundup.

1. Spectrasonics Atmosphere
2. Euphonix MC Controllers
3. Access Virus Snow and Atomizer software
3. Korg Kaossilator
5. Mackie HotWire Guitar amp

There’s always been a disconnect between musical instruments and technology. On one hand, we view instruments as things that take years of dedication and practice to master, while the unabashed goal of technology is to make the things we do, from basic communication to art creation, easier, and shall we say, more "democratic." With synthesizers, there has always been a steep learning curve involved with the art of sound design, however manufacturers have repeatedly found that most using these instruments, hardware or software, never stray far from the factory presets. Now let’s take a company like Native Instruments, who have developed an extraordinary line of unique, powerful instruments. How do they reconcile the two, staying on the cutting edge while serving the needs of the marketplace?

In the last couple of years, NI has been promoting its Kore system as a way to simplify working with massive software synthesizer patch libraries. Kore uses a database and browser to organize patches, formatted as Kore sounds, by sound categories. For those who have NI Komplete, this makes for a very powerful way to access sounds while in the production process. Typically, when looking for a bass sound, one would have to open each synth, browse for suitable patches, write them down, open another synth, and repeat the process, over and over again. This gets tiring fast; –not what attracted any of us to electronic music in the first place. With Kore, the patch browser lists all patches designated as bass patches, regardless of which instrument they’re from. They can be opened, auditioned and used in a project, all within Kore.

While on the surface it may seem like we’re opening a new synth each time we call up a patch, we’re actually running off the Kore Sound Engine. What NI has done is built the sound engines for REAKTOR, MASSIVE, ABSYNTH, FM8, KONTAKT and GUITAR RIG into Kore, so when any Kore sound is loaded the engine is ready to go. Pretty cool…

So what’s the next step? Give the software away…free. At NAMM NI announced that a free Kore Player would be available in March, and the company will be selling soundpacks for 59.00 each. The player will have all the sound engine capabilities of the full Kore 2 version with a starting collection of 30 patches. While this is a remarkable development in the electronic instrument industry, giving away the synth but selling the patches, this is a model that we see more and more with technology tools. You need to look no farther than the printer you probably got free when you bought a computer to understand that the cost is in the toner, not the machine. And so it goes for software synthesizers.

It will be interesting to see how this flies in the marketplace. While there seems to be some support for the business model, soundware never appeared to be much of a moneymaker in the music tech industry. But, when you take a look at how musicians actually use synthesizers, as opposed to how they say they use them, our friends in Berlin may be on to something.