Sound from a Virtual Planet

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.

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.