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Examples, tutorials, and the everyday struggles of a sound designer and composer.

[officialhaiku]

Getting Qu-bit ready for the Trash Audio meet tomorrow! Check out this DnB mashup with their Nebulae and Tri-ger!

[officialhaiku]

My Current Eurorack System

This is for anyone interested in what modules that I currently use to make music. My next synth composition update is in the works :).

Gear list:

Makenoise DPO, MMG, Maths v2, Echophon, Wogglebug, Phonogene, Rene, Optomix, and Moddemix.

Livewire Vulcan Modulator with the Intellijel Mind Meld expansion

Intellijel Triatt

Synthwerks FSR-1

Steady State Fate Quantum Rainbow

Mutable Instruments Yarns

Tiptop Audio z3000mk2 x2 and z2040

Qu-bit Electronics Nebulae and RT60

[officialhaiku]

Eurorack Modular Synth Blog Entry 2: Extending Bat-synth and adding arpeggios!

I'm back with the second Eurorack blog entry! In this post I will be explaining how I am starting to "flesh out" the song form from the previous blog entry and I will be covering some of the technical and creative hurdles that I have experienced as I push forward with this track. First off, I'm going to stop yapping and invite you to take a listen to the music.

Alright so now that you are, or have, listened to the track, lets talk about where I'm going with it and how it has changed. When I made the chord progression initially I didn't think of how I would want to start the song and what other elements I would like to add to the music. That's all fine and dandy for a little while, but we aren't using virtual instruments here. I'm recording patches that I breakdown and often faintly remember the next day!  So you may have remembered that I mentioned using Lemur to record tempo automation for the session. Well I was using extreme values that fluctuated between 50-75 beats per minute. You don't really notice it that much because of the type of swelling nature the patch had to it. But with the next element that I wanted to make was a nice flowing arpeggio. Unfortunately, as I put in the MIDI data the rhythms were speeding up and slowing down way to drastically and this lead me to go down one of two roads. I could use elastic audio, or what Ableton calls "warping", or I could re-record the material. Which one do you think I chose? If you don't know me I'm an extremely meticulous nut when it comes to preserving the quality of the performance and when using elastic audio it does distort some of the audio (not like rock n' roll distortion but more of a blurring the original intention type). That is fine if you want that kind of sound, but in this case I don't, so I went with re-recording the patch with smaller tempo fluctuations. Here's a pic of the session to understand what I'm talking about, look at the Master channel to see the red automation lane. The tempo minimum and maximum are only ten BPM apart.

While re-recording the bat-synth patch I also slowly opened the z2040 lowpass filter by hand during the first play through of the chord progression. I feel as if this gives the progression a nice intro and builds tension until the progression is at the ultimate brightness. I also slowly fade in the top 3 voices of the chords over the course of the first 32 measures to further achieve this effect. And now for the arpeggio! It took me a while to write the notes for the arp, everything that I was drawing in Ableton seemed boring to me. I was quite frustrated and almost gave up on the arp section until I picked up my acoustic guitar and started finger picking through the chord progression one evening. Fifteen minutes later, I had written the arpeggio line and some other elements that I don't want to show just yet. You can't beat the immediacy of a principle instrument when you get in a rut! With the notes now plopped into Ableton I began constructing the patch on my synth. Here's what the arp patch became:

Pretty simple actually! Saw wave mixed with white noise–routed to the low pass filter which was also fed to the output and also to two fx processors. The Phonogene was running in Broken Delay mode. It has a great low-fi delay sound. Here is what that sounds like on its own.

Neato! The third layer was an Echophon tuned and tracking the arpeggio notes. Here's what it sounds like naked.

After mixing that, plus three takes at different octaves of me moving the MMG's filter cutoff, dry, I had the ingredients that I needed for the second part for the track.  I did some basic editing and light fx additions once inside Ableton to blend it in with the chordal element. For now, I'm not worrying much about mixing. I find it extremely important to finish writing the material before doing any heavy mixing sessions because I can easily waste time making these two elements fit perfectly in the mix but all that work might go down the drain once I write the other parts of the song.  Well, that is it for now! I hope you are enjoying reading this as much I am making it. -Haiku!

[officialhaiku]

Hanging with my new pal the QU-Bit RT60!

[officialhaiku]

Eurorack Modular Blog Entry 1: Bat-synth

Welcome to my first blog entry on Tumblr and also about my up and coming Eurorack modular synth album! 

Today was the first real day of progress on the music and I'm excited to share it with you. I started out earlier in the day cleaning off my workspace and setting up the computer and other gear. As of now, I don't own a second audio interface, and I'm not too inclined to break down my other production desk in the living room for when I want to record my modular. I like to keep those worlds separate, so for now as a workaround, I am using the Zoom H4n handheld recorder. It is being fed directly from the modular and I am transferring the recordings to my laptop afterwards.

You can view my setup and my initial idea for the sound here!

Nice little bedroom setup don't you think? The workflow has been interesting thus far. I am using the Mutable Instruments Yarns MIDI-CV interface in my case, the module is a serious game changer for me. The setup time is next to none and my MIDI interface, the iConnectMIDI, is an amazing low-latency workhorse that communicates well between the Yarns and my laptop.

But we are here to talk music right? Yes of course, I almost forgot! So I had this sound in my head. Kind of a Hans Zimmer's Batman score progression going on. I wanted block chords fading in and out that are fed into a GIANT space. To achieve that sound I multi-tracked my Tiptop Audio z3000mk2 oscillator five times and fed the audio to the wonderful ValhallaDSP plugin, Shimmer. I thought long and hard about what chord progression should be used for this music bed since it will be the foundation for everything else in the track. I ended making some slight changes to the notes from what you hear in the video. Can anyone guess the harmony? Anyway check it out in all its glory!

And here is what the session looks like so far in Ableton 9.

Also, I forgot to add that I used Liine's Lemur app on my iPhone to record all of the tempo modulation to give the progression a more cinematic feel. 

That's it so far! I have some more cool patches cooking for this track and can't wait to share how the music progresses. Over and out!

-Haiku

[makenoisemusic]

We made mod squad this this issue! See electronic musician mag.