'Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' He asked. 'Begin at the beginning,'
the King said, very gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'
The composer Simon Stockhausen has just released a new sample map & set of accompany snapshots for my Reaktor instrument Reichatron.
I heartily recommend you download and listen to them since there are some great sounds in there ("scifi world" is my favourite). Visit PatchPool and follow the Reaktor link in the left hand sidebar. The download is at the bottom of the list on the right hand side of the page.
It's a strange new feeling for me to have someone take something I made and do something this cool with it. Many thanks Simon!
Slightly belated post but I'm announcing that Reichatron 1.0 has been released:
Here's a sample of something I cooked up with it by blending the phase shifting of different guitar parts before feeding them to the effects section:
This is my first Reaktor instrument and represents a big effort on my part getting to grips with the basics of Reaktor. But these efforts would have been for nought without the help of many people to whom I am indebted:
Mike Daliot for his inspirational Metaphysical Function instrument (wish I had a link to Mike, he seems like a ghost in the machine)
Also I would like to thank my fellow members of alonetone.com who have been supportive of my musical efforts and encouraged me to go on. I'd like to single out also those who responded to my call for samples to go with the Reichatron release. I'd hoped to maybe get a dozen and ended up with half a gigabyte of original material for the release.
because, without Alonetone, who knows if Iʼd still even be on this musical journey.
Please go listen to their music.
Lastly Iʼd like to thank Ronnie of rekkerd.org for permission to use some of his excellent mixed bag samples (which work great for phase shifting) and Rhythmn Lab/Cyberworm for some excellent flute samples.
The response to Reichatron has been very uplifting and, for which, thank you to all those who left comments. I have several improvements to the basic instrument in mind as well as a couple of new experiments planned.
So the RPM challenge started on Monday. It's been on my mind since I signed up for it a few weeks ago. To some extent is has sapped my desire to make music so as not to "waste" ideas before I used them in RPM. Yet, after it started, I found myself listless, unable to focus, and blank. It wasn't excitement or eagerness I was feeling. It wasn't fun.
Last night the idea briefly flashed through my mind "Why don't I just stop?" I liked it although it was accompanied by a little dissonance as I'd already announced that I was doing it, committed to it. I decided to sleep on it and woke without any sense of doubt. Taking on RPM was a combination of optimism and hubris. The idea of stopping felt great. So that's what I am doing.
The reality for me is that I am not ready for something like RPM. I don't need to be challenged this way because, musically, everything's already a challenge. Adding deadlines, pressure, and expectations (even just my own) is all completely unnecessary and makes it less fun. I don't know why it feels so different to the Alonetone 24hr challenge but, for me, it does.
So I'm going back to my own timetable, my own pace, and doing what I want to do. Maybe I'll do RPM next year, or the year after, or never. I'm not going to worry about it.
I've never used the same quote twice in two posts but it's seem appropriate to quote Salinger again:
"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's." -- JD Salinger.
Good luck to everyone choosing to do RPM, I look forward to hearing your creations!
"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not
anyone else's." -- JD Salinger.
This from The Impossible Cool popped up in Google Reader this morning while I was thinking, with increasing nervousness, about RPM 2010.
I'm claiming this one for my own and giving up worrying about what other people might think about what I'll be able to do (or not do) for my first RPM.
Yesterday I passed 10,000 listens of the tracks I have shared on Alonetone and I think it's a milestone worth celebrating.
Even two years ago the idea that I would be making music would have seemed fanciful. I love music, but what do I know about how it's made? What talent have I anyway? Until 2008 I think my closest contact with an instrument was tapping a triangle at school.
At this point I have made some 70 tracks, and - I think - many hundreds of people have listened to them and, at least a few of them, have enjoyed them. I know I have. I'm not claiming these are anything more than you'd expect from someone who has a years worth of experience in a complex, creative, field but... I've made a few that I love, like this one.
I'm signed up to do the RPM challenge in 2010. I've no clue what I'm going to do and few expectations about what kind of an album I will come up with. But... I'm making an album this year.
Well I'm not entirely sure a wiki is what I want. As a text writing environment I think wiki's are pretty poor but they still seem to be best game in town for attracting participation and that's mostly what I want.
I'm trying out DokuWiki which seems pretty simple and pretty nice. It supported ACL's out of the box and seems to have anti-spam measures available. I've seen too many wiki's descend into spam hell to consider any wiki that doesn't have a modicum of defences available. It also has a reasonable WYSIWYG editor, image upload, and some other nice features and, if I don't care for it being PHP, I've been able to grok the code when I had to look at it.
I started with the Ubuntu install of doku but couldn't seem to get it up to date (which meant horrible messages at the top of every page) so I just scrapped that and started again, downloading the latest release and installing it myself.
I'm using a rather ancient version of nginx which I, again, seem to have installed myself. I should probably switch back to the Ubuntu one (I think maybe I couldn't figure out how to install that when I originally started on Slicehost). This made setting up the clean url's harder but I got there eventually.
I did have a problem with DokuWiki not recognising login sessions when clean URL's were enabled. The login process worked but, after logging in, you... wouldn't be logged in. I tried turning on the PHP variable to make it use cookies for sessions but that didn't help. In the end giving DokuWiki it's hostname & path rather than letting it auto-detect them seemed to work.
Now I have a working wiki and it's not looking too bad. Especially after adding a couple of the plugins to support things like inline notes.
I'm considering creating a book and, to begin with, I want to collaboratively develop an outline for what the book should cover. I wouldn't expect more than a dozen contributors (if I'm lucky!) but the tool would need to handle it. It would be nice to find a tool that would segue nicely into the writing (and, even, layout) task but that's less essential.
If anyone has personal recommendations of online tools they've worked with that would be suitable for that purpose I'd be grateful to hear them.
Astute readers may have noticed there are no more comment links on my posts (at least the recent ones). The venerable Radio Userland comment server that was hosting those comments is no more. That's a lot of commentary gone missing but, so far as I know, they offered no means to actually recover your comments. I did ask once and was told no.
For now I hope you will either blog any response you want to make or maybe tweet it. I've often argued against comments but I seem to be in a minority so if anyone has a recommendation for a good comment service please get it to me somehow (I narrowly avoided saying "leave a comment").
As we head for the end of 2009 I thought it might be a good idea to put down some thoughts about what I am doing vis-a-vis my favourite hobby. This marks the end of the first full year of musical exploration and, with my experiments building a Reaktor based looping instrument, I finally feel like I am beginning to earn my khaki shorts and pith helmet.
I got inspired by reading about Steve Reich and his 60's experiments with phase shifted looping. Notably the seminal pieces It's Gonna Rain and Piano Phase.
The basic principle is a simple one: play two identical loops of sound at slightly different speeds and they will drift out of phase from each other. The phase differences create interesting effects and counter rhythms which vary as the phase relationship between the two loops evolves.
Here's a fantastic clip from a South Bank show on Steve Reich that discusses this early period of his work (Parts 1, & 3-6 are also available and recommended viewing if this kind of thing is at all of interest to you):
Throughtout December I have been experimenting with phase-shifted looping through building a Reaktor ensemble that I call The Reichatron (original name 'Reichenbach'). At heart Reichatron consists of three granular sampler modules. Why 3? I'm not sure but everyone else was using two so I decided to use 3.
The granular in granular sampler is important because, instead of treating a sample as a single chunk of audio they represent it as a stream of audio grains which may be only a few milliseconds long. The sampler module then resynthesizes the original sound by blending the grains together.
The advantage to this method is that the sampler can vary the speed of sample playback, by either dropping or extending grains in the stream, without changing pitch and vice verca. This turns out to be a very handy property.
In Reichatron the playback speed & pitch of each sampler can be varied independently. I normally set one to normal speed (1.00x), another to 1.01x, and the third to 1.02x. But I've also experimented with other relationships including reverse speeds with the same kinds of relationships. I also play with pitching the samplers up or down an octave to see what effect that has.
A very early example of what I produced is "Gnossiennes-1 Reiched Pt. 2" which takes a recording of the Erik Satie piano solo piece Gnossiennes #1 and loops sections of it.
The result is, I think, quite beautiful in itself and, I hope, does no injustice to Satie's work (a favourite of mine and piece I hope, eventually, to learn to play).
A few weeks later and Reichatron had evolved into a somewhat more sophisticated beast as I discovered that layering effects such as delay and reverb over the basic phase-shifted looping lends a more polished quality to the result. For example a piece I made from a 2 second long piano sample and titled "Reichenbach Piano 1"
Now one of my favourite Reaktor ensembles is called Metaphysical Function. Created by Mike Daliot, it is a monster of a sound generator that combines several oscillators, a sampler, and an effects signal chain. It can create the most bizarre and wonderful textures.
One of the things I love most about the design of Metaphysical Function is the way that automation of the parameters is built right-in to the interface and I resolved to learn how to do that myself. Copying the structures from Metaphysical Function itself was impossible as the ensemble is insanely complex. I decided to take the challenge of learning to build them from scratch.
This turned out to be several weeks work and I was grateful for the assistance of my Reaktor tutor Ernest Meyer, a real old-hand, who helped me steer some of Reaktors darker waters. I was very pleased and happy when I was finally able to upload a working control to the Reaktor User Library (my first such contribution).
Later on it occurred to me to also try modelling some of Metaphysical Function's signal chain for Reichatron and this began the process of Reichatron evolving from a throwaway experiment into a real instrument that I would consider using to make music.
Again it was pointless to look at Metaphysical Function as anything other than inspiration so I copied the high-level block structure of oscillators (in my case samplers), filter, distortion, EQ, resonance, and reverb. I built this using components of my own for the simpler aspects, augmenting them with components from the Reaktor Factory Library, and some useful stuff from the User Library (should out to the RB Macros project) as well as a contribution from Computer Music's own rachMiel when I was having trouble building a resonator.
At the same time as I was developing the signal chain I was also experimenting with different ways of navigating the loop points of the sample being played devising different modes. In the beginning I started with one knob to control the start position of the loop and one to control the length and manually moved the loop as I recorded.
By the time I released "Reichenbach Rekkerd 3" I had evolved more sophisticated controls to automate loop navigation.
This piece uses drift mode which randomly introduces small variations into the loop start & end points during playback. Rekkerd refers to Ronnie from rekkerd.og who provides two "mixed bag" sample packs on his site. They're great samples and many are perfectr for playing with these techniques.
One of the best comments on this piece was from Sister Savage who wrote that it was like:
"Some kind of underground bug conference, with drinks."
I liked that a lot. Indeed I have been very gratified that a small audience has developed who seem to enjoy these rather strange experiments of mine.
I kept improving both the signal chain and the looping modes and one of the more interesting pieces to come out of this process was Twisted Reichazoid 1 which has a very experimental sound. But I liked it a lot.
A few days ago I reached a point where I feel Reichatron is beginning to approach something I might call "Version 1". To show off where I had got to I made the piece Reichatronic Flute 2.
along with an accompanying screencast:
The screencast shows the various features of the ensemble and I think the similarities between Reichatron and Metaphysical Function will be quite apparent. I hope Mike Dalliot wouldn't be too offended by the comparison.
There's a little more work to do on the looping modes, then I will select some samples for release and create some presets to demo it. Reichatron will be my first instrument upload to the Reaktor User Library and I am hoping other people may enjoy playing with it and, if they do, what they might come up with themselves.
What I have in mind for the future of the instrument is greater control over how the loopers and the signal chain interact to create more interesting compositions. But first version 1!
All in all December has been a most interesting month!
Yesterday was a very interesting day for me since it marked two musical firsts: My first track made with Ableton Live, and my first track taken "successfully" from concept to execution.
My normal music creation process is very hit and miss and mostly miss at that. I usually sit down and mess about with drum beats or synth patches until something catches and then, incrementally, add stuff until it seems to be done somehow. The net result is that I am unhappy with a good deal of my work.
But I keep slogging away trying to make as many tracks as I can and learn all I can in doing so.
On Friday, thanks to some generous discounting by Ableton, I was able to buy Live 8. I've dabbled with the Live session view a few times and considered it interesting. This weekend I was able to really dig into it and I find myself very happy with the result.
In a sense what the session view allows you to do is think about arrangement at a more abstract level than a typical arrangement view (such as Logic's). Where in an arrangement you have to think concretely about what sound goes where, in a session it's easier to think more in terms of the relationship between different parts. I've found it very invigorating.
So for some time I've had a desire to make a track featuring the sound of clocks ticking. I used a clock ticking in a track I made last month and I thought it was very effective. It laid a seed... what about making a track using nothing but clocks.
I finding the ticking of clocks very interesting. On the one hand I absolutely cannot sleep in a room with a ticking clock; I begin to anticipating the tick & this pushes me to the brink of madness. Yet, at other times, I can find ticking a comforting sound and I find the sound of many clocks ticking at once strangely intriguing.
I spent several weeks collecting clock samples and was kind enough that a bunch of Alonetoner's and Twitter friends helped me out.
Then I tried to make an arrangement in Logic. But I found it quite hard to get beyond a cacophony of sound. I definitely wasn't trying to make Ligeti's symphony for metronomes so I wanted to avoid that. I became frustrated until my interest in the project waned and it got shelved.
Yesterday morning it struck me that this was a perfect opportunity to try out Live.
I started a new Live set, collected all the samples into Live clips, and began sorted them into groups:ticks, fast ticks, grandfather ticks, mechanical ticks, chimes, and even a cuckoo.
From the groups I was able to structure things so that the I could keep the relative balance of the different types of sound the same while the sounds themselves could change and progress along with the track. One of the reasons live is very good for this is that the session view compresses time. You don't have to think about "bars" but "scenes" (of arbitrary length).
After several hours work I had a structure that I was able to play through, scene-by-scene, and come up with something I was quite happy with. I even managed to include a Cuckoo! My session view looks like this:
Then I went back and looked at creating some ambient sounds that would glue the whole thing together. I decided to put each group of sounds through a different send but keep the send levels quite low so that the wet sounds are part of the scenery and don't intrude. Among other things I used an Absynth resonator on the ticks, Live's beat-repeat on grandfather ticks, Audio Damage Dubstation on the chimes, and a little of a Live device called 'Abstract-synced Phaseverb' on some of the ticks.
I printed this to an arrangement and rendered all 22 tracks to audio which I pulled into Logic for mixing. I'm pretty comfortable mixing in Logic and the Logic arrange window still feels superior to me.
Talking over an early mix MMI with MMI one of his criticisms was that there wasn't much stereo movement. I spent some time working on panning some elements as well as using Camel Audio's CamelSpace to autopan others (although I didn't use it for sound treatment per se, none of the other camel effects are active).
I spent some time adding reverb using both Space Designer and Eos. I find reverb very tricky, it seems to be "nothing", "nothing", "nothing", ..., "oops laid it on with a trowel" and little in between. I was very careful to keep my reverbs short and using slightly different timings for the tracks I used it in an attempt to create some distance.
The last stage was the mastering channel strip. I used my normal strip of gain, multipressor, reverb, limiter but the sound was getting very distorted. In the end I realised I was running the limiter far too hot and the further back I dialed it the better the track sounded. Once I figured that out it wasn't hard to get a mix that sounded good to my ears.
Note that the track is 8m15 long and is made entirely from the sound of clocks ticking, chiming, and so forth. No drums or synth patches here!
I'm really pleased with the result not only because I like the track a lot but because the process seemed to work so much more smoothly than usual. It gives me hope that the combination of Live and Logic will be a fruitful one for me.
I've written such a long post to give a little more detail into my process. I hope some of it may be interesting either to you or, later, to me!
Lately I've been pondering what to do with this blog.
When I started blogging I was coming out of a period where I had much to say and few avenues to say it. Blogging felt like such a liberation and I feel I got a lot out of the experience. In the intervening years my blog went up and down but always ticked along. But the last year has been very different.
Here's a little history. I start blogging in May 2002.
Year
Posts written
2002
620
2003
597
2004
429
2005
372
2006
391
2007
275
2008
196
2009
45
Those first 8 months were a pretty furious exploration of a new medium. It was, perhaps, inevitable I couldn't maintain that kind of pace especially as I started writing more and re-posting less. I think I maintained a healthy pace through most of 2008 and then my writing fell off a cliff.
In 2009 I have written only 45 posts which is considerably less than the number I would write some months in previous years. What happened?
I took up music seriously as a hobby
I got Twitter
In January I started taking weekly piano lessons and threw myself into making music as a hobby. I'm a classic hobbyist I suppose but with some aspirations to progress beyond my little spare bedroom cum office/studio.
With music & music tech taking up so much of my time my former interests in technology, learning, km began to whither. I'm still interested in those things but as a practitioner rather than a practitioner-observer. That is I am using the technology, learning things, working out how to learn & remember rather than studying or building tools for such things.
This means that less of my time is spent in what I would call abstract thought and more on practical matters. When I am learning to play a blues accompaniment style it's an active task. When I am trying to make a phase shifting looper in Reaktor it's an active task. These things do not seem to lend themselves so easily to being written about.
The second major factor is that, as my output has dwindled, it has tended to be more life stuff and, since I am by nature a private individual, that means more the frustrations and irritations I need to release. Twitter has turned out to be a marvellously useful release value for me and far more effective than blogging for that purpose. For the most part even this use of my blog has died off.
The combination of these factors lead to a ~90% drop in output. Last month I began, seriously, to consider shutting the blog down altogether. But a couple of things have made me reconsider and think about restarting it in some new form.
The first year of any new phase of your life I think can be overwhelming. In this year (or a little over) I have uploaded 62 "tracks" to alonetone.com where I share my music. Some pieces are musical, some are semi-musical, some are outright experiments with sound. I'm proud of what I have achieved in a year but under no illusions about it. I've also:
gone from not being able to find middle-C on a piano to being able to play a solo piece by Philip Glass and several blues accompaniment styles
released one MIDI sequencer and built others
learning some basic arrangement, mixing, and production skills
started building my own instruments & effects in Reaktor
I am starting to feel the stirrings of having something to say about what I am doing and where I am headed. So my thoughts turn back to my blog as a way of doing that.
When I was knee deep in blogging writing my own blogging software made sense. I wanted to experiment with the platform and the only way to do that with any efficacy was to have my own. Today it seems entirely inappropriate as I know I am never going to go back and finish any of the features that would have made it interesting. Today my own blogging software is a burden.
So I have a couple of choices to make:
A clean break with the past, orphan/archive the 2925 posts I wrote and start afresh? Or continue but with a new focus/theme?
