Curiouser and Curiouser!

December in a loop

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 in my favourite hobby. This marks the end of the first full year of musical exploration and, with my experiments with 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 It's Gonna Rain and Piano Phase. The basic principle is a simple one: Play two identical loops of sound at different speeds and they will drift out of phase from each other and these phase differences will create interesting effects and counter rhythms.

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. 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 some of these grains. The advantage to this method is that the sampler can vary the speed of sample playback without changing pitch and vice verca. This turns out to be a very handy property.

In Reichatron the playback speed 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.

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 called 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.

One of the things I loved about MF was the way that automation of the controls was built right-in 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 dark waters. I was very pleased an happy that I was able to upload a finished & 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 fun experiment into a real instrument.

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 and substituted in components of my own, components from the Reaktor Factory Library, and some useful stuff from the User Library 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. By the time I release Reichenbach Rekkerd 3

I had evolved the controls to include a range of modes. This piece uses drift mode which randomly introduces small variations into the loop start & end points. Rekkerd refers to Ronnie from rekkerd.og who provides a range of great, free, samples on his site.

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 rather experimental sound. But I liked it a lot.

A few days ago I reached a point where I feel Reichatron is beginning to look like a "finished 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 offeneded that I try and put myself in the same space.

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!

They reflect time, I am the very ticking

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.

That track is The Madness of Clocks

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!