Interview with ambient/minimal master Robert Rich
Robert Rich has been creating music in the atmospheric / ambient / electronic genre for three decades and is often heard on the public radio program Music from the Hearts of Space. His atmospheric spaces with unique rhythms often accompany his custom PVC flutes or the sound of the lap steel guitar played in a glissando style
During a concert stop in Des Moines he describes how his long form slow music relies on being in the moment and how he expresses sound in its flow from moment to moment during live performances.
Robert’s music has been a major influence in my own sound as an ambient musician and for years I featured his recordings when I hosted the now defunct Iowa Public Radio program Wild Rose Café.
Grrove it like Jamiroquai
Here’s a nice tutorial where Russ shows how to use some to the tricks used by bands like Jamiroquai to get those funky grooves.
Thanks to AUB
Sound effect synth for iPhone
MendelSynth (App Store link) is a sound effect synthesizer that’s designed to be a “fun exploration and discovery tool.”
MendelSynth is based on a genetic algorithm — sounds are synthesized from simulated genomes. New sounds are made from old by mutating and cross breeding their genomes.
In the interface, genomes are represented by movable circular buttons that can be played by tapping on them. Double tapping on a button creates six new mutated child sounds arranged around the parent. Dragging one button on top of another creates five new children that inherit features from both parents.
Child sounds are often not very interesting (or worse!), but with patience you can achieve pleasing effects. One strategy is to select the children with the most desirable features, then create children from those and repeat the process until you find something you like.
Features:
- A library of 250 seed sounds.
- Save synthesized audio to a file and send by email.
- Mutation rate and parameter variability controls.
- Individual volume, pitch and tempo controls for each genome.
- A “gene pool” where favorite genomes can be saved and retrieved.
MendelSynth sells for $2.99.
Via ST
How to makes pads with Dronemakes
In this video, Brian demonstrates how to make excellent pad sounds using the free spectral processing plug-in Spectral Dronemaker by composer Michael Norris.
Spectral Dronemaker is one of Trifonic’s favorite tools, and (as Brian discusses) it was used most recently to create sounds for their remix of Hybrid’s track Can You Hear Me.
New Brian Eno inspired sample set
Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategy “Honour they error as s hidden intention” is the inspiration for a new sample library, Error Tone.
Here’s what developers Tone Manufacture have to say about it:
In that spirit, we’ve created a library solely from errors. Some of them completely accidental, some where we just looked the other way whilst the accident happened. But all of them stem from a willful ignorance of instruction manuals and correct operating procedures.
Home movie soundtracks mangled with the wrong converters, musical toys tortured into revealing hidden sonic secrets and computer hard drives dying noisily, all of the sounds in this library started out life as errors.
Some of them have been further treated with a mixture of carefully applied computer processing and traditional studio techniques, some left as nature (never) intended.
Tone Error sells for £29.99 £19.99.
Contents:
- 30 NN-XT sampler patches, ranging from massive pads to sub-shaking percussion.
- 14 Combinator instruments, all with performance controls and extensive processing.
- 200+ single hits, from tweeter shredding glitches to low end rumbles.
- NN-XT patches with all the single hits mapped across the keyboard.
- 46 REX2 loops, from percussion to circuit bent transmissions.
- 600+ Mb of content.
- 24 bit / 48khz high quality audio.
- Available either in Reason Refill or Wav / REX2 format.
- Wav / REX2 format includes NN-XT instruments that can be used in Native Instruments Kontakt.
All modular
A couple of nice videos showing of modular stuff like beat, sequencing and bass handling
“The case is a 6U with wogglebug, maths, qmmg, envelator, a140 adsr, A147 vclfo, A160/161 seq, zorlon cannon, a166 logic module, a138c bipolar mixer, a172 max/min, a151 seq switch, hertz donut direct record with a little reverb and some delay”
Chip and Blade Runner
The music is a midi file from blade runner, one sound is the wtr and the other a synth from fruityloops.
Intro on the Moon Modular Octal Clock Divider M5544
This is a video introduction to the Moon Modular Octal Clock Divider M5544.
The Moon Modular Octal Clock Divider combines eight divider circuits in one module.
Each of the dividers offers twelve division factors: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 10 / 12 / 16 / 32 and has its own LED indicator.
In position 1 the clock signal is fed through and the internal divider will be reset. The input jacks are normalized to allow complex divider combinations without external patching:
- Input 1 is daisy chained to input 3,
- input 3 to 5, input 5 to 7.
- Output 1 is daisy chained to input 2,
- output 3 to input 4,
- output 5 to input 6 and
- output 7 to input 8.
The Moon Modular Octal Clock Divider M554 retails for $379.
A round of tutorials on Logic…
….coming your way
Into the Abertronic – Jupiter 4, Roland Space Echo and violin
DATAMASKIN
