New vocoder from VirSyn – listen to it here
VirSyn has announced the release of MATRIX – The Voice Coder, “The Vocoder for the 21st century.”
And it sounds pretty cool too, listen for youselfs, LOL
MATRIX sets a new milestone in the long history of Vocoders started by Homer Dudley in 1936. This new application provides precise analog modelling 8-pole filters and extremely fast envelope followers for unprecedented resynthesis quality.
Additional features include: New voiced/unvoiced detection and pitch extraction algorithms for high intelligibility. Stereophonic synthesis filter bank preserves the spatial characteristic of the replacement signal.
More about MATRIX and sound demos:
www.virsyn.de/en/E_Products/E_MATRIX/e_matrix.html
Features
– 32 channel filter bank.
– stereophonic synthesis.
– voiced/unvoiced detection
– Pitch tracking
– Formant shift
– Pause filling
– Channel matrix
– Pan position and level for each channel.
– 16 internal oscillators.
– Easy user interface.
Host compatibility
– VST 2.4
– AudioUnit
– RTAS
Minimal system requirements PC
° Pentium IV 1.6 Ghz processor or Athlon XP/MP
° Windows XP
° USB port required for Syncrosoft copy protection device
° 16-bit Soundcard with DirectX/ASIO driver
Minimal system requirements Mac
° PowerPC G4/G5 1.6 GHz / Intel Mac
° Mac OS X version 10.4
° USB port required for Syncrosoft copy protection device
Synthmusic in commercials?
Synth music has a tendency to stick in the sub-cultures of the music scene, but once i a while you find some indications that things might ne changing, although I am still scepticle that it will ever be so. Remember the old synth pioneers Devo, well these guys arguably has done some work to put synth music on the map and recently saw this add where IT-giants Dell actually uses Devo for one of their commercials – although you have to watch the video for some time before you actually understands what the video is all about, LOL
DEVO wrote this song called “Watch Us Work It” and recorded it in Los Angeles, CA, and produced by Sweden’s famous Teddy Bears. DELL heard it because Paul Malmstrom and Linus Karlsson at the Mother agency in NYC played it for them as a possibility for a song for their TV campaign featuring a newly developed, high-end laptop computer. DELL liked it, and now you can of course enjoy it here too. I do not claim to give you some brand, hot news directly out of the press, the video is about 6 months old, but still…
Enjoy!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhtgw-tOj-o]
Want to know more about what is going on with Devo >>
Electro Ambient tune to enjoy
New tune to listen to from my electro ambient project called Betong
Have fun
C=iao
KikAxxe – faithful emulation of a classic ARP AXXE synthesizer
Nice little new synthesizer to play around with.
Built from the same award winning analog modeling technology used for TimewARP 2600, KikAXXE delivers a fat analog sound and much more.
In addition to the faithful emulation of a classic ARP AXXE synthesizer, KikAXXE includes a 16 step analog style sequencer, a drum machine and a modeled tape delay. All in all, KikAXXE is a blast to use.
Download a 30 day trial here >>
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTn__bAsuYc]
Free ReGroove Refills
ReGroove
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWx_ij5kRq0]
Maustaste – the contributor of many free Reason samples – has offered a new package of free Reason resources. There are ready to use ReGroove Patches for Reason 4. How many? 320 ReGroove Patches for free download!
But there is more! Darryl Miller uploaded two Thor-Patches. For free of course.
320 ReGroove Patches
2 Thor Patches
In rememberance…
…of a great synth pop pioneer
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA_8nNNZqD4]
Have a great weekend
Free Reason Refill from Nucleus – check it out
Good start in the new year – follow th link below and download a quite hefty sized refill from Nucleus Soundlab.
Drone Structures
Drone Structures is an excellent Pad & Texture library released under the Creative Commons license by Intelligent Machinery.
Nucleus SoundLab took these samples and carefully looped and trimmed them. Then the entire library was converted into the Reason Refill, Wusikstation, SF2 and SFZ formats.
You can download this 300mb+ Refill for free! In order to do so, please enter a valid email into the box below. You will be sent a confirmation email instantly. By following the link in the confirmation email you will then be sent one more email – this email contains all of the download links for Drone Structures! If you don’t appear to receive any of these emails – please check your ‘bulk’ or ‘junk’ email folders.
In addition you will automatically be added to NSLs freebie mailing list. You will receive emails containing free and commercial product announcements, as well as download links. For those worried about privacy, your personal information will never be sold/distributed.
Drum looping and processing in Tracktion
A good post from Youtube on how to do live drum looping on the fly
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No3mTLzIjVM]
C=iao
Equipment used by Kraftwerk
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXa9tXcMhXQ]
Found this nice site today that shows a pretty detailed list of the equipments used by Kraftwerk on their albums and on their gigs / world tours.
Maybe some inspiration for some of view 
Personally I´m quite intrigued by the vocoders used
Here are some of the questions they answer:
Octopus BlackSea – mmmmm nice :-)
Played around with this little beauty during Xmas:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JISVw7xiR5w]
And I must say it is rather impressive, below a short description taking from the producers website
Octopus is a MIDI sequencer – simply put, a machine to generate control data for sound-producing devices, e.g. synthesizers.
Octopus’ most outstanding trait is probably its recognition by an authoritative audience as a musical instrument. The merit lies in the fact that comparable products are traditionally perceived as “just” intricate electronic devices.
User experience and musical creation are the centerpieces of the Octopus design. Its embodiment is a no-compromise machine.
The recipe is to combine a high-end user interface, a domain-specific data framework, and the power of modern real-time computing technology.
DATAMASKIN
