Grain Machine Sample from Live Performance

Posted on January 19, 2011 by John Keston

Here’s a sound I produced during a live set at Nick and Eddie for the Thursday Funhouse series under my Ostraka moniker. You can download the entire set that I released as a holiday gift last month. I used Grain Machine which is a touch based granular synthesis instrument that I developed in Max for Live to create the sound. Grain Machine requires a device running TouchOSC such as an iPhone, iPod Touch, or Android device for the touch based control. There’s a rotary wheel with friction modeling, and an x-y pad for granular exploration.

Grain Machine from Thursday Funhouse

Auto Octave Filter Sweep

Posted on January 18, 2011 by John Keston

Here’s a test composition using another patch I created for Curve titled Auto Octave Filter Sweep by AudioCookbook. On this patch I used two of the LFOs. The first one I setup to alternate between the octaves with a square wave, and the second I used with a sign wave to modulate the cutoff frequency on the filter configured with a 24dB low pass filter. On the second LFO I used the fixed rate that ranges from 0.020 hertz all the way up to 5.24 kilohertz. I mapped a MIDI controller to the LFO speed and adjusted it over the full range during the sequence. I also made adjustment to the cutoff frequency, resonance, and envelopes during the 5:20 minute recording.

Auto Octave Filter Sweep

Sequence Made with Curve Shared Preset Synthesizer

Posted on January 17, 2011 by John Keston

Cableguys.de have recently released an excellent community-driven software synthesizer called Curve (downloadable demo available). The synth has three, aliasing-free oscillators, three five stage envelopes, two filters each with ten modes, and four LFOs that are either, beat, note, or frequency synced. One of the coolest things you can do is draw your waveforms in the editor. You can even randomize them for some interesting results. Here’s a sequence that I created and recorded without any processing using Curve. This is one of my first attempts at creating a patch in Curve and I shared it to the preset community (available within Curve’s interface) as Bouncy Arpeggiator by AudioCookbook. Stay tuned for a lot more from this powerful and great sounding software synth.

Cables Guys Curve Sequence

Sounds from a Contact Mic Frozen in Water Ice

Posted on January 17, 2011 by John Keston

I just got a note from Dan Pugsley of Radium Audio. regarding their new resource Radium Audio Labs. The site will feature a broad variety of sound experiments and explorations. Dan writes,

“Radium Audio has recently started a blog demonstrating some of our explorative processes, and though it’s very much in the early stages of development we have some pretty interesting pieces uploaded already and I was wondering if any of it might be suitable for Audio Cookbook? We have two new explorative projects in the works at the moment, one of which is based on binaural recordings and the other will be revolving around the use of dry ice to create a variety of sounds.”

The projects posted so far include using a coil mic to record the electromagnetic fields from various electronic devices, like an iPhone and a printer/scanner, and my favorite at the moment, sounds captured from a contact microphone frozen in water ice as it melts.

Frozen Contact Mic in Ice by Radium-Audio

Example of Posc from Live Performance

Posted on January 16, 2011 by John Keston

I extracted this recording of the Posc from a performance of Words to Dead Lips at Intermedia Arts last November. I left the processing on it that I had used during the performance. At some point I’m going to acoustically record one of the “noise shields” that built for the dancers to use in the piece as a comparison. The “noise shields” have a distinctive sound tailored by the amplification, speaker, and the body of the instrument that is quite different for the direct sound below.

Words to Dead Lips Posc Example

Eerie Pseudo Oscillator Microtrack

Posted on January 15, 2011 by John Keston

Here’s another result of experimenting with the Roland Juno-106. I created this sound by using the VCF as a pseudo oscillator. I cranked up the resonance to full, and put the cutoff at about half way, then turned off both the square and sawtooth DCOs. You might assume that with the oscillators off, including the noise and the the suboscillator, that the synth would make no sound, well it doesn’t really until you almost max out the resonance. Maxing out the keyboard slider changes the pitch of the notes on a roughly twelve tone scale, but it’s not well tempered, so this creates an eerie detuning between the notes. See the photo above for the exact settings. In the recording you’ll notice an abrupt key change happening a few times where I turned on the sawtooth oscillator. I also nudged the LFO on the VCF here and there to add to the spooky factor.

I’ve done a similar thing with the Pro One before, but it sounds really nice in six voice polyphony on the 106. My guess at what’s happening is that a sort of controlled resonant feedback on the instrument’s noise floor is creating the pitches. This is something that doesn’t really work with digital filters on modeling synths, as far as I know. I know that I haven’t been able to reproduce this behavior on the Korg MS2000. I don’t fully understand what’s happening, but that’s my theory. If anyone has better insight, please share a comment on the article.

Eerie False Oscillator

Ableton Live Arpeggiating Analog Polysynth

Posted on January 14, 2011 by John Keston

Today’s One Synthesizer Sound Every Day involves using the arpeggiator built into Ableton Live. The arpeggiator, found under MIDI Effects, is a pretty simple tool, there are the usual up, down, up/down patterns as well as random, random once (repeats a random pattern), and random other (doesn’t play the same note twice).

This one minute and fifty second microtrack is composed of two layers of arpeggios created by routing Ableton’s arpeggiator to my newly restored Roland Juno-106. I added some filtered tempo delay and mixed in some reverb on the fade out to polish it off. I wish I had a piece of hardware that did exactly what Ableton’s Arpeggiator does (perhaps with the addition of a tap tempo button). In fact I started a discussion about this on the Electronic Musicians Network, a Facebook group started by my friend Robert Luna. Friend me, then message me there if you’d like to participate in the group. I’ll write an article soon compiling my research into dedicated hardware arpeggiators and hardware sequencers. Here are the arpeggios combined.

Two Layered Arp at 114 BPM

Juno-106 Glitchy Drone

Posted on January 13, 2011 by John Keston

Here’s another excerpt from the glitches that I recorded while the voice chip was failing on my Roland Juno-106. In this section I was just holding a note without touching any other controls, so all the variations in the sound were caused by the autonomous shorting that was going on inside the faulty 80017a voice chip.

Juno-106 Glitchy Drone

Juno-106 Bad Voice Chip Glitch

Posted on January 12, 2011 by John Keston

As I mentioned in my last article, I was quite disappointed that my Juno-106 arrived with a bad 80017a voice chip, not to mention a laundry list of other technical and cosmetic problems. However, in some ways I enjoyed the challenge of getting it back in working order. All the research, soldering, and fussing with the electronics was kind of rewarding in the long run.

Another thing I wanted to explore were the glitches I could get out of it while the voice chip was bad. So, I recorded 20 minutes of crackly, warbled, weirdness while adjusting sliders and pressing buttons. I’ll be sharing more bits and pieces of this in upcoming articles. For now, here’s an excerpt of glitches from the first few seconds of my experimentation.

Roland Juno-106 Glitch from Bad Voice Chip

Roland Juno-106 with Bad Voice Chip Restored

Posted on January 11, 2011 by John Keston

Back in November I wrote an article titled What is Your Favorite Poly Synth? discussing mostly vintage polyphonic synthesizers. One of them that kept coming up was the Roland Juno-106. Researching these popular synths, I found that they are fairly easy to come by, and usually reasonably priced. I found a great deal on one and snapped it up only to discover that it had the dreaded voice chip problem. Fortunately the seller agreed to refund part of the purchase price to help pay for the repairs. Six weeks later I have finally got it up and running, but it took some doing. Read on for more, and the the synth sound of the day.

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