This Pro-One kick sound was whipped up quickly during a session with Michael Moline, Miditerranean using the self oscillating filter property.

Pro-One-Self-Oscillating-Kick

I recently came across this lead produced on the MKS-80 with the GMS during a performance last August. Throughout the recording you can hear the LFO speed changing along with my usual real-time filter adjustments made with the Bitstream 3X.

MKS-80 Lead from Live Set

Acculturation

Voice Lessons is an interactive touch-screen installation that I recently presented during a graduate critique seminar at MCAD. The piece, developed in Max/MSP, granulates both sound and video as the viewer touches the screen while maintaining synchronization. I will be installing the piece again next month for an open studio night on December 9, 2011 at the MCAD Whittier Studios, 2835 Harriet Avenue South, Minneapolis. I will also be sharing more complete documentation about the piece soon. For now, please enjoy this short segment of audio sampled from the piece as it was in use.

Voice Lessons Excerpt

Jack Sack alerted me to the work of Cheryl E. Leonard who makes instruments, sounds and music from natural materials such as stones and ice. Visit her blog for more information about her work.

It was an entertaining race, and great experience. Tech below:

I was up by Abbey (and walking around) and managed to get lots of useable material. I sampled at 24/96 but there’s not much going on above 20-25k, only the really raspy exhaust stuff.
I hired out some low sensitivity DPAs and ran them into a fostex FR2LE at almost 0dB gain, coming up to -10dBFS.
The recordings do sound small and tinny. I remembered distinctly they had weight and size to them, although if you played them back at normal levels, you’d probably get near to the feeling – it’s the extreme volume.
The Lotus F1 engines had a new front firing exhaust and this made some entirely wierd noises, great for SFX.
(click for audio)

F1 Silverstone 2011 © Lostrack

Ryan Terrell (aka Eskimo Spy) recently wrote this article to share on AudioCookbook.org regarding MIDI delay and sequencing in Ableton Live, and I agree that it is something that will interest many ACB readers. Ryan writes:

I’ve always wanted a MIDI delay and sequencer built into Ableton. Recently, Max for Live programmers have been coming up with some slick patches to do just that. For those of us who haven’t got the cash for Max yet, there’s an alternative.

While tinkering with the “Note Length” MIDI plugin I stumbled upon an interesting find. The “Note Length” plugin has two modes: Note On and Note Off. Note On simply allows the note to pass through changing only the length of the outgoing note. However, “Note Off” waits for the “Note Off” MIDI message (sent from most synthesizers after the key is released) before triggering a *new* note.

I found that in stacking more than one of these plugins end on end I was able to successfully create a MIDI effect rack built on quantized step increments. Each “Note Length” plugin is waiting for a note to finish before triggering their note. By stacking more than one, and setting the plugins to “Sync” mode, you can delay it by quantized increments.

For added versatility there is a Pitch and Velocity plugin at the end of each parallel rack. The velocity plugin is set to “Fixed” mode, so when the velocity macro for each chain are set at 0, the note doesn’t sound at all, effectively silencing that step.

Finally, there’s are global “Random Velocity” and “Gate” length macros. This will give you global control over all the steps’ lengths, and random deviation by degrees from each step’s programmed velocities.

The implementations of this are two-fold. You can create a type of “MIDI Delay” if you remove any pitch variant, and map a macro (with some tinkering) to the velocity of each step, thereby allowing it to “Decay” over time in velocity. You can also use this as a step sequencer, with 4, 8, 16, 24… etc. steps. The rack I used to make these are built on 16 steps, but it’s entirely modular. Also, with the myriad of “Velocity to ____” (fill in the blank) parameters on every synth in Live, this is a massive breakthrough for my own music. Such is the beauty of racks.

E-mail eskimospy.music [at] gmail [dot] com for the prototype racks. This will be featured on the upcoming website www.RacksForLive.com and you should head over there to register for details of the site launch from the founder, Isaac Halvorson.

Ableton – MIDI Delay w/ Velocity or “Feedback” Modulation by Eskimo Spy

I created this sound on the Roland MKS-80 by putting the oscillators into sync mode, then manually sweeping the frequency of the second oscillator as a sequence of notes was played on the synth. This looks like another good example for the oscilloscope.

Oscillator Sync Mode

I created this polyphonic wind sound on the Roland MKS-80 using the Bitstream 3X to manually modulate the filter to give it a more natural and irregular sounding whistle. I did this rather than using the LFO because although I could adjust the rate the sweep would be automated and too regular instead of being based on human judgement. I am presenting it here in mono with no processing. If I were to use this I would process it in several ways including some volume automation, panning, equalization, probably a bit of slap back delay for stereo imaging, and a fairly short linear reverb that doesn’t sound too roomy.

Manually Modulated Polyphonic Wind