Here’s a render of a Subtractor bass line I created using Matrix during a Reason demonstration for my sound design class last week. The theme of the demonstration was subtractive synthesis, so I started by initializing the Subtractor and creating a new sound from there. I threw a Dr. Rex drum pattern with a linear sweep on the envelope amount to illustrate automation as well.
Tomorrow morning I am going to be discussing some basic concepts of sound synthesis including subtractive synthesis with my sound design class. We’ll be looking at some hardware synthesizers, listening to some sounds, then creating sounds of our own. Tonight I created this pulse in Reason using the Subtractor instrument followed by delay and reverb as an example to show, although rather than showing this example I will create something else using a similar technique during the demo.
To get this prickly texture I ran the Korg MS2000 through Grain Delay and Auto Pan in Ableton Live. I forgot to mention that the track was going through the usually reverb and delay sends as well.
Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of introducing André Michelle at the Flashbelt conference in Minneapolis. André is the lead developer of Audiotool. If you’re not familiar with Audiotool it is, in my view, the best web based audio production application I have ever seen. The bulk of André’s presentation involved showing Flash built demos of advanced audio functionality, like granular synthesis, guitar modeling, and using physical modeling to influence sounds and sequences.
Toward the end of his presentation he brought Audiotool into the mix. Audiotool is an application built in Flash. The nearest thing I could compare it to is Reason. The biggest difference is that it runs on the web. This allows for social media opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Instruments built into Audiotool, include very convincing emulation of several popular Roland devices, like the TR-808 and the TB-303. It also includes a modular synth called Pulverisateur and a number of effect processors.
Finally, there is an audio track module that allows you to bring in samples stored within a pretty big library provided by Loopmasters. You can’t bring in your own samples yet, but André assured us it was in the works.
André played me a few examples of some of his favorite user generated tracks from Audiotool and I was very impressed with the sound quality and scope. It’s easy to dismiss a web based audio application as a novelty, but the community around it is creating some totally professional sounding stuff that can’t be ignored.
Here’s an archive that contains the patch and a standalone application (Mac OSX only) of the step sequencer that I built in MaxMSP a few days ago. The sequencer works pretty well sending MIDI, but I haven’t really fine tuned the internal synthesis. Currently it uses a function object with an adjustable domain to adjust the amplitude envelope of a sinusoidal, but if the note length (function domain) is either too short or too long, clicks occur between notes. What I need to do is ramp up or down to the proper level for each new note. I’ll post an update here when I come up with a solution. If any Max veterans out there have any suggestions, please feel free to post a comment.