Ed. Twisted Tools are a special breed of music software makers, concocting wild-sounding instruments, sequencers, and effects, all with a distinctively-colorful and graphical approach to interface design. And they do all of this in Reaktor, Native Instruments’ deep toolbox for visual development of soundmakers, a patching cousin to tools like Max/MSP, Pd, and Plogue Bidule. Various patchers take a DIY approach to building musical tools in such environments, but Twisted Tools have successfully turned those creations into a business.

That’s part of what makes this interview well worth a read, whether you’re an end user or a developer. Writer Markus Schroeder talked to Twisted Tools’ Igor and Josh for the German publication AMAZONA.de; you can read that translated interview in German. But the interview itself was originally conducted in English. Through the generous permission of Markus and AMAZONA.de, we reproduce that full English interview, edited in its entirety, for CDM.

In it, Markus asks some probing questions about designing and selling musical tools, with some insights into the Twisted Tools’ current catalog. And Twisted Tools share both praise and criticism for Reaktor as a tool – there’s some tough love in there. I’ll let Markus take it from here. -PK

Tell us a bit about the foundations of Twisted Tools and its team members.
IGOR: Josh and I started Twisted Tools about a year ago now. It’s basically the two of us with lots of encouragement and support from friends and fans. Several years back, Josh contacted me because he was a fan of my work. He wanted help building an idea of his, and we got to know each other well using Google Chat. At some point, we decided that it would be cool to start a business together selling such things. At University, I studied Linguistics and worked as an English interpreter, which in many ways comes in handy now with Twisted Tools. When I was studying, I began fooling around with DAWs, then discovered Reaktor and got hooked. The rest is history. As for Twisted Tools, it’s my full time gig now.

JOSH: I think we began thinking about starting a business together because we saw eye-to-eye on almost everything; at the same time, we bring unique ideas to the table. I’m an electronic musician and a teacher, so I think I tend to approach instrument design from a user’s perspective. Igor spends most of his time on the inside looking out, from a builder’s perspective, so the partnership works out nicely. We still use Google Chat as our primary means of communication. In fact, all our work is done using chat, which I also think helps us to focus. Lots of people ask me why we don’t ever use audio or video chat, but I really think we’d lose something in doing so.
Until recently, I was the Course Director of Computer Music Production at a digital arts college in the San Francisco area. Now Twisted Tools is my main occupation, too. I don’t perform at all. Once upon a time, I DJ’ed and produced electronic music. These days, Twisted Tools satisfies most of my creative urges, though I’d love to get back to music making, too.

How long you have been actively developing with Reaktor, and why did you get started?
JOSH: Igor has been building for about five or six years, and I’ve been doing some basic building on and off for several years, but I wouldn’t consider myself a true builder. I tinker and understand the basics, but nothing like Igor, who probably has 20 years’ experience if you’re counting by the hour.

As far as why I got started, I bought Reaktor 3 to basically just use the factory stuff. There are so many interesting and unique things about Reaktor that I can’t remember exactly what interested me most about it. When you crack it open and demo it for the first time, it is pretty jaw-dropping. Then you open up the structure and realize the potential. The urge to make modifications creeps up on you and before you know it, you’re building stuff for fun. It is like an addictive puzzle that makes sounds.

What were the reasons to take the step to commercially selling your Ensembles? And does it pay off, in one way another?
JOSH: Well, I think it came down to simply gaining enough confidence to try. I’d hired Igor to help me build stuff before and was super pleased with the results. So I was totally confident in the quality; I just wasn’t sure if people would buy Reaktor ensembles and/or how many people out there were even using Reaktor. Reaktor hadn’t been updated in years and seemed forgotten, so it seemed like an unlikely business idea. But, when I saw the first versions of Vortex that Igor had made, I was pretty confident that people would buy it and so was Igor. So we moved on that impulse…

IGOR: As far as it paying off, I suppose it depends on what kind of currency we’re talking about We spend a ton of time on Twisted Tools, more than most people would imagine. I would say that we spend at least four or five hours a day, usually six days a week on Twisted Tools. That’s a very conservative guess. The response has been incredible and as cliche as it sounds, I think that makes it worth it alone.

What was the reaction from the Community of the Reaktor User Library?
Were you worried about possibly sending some wrong signals out to them, since there are a lot of high quality Ensembles for free?

JOSH: To be honest, I’m not sure what the reaction was like for everyone. I’m sure some approved and some didn’t, but I think either way people respect the quality. The overwhelming majority of the things I’ve heard have been positive and I think that in many ways, selling Reaktor ensembles has been good for the Reaktor community. I don’t really see much difference between selling a VST/AU or selling a Reaktor patch. In fact, the only reason a VST/AU is better is because you can run it without owning Reaktor. Otherwise, having a Reaktor ensemble is so much more powerful than owning a VST/AU. You can open up our stuff, modify it, study it, make OSC routings, etc. Plus, our development process is faster and our updates/fixes come more frequently than most VST/AUs.

IGOR: In the end, the question is, do people find it useful and of value? If they do and want to pay for it, that’s great. If not, that’s fine too. There are still tons of amazing free instruments in the User Library and if someone finds what suits their needs there, that’s great. But we definitely don’t feel we’re sending the wrong signals. NI sells Reaktor ensembles too now in the Player format, so what’s the difference?

Was it difficult to suddenly deal with issues like online selling and customer support?
JOSH: Absolutely! Especially after our first launch. We didn’t expect that kind of traffic and the e-commerce cart we were using had a poorly-programmed PHP script that ended up crashing the server, due to traffic load. Our host didn’t like that, and not only shut us down in the middle of our first day, but locked us out and I couldn’t get to our files. Nightmare…but, we changed hosts and somehow managed to get things back up in a day or so. I learned quite a lot in those first days.

IGOR: It’s really a lot of work, still since we do everything ourselves — instrument design, GUI design, web design, support, marketing, documentation, videos, etc. At first it was very difficult, but it has definitely gotten a bit smoother. We are kind of lucky to be in two time zones because we take shifts which basically gives us a 24/7 customer support system. It’s rare that a customer sends in a request for help and more than several hours go by without a response. We’re happy about being able to provide that kind of support.

What was the reason of going Reaktor instead of making software on your own?
IGOR: Reaktor is a great platform to develop with. It has a great interface and many possibilities. All that I know about DSP and instrument design, I learned while working with Reaktor. Neither of us know any other programming languages, so there wasn’t really a choice. We’d love to do VSTs and AUs someday, though.

JOSH: If we do VST/AUs, we’d obviously be able to tap into a larger market, so it is something we are considering more seriously.

What did Reaktor already provide as building blocks, and how much did you have to invent by yourself in the form of Core programming or Macros?
IGOR: I use my personal macros and core library wherever it is possible. I trust these structures and know them inside and out, making it easy for me to tweak things and look for bugs. Building this library took years though. The initial steps were back-engineering the factory content of course. I think that this is a very good way to learn things in Reaktor when you are starting out. The documentation is only useful up until a point because there are so many variables involved in building.

If there was a lot of Core programming, can you tell us about the the process of working with it? Did you face any obstacles?
IGOR: Of course, Core is a great environment with lots of possibilities; however, it’s still pretty limited, and some very basic workflow features are lacking. For example, you can’t copy/paste input and output ports inside Core Cells, you can’t duplicate the selected structure preserving connections, as opposed to primary, etc. Then there is the lack of polyphony management, iteration issues, event loops, snap-able memory, the list goes on. Lets hope that the situation will improve in the future.
Ed.: NI engineers, I hope someone is taking notes. Core is incredibly powerful, and could be even more so… -PK

What were the hardest obstacles to overcome?
IGOR: I wish we had the ability to save in the Reaktor Player format, so we could share our work with more people, since it wouldn’t require that you own Reaktor.



Now let´s have a look at the catalog of Ensembles Twisted Tools have to offer, and get some insights on their inspiration.

Vortex

What was your initial conception behind Vortex?
IGOR: The vision behind Vortex was to create a flexible, sample-based groove box that is capable of simple yet powerful control over one-shot samples as well as loops. In Vortex, you can stretch short one-shot samples and create long textures, slice and chop loops, or create drum kits.

How you know when what you’ve got is a final product?
IGOR: Well, as they say, perfect is the enemy of good, so you need to stop at some point when developing instruments. It’s impossible to fulfill everybody’s needs, but I think we did our best and covered the most important areas.

JOSH: There certainly is always room to improve something, but we also run the chance of making it worse by adding too much. Our devices get pretty complex and we always end up having to leave things out, which is usually a good thing. Sometimes simple can be good, too, though, so I think we’ll be releasing a new line of tools that have fewer options, but are still powerful, in the very near future.

Colorflex

What were you ideas for Colorflex?
IGOR: The idea behind Colorflex was to take a simple, 16×16 note matrix and push it to the limit.

JOSH: We wanted to make a sequencer that could be used for both hardware and software, with lots of creative possibilities. The graphic layer approach makes it fun to look at and use.

How much of it have you achieved to get into the final product?
JOSH: I think we squeezed as much into Colorflex as possible. It is a very deep and complex device, with tons of options if you dig into it. It started out as a simple cell matrix based on colors and kept growing from there. If you want to sequence MIDI CC’s you can use it just for that — or you can use it to automate other Reaktor devices using IC Sends. Those were things we added and that took a long time to get working properly, but make the device do a lot more than we’d initially planned. In some ways, Twisted Tools devices are like improvisations that start out in one direction and end up somewhere totally new by the time they’re finished. I think the ability to basically improvise while you build is one of the things that makes Reaktor instruments interesting compared to building standard VSTs.

The Matrix Sequencer is very powerful, as are the editing options. How complicated was developing the different edit layers and make them work?
IGOR: It was pretty complicated, of course; we had to deal with Stacked Macros and it’s not the most pleasant part when working on GUI.

JOSH: Igor is putting it mildly. Reaktor is limited to a four-pixel resolution for moving graphics around on the interface, which makes finalizing the look a true pain.

Buffeater

What was the driving idea for Buffeater?
IGOR: Obviously, Buffeater is not the first effect of this kind, but it was a personal take. It’s also entirely focused on buffer based processing (no filters, lo-fi crushers etc).

JOSH: We definitely wanted everything to be automatable and we wanted it to have a great library of sounds and presets to get people started. That was important. Not only is everything automatable, but each parameter’s automation lane can be set to a unique speed so that patterns overlap and evolve in unique ways. Each effect has presets as well that store the automation. You can even record live automation into a lane by turning on record and twisting knobs.

How much of the original concept survived in the final product?
JOSH: We’re very happy with how Buffeater turned out. It’s a ton of fun and we’ve received a great response. There are a lot of buffer effects out there now, and they all do something interesting and unique. We had a similar effect brewing before we did Buffeater that’s also good for live mangling, but sounds and feels totally different. Perhaps we’ll end up putting that one out, as well … it’s never enough.

What do you think makes these six effects so popular, generally?
JOSH: Well, people like to mangle and twist up audio. Buffer effects are a good quick way to do that.

Scapes

Scapes is another way-out kind of thing. How did you get the inspiration for it?
IGOR: The initial inspiration was to create a multi-faced instrument that’s capable of creating rhythmic structures, soundscapes, process incoming sounds, etc., all with a unique twist.

JOSH: Again, this device was really something that took on a mind of its own. At first it was a soundscape generator, then it started to evolve into a percussive instrument and synth…then it morphed into an effects processor. Eventually we decided that it could do all of those things together in a neat way. Rather than making several devices, we put them together all in one, and the result is a very unique instrument. Whether you are a sound designer at Lucas Arts, a video game composer, musician, or an iPad enthusiast, Scapes is useful and fun.
We hadn’t really anticipated the iPad control potential until we hooked up with the guys from Konkreet Labs. They had just finished developing their Konkreet Performer iPad controller app right around when we were planning to launch Scapes. The two work brilliantly together. When I first set it up, I sat my wife down in front of it and she just started playing for about an hour. I swear I had to tear it out of her hands…she’s not an electronic music producer, but she had so much fun, anyways. This is a side of Scapes that we hadn’t anticipated.

Scapes is so versatile, is there still something that should be included?

JOSH: I think we truly created a unique device that we are both very proud of. The response has been amazing so far. So… no.

A short time ago, I honestly thought granular synthesis was mostly done, since only few products using the technique managed to produce their own distinct sounds or interesting sounds at all. Then, Curtis for iOS, from The Strange Agency , came along and rekindled my interest. What is your take on grains?
IGOR: I think Scapes itself answers this question

JOSH: The funny thing is, we kind of were worried that people would think like you, and we changed the name from Grainscapes to Scapes for this very reason. Scapes makes unique and complex sounds. The sounds can’t be used for everything, but they have their own place, as does granular synthesis.

Your products often revolve around the idea of chaotic and fractalized sequences. Do you see your work in terms of using data of stochastic, mathematic or physics sources as means to create musical events?
IGOR: I think Colorflex is capable of both – fractal, semi-random structures, and more day-to-day musical stuff. Though I wouldn’t place Colorflex in that area, entirely.
Right now, taking an academic approach to instrument development doesn’t excite me. There is definitely a place for this, but in our case, it’s all about music.

JOSH: The more important question for us is, is it going to be something that’s fun to use? Is it useful, simple enough to understand, but complex enough to grow into? What kind of sounds does it produce? Is it intuitive? Does that matter for this particular device?

Thank you very much for the interview Josh and Igor.
And also let´s have a big shout out to the Reaktor community. Without them, Reaktor could not be where it is today – one of the most sizzling music applications you can get.

This interview was conducted by Markus Schroeder and originally published by AMAZONA.de in German translation. This interview on CDM is the original English transcript, which is supplied in approval by the author, Twisted Tools and AMAZONA.de

 More information at:
Twisted Tools – http://twistedtools.com

Granular synthesis… you’ve heard it before. Famously articulated by experimental composer Xenakis, the process of slicing up sound into tiny bits and reassembling it has produced everything from lovely (or terrifying) synthesized sonorities to the underlying time stretching algorithms in popular music software. But with all the tools competing for your granular synthesis time (one seems to pop up every few seconds on the prolific Facebook page of sound designer Richard Devine), the Hadron Particle Synth promises to be different.

It’s a synth, but also an effect – and, for a twist, can seamlessly morph between the two, going from sound source to sound processor and shades in between. Its layering, parameter control, expression options, and all-around completeness lead its developers to confidently dub it “particle synthesis” and not just “granular synthesis.” And what may really convince you, it’s completely free, open source, runs and runs at release either inside Ableton Live as a Max for Live or within the free, geekily-delicious tool Csound. (Plug-ins for Mac and Windows are coming, too.) Whew. Now you’ve got my attention.

No video is out yet, but the Trondheim, Norway-based creators point CDM to their SoundCloud page for some sound samples.

Oeyvind Brandtsegg shares some delightful demo music for your sonic exploratory pleasure, complete with notes on its creation:

All of them made with Hadron as a primary ingredient.
The “Little Soldier Joe” songs are live recorded duo improvisations (Carl Haakon Waadeland on acoustic percussion and myself on Hadron).

Little Soldier Joe walks home with the sugar by Brandtsegg

Little Soldier Joe throws spoonful of sugar in the air just to hear the sound of it falling by Brandtsegg

Little Soldier Joe throws spoonful of sugar in the air just to hear the sound of it falling by Brandtsegg

Little Soldier Joe wonders where he put his keys by Brandtsegg

Little Soldier Joe walks down to The Future to borrow a cup of sugar by Brandtsegg

“Ramblin”, “Walking” and “SpinSync” were actually made as Hadron demo songs (the programmed drums are the only sounds not made by Hadron).

Ramblin by Brandtsegg

WalkingAndFalling(in progress) by Brandtsegg

“Magnetic Forest” was my first electroacoustic composition with Hadron (three improvised overlaid tracks, recorded as midi and edited/composed)

Oeyvind Brandtsegg has a delightful selection of tracks for your sonic exploratory pleasure, with notes:

MagneticForest (in progress) by Brandtsegg

“FeedingTheCharmQuark” (1 and 2) are improvisations with audio feedback into Hadron, where pitch tracking of the audio input is used to control grain rate, so there’s some organic/unpredictable stuff happening as a result of the feedback loop.

FeedingTheCharmQuark2 by Brandtsegg

FeedingTheCharmQuark1 by Brandtsegg

More on the tool:
Hadron Released [News Item]
Partikkel Audio
The team of creators (sound designers, DSP gurus, and Max for Live aficionados all)
and for the really good bits (including that Csound source): Partikkel Downloads

By the way, if you’re wondering how the business model works here when everything’s free and open source, so far it looks like Partikkel, cleverly, has a Hadron expansion pack of “Time Dilation Effects.” Clever — free and open source software, plus what in gaming is called DLC (“downloadable content”). It could be The Future. Either way, it’s The Awesome for now.

I may fire up Csound this week so I can play with the source version. I also need to dig up the Csound for Pd external so I can use those two tools together. And of course I’ll use it in Max for Live, too, just to make sure there’s no chance my head doesn’t explode.

Named for Curtis Roads, Curtis is an iPad and iPhone/iPod touch application that implements granular sound processing – a technique, imagined early on by the composer Xenakis, which divides sound into tiny granules, allowing more liquid modification of the audio. Roads brought this idea to digital synthesis, and the results can transform recorded samples in pitch and time.

Composer, producer, and sound designer Richard Devine has long made use of granular techniques in his own work, so it’s little surprise Richard is turning his sonic compositional efforts to the iPad app. The latest release includes a new sound set he designed, but he also writes CDM to point out a track he’s shared on SoundCloud, free to download and hear and for your remixing and re-compositional use.

The track is a composition of samples, and it shows just how much you can do with recorded audio:

This piece is a Acousmatic composition based on everyday found objects. I recorded various wine glasses, gears, metal, motors, Ratchets, chimes, croaking frog scraper, Indian bells, Tibetan Singing Bowls, Santoor, waterphone, piano, hematite magnets, processed voice, underwater ambiances, computer, and sprinkled bits of Buchla 200e/Doepfer Euro rack Modular.

All of the sounds originally captured at 24-bit 96khz with a Neumann RSM 191 A/S stereo shotgun mic, SMK4060 Stereo Matched 4060-BM Miniature Omnidirectional Microphones and Sound Devices 702 recorder.

Objects Of Granularity by RichardDevine

If you want to try out Curtis, you can do so on both iPad (pictured above) and iPhone:

Curtis for iPad
Curtis Heavy for iPhone

I love the geometric/vector-style twist on the wave display. New in the recent 1.1 release: pitch control, echo effect, volume control … and the all-important MP3 import. (Usually working with uncompressed files is more successful, however. With WAV or MP3 files, simply drag-and-drop files from iTunes.)

In other sound design experiments, Richard records an insect’s footsteps inside a box, recorded on a catch-and-release program, from earlier this summer.

Found a large Velvet Ant walking on my driveway today, and couldn’t help but notice the odd sounds this insect was making. The recording is of the insect crawling around inside a cardboard box, before I let it go back into my backyard. The Velvet Ant, also known as the “Cow Killer” is actually not an ant, but a wasp. I recorded this with 2 DPA 4060 Lav’s and Sound Devices 702 recorder at 24bit-96Khz.

Recording of a Velvet Ant. by RichardDevine

The sounds are alien and twisted. The user interface looks like engineers from Boeing and the Klingon homeworld got together to collaborate on a new spaceship cockpit. It can only mean one thing: GrainCube is here.

Built on sound designs and conception by sonic renegades Richard Devine and Josh Kay (Devinesound), with development by Rick Scott (Rachmiel), Igor Shilov (Twisted Tools), and a Lemur control-surface and additional input by Antonion Blanca (absoundscapes.com), this is a dream tool from a dream team.

The tool is free, a gift to people in the Reaktor and Lemur communities. (A Lemur isn’t necessary, though it is fun; Reaktor 5.x is required.)

I’m not just hyping this up for the sake of it, either. Seeing work like this is inspirational to me as a sound designer and sometimes-developer. I love the sounds they’re coaxing out of Reaktor and the insane mad-science of it all. At its heart, it’s a sample map of 400 mb of sample material, the sonic raw material for the work. An all-stops-pulled array of randomization and modulation then warps and melts and smelts that into audio ore.

For a sense of the tool in action, see the video at top, which Richard shot exclusively for CDM. If you’re a Reaktor user, you can then go grab it at the site below. If you use another tool or want to make some of your own samples, well, you’d better get patching and recording. That is all.

http://devinesound.net/

Lemur template @ Jazz Mutant

Obligatory monster screenshot:

Grain Main Frame is a sound sketch, a one-off piece of software that loads audio files and plays them via several inventive, homebrewed sample players. Via granular techniques, methods of slicing sounds into tiny grains and then re-assembling them, a single sound can be stretched, sliced, and retriggered creatively. The software supports drag-and-drop functionality, as well, so you can drop files and go.

It’s a simple app conceptually, but it’s already packed with functionality in this early version. In addition to drag-and-drop file loading and a folder full of homemade samples to play, the software includes:

• Gesture recording of mouse movements, a la KORG’s KAOSS Pad series
• Rate, interval, loop point, randomization, and pan settings for granular playback
• OSC control, so you can manipulate parameters via an iPhone, a Max patch, etc.

The software is built in Processing, the artist-friendly code environment, using the Beads sound library for Java. Because it’s Java-based, it should run on any platform. (I did have an issue with the executable jar on Linux, but I’m working with Jeremy to see if I can fix the problem!)

It’s free-as-in-beer; no license or source is included, but Jeremy tells CDM he does plan to give most of his work away. (If this does develop into a more mature app, you may see a paid iteration some time down the road, but not any time soon, says the author.)

Grain Main Frame is Released [jeremywentworth.com]

Check out Jeremy’s site for some other cool projects in Reaktor, Max, Max for Live, and Processing.

The iPhone and now iPad have spawned a lot of talk about the idea of small, simple apps rather than big, monolithic workstations in software design – musical and otherwise. But projects like this suggest that we could see similar trends in software elsewhere. After all, there’s no reason you couldn’t load up a new netbook or slate with some simple sonic tools, too; no Apple logo is necessarily required. It’ll be interesting to see how that evolves. (And they could be connected, too: to use Java as an example, there is a Java JACK implementation for routing audio to and from other applications.)

Via our friend Richard Devine in comments, here’s another cool app, this one powered by Csound. It’s a separate project, not authored by Jeremy, but Jeremy has done a lovely screencast. (Grain Main Frame could also substitute other back ends for sound processing).

That project is free and open source, working with Python and Csound:

http://code.google.com/p/soundgrain/

Csound downloads

More information on granular options on Jeremy’s blog:
Obsession with Granular Synthesis

Sometimes, looking back at pioneers can be nostalgic. “Back in my day,” goes the story, “electronic composers were real electronic composers.” But then you hear from someone like Curtis Roads, and his mind-blowing ideas are coupled with a belief that we’re only now reaching the Golden Age of electronic sounds. Rory Ahearn writes to share the latest episode of the show Motherboard on VBS TV, which talks to composer Curtis Roads. Roads was ground-breaking in his early granular synthesis work in the 1970s as he continues to be today.

Motherboard: Curtis Roads – Think Granular

Rory writes:

There are two divergent streams in 20th century electronic music: The one most people are familiar with starts out with goofballs like Jean-Jacques Perrey and Vangelis noodling around on synthesizers and eventually devolves into Kaja Googoo. Curtis Roads is part of the other path, the one that follows insane geniuses like Stockhausen and Morton Subotnik and uses whatever-period-it-happens-to-be’s state-of-the-art computer technology to produce compositions that completely defy conventional music logic and sometimes sound more like a freaked-out ATM than tunes you put on and listen to.

Even having heard him say it before, I never get tired of hearing Roads speak about working with music “below the note level,” and even below the surface level, to sounds that are only perceived when you hear the resulting, total composition. He describes going beyond just notes in the interview:

Electronic music extends the domain of composition from a closed, homogenous set of notes … to an open universe of heterogeneous sound objects … All of a sudden, we’re working with any sound possible. And that really changes the game.

There’s also a rather poetic comment on why synthetic sounds can be wonderful – a notion that always bears repeating:

Natural sounds are beautiful … but the virtual sound world is also beautiful, the world of sine waves, of impulses, of electronically-generated tones. That’s a vast space… Voila!

As seen, as well, on Synthtopia.

You may have heard about Pure Data (Pd), the open-source cousin to Max/MSP and a powerful tool for visual programming or “patching” music and multimedia. Pd has even appeared in the iPhone app RjDj and creating generative music for EA’s hit game Spore. But actually learning how to use the thing? Or learning some of the more advanced possible techniques in sound synthesis and processing? That’s another matter.

Johannes Kreidler writes to let us know about his new book for people wanting to learn Pd. It starts at the beginning and teaches you not only the ins and outs of the Pd environment, but all of the advanced music processing techniques, as well. (Given the similarity of Pd and Max/MSP, that should make this just about as useful for Max devotees, too.)

The book is available for reading free online, or in paperback format from Wolke Publishing House. It’s available in both English and German. Johannes writes:

This tutorial is designed for self-study, principally for composers. It begins with explanations of basic programming and acoustic principles then gradually builds up to the most advanced electronic music processing techniques. The book’s teaching approach is focused primarily on hearing, which we consider a faster and more enjoyable way to absorb new concepts than through abstract formulas.

The patches described are available for download.

He notes that because Pd is free and open source rather than commercial software, there isn’t a company behind it that can focus on documentation for new users. That’s been a common complaint about Pd, and this book does a lot to fill it — as well as a lot to fill the need for better documentation of sound techniques, as well, for users of any environment. Some of the juicy topics covered:

• Additive, subtractive synthesis
• Sampling
• Waveshaping, modulation synthesis
• Granular synthesis (something I try to eat a bowl of every day, seriously)
• Fourier analysis
• Sequencers
• Connecting to hardware, network transmission and OSC
• Basics of visuals

It’s a really elegantly-organized set of topics, and absolutely of interest to users of Max/MSP and other environments, as well. With this and a new SuperCollider book coming out this spring, we’re really getting some wonderful resources for learning greater ninja skills. Stay tuned, as I hope to create a forum for folks working on learning this stuff.

Resources

Book site, including downloadable patches and online reading:

http://www.pd-tutorial.com

Direct link to downloading all the patches as one zip (thanks, mic, in comments!):

http://www.kreidler-net.de/pd/patches/patches.zip

More info, including the paperback version:

http://www.wolke-verlag.de/musik_u_t/loadbang.html

http://www.buecher-zur-musik.de/assets/s2dmain.html?http://www.buecher-zur-musik.de/53108697370a2cb3f/5310869bc400a7a02.html

Author’s site:
www.kreidler-net.de

The authorship of the book was aided by a grant by the Music University of Freiburg / Germany.

Previous appearances by the author:

A song made from 70,2000 samples

The stock market declines, as a song

More Pd Books

bang | pure data Free, online

Creator Miller Puckette’s own The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music, free online in various formats and also in print

Nicely done, Matteo Milani! More details from these Kyma sound synthesis experts at Unidentified Sound Object, which also has lots of resources on sound design in general on the main blog.

Ready to do this yourself? Full details on how-to at kyma-tweaky, the Kyma collective, for users of this advanced DSP-powered synthesizer.

This demonstrates the potential power of granular synthesis, so geeking out aside, there is something to be learned here. What’s fascinating is just how much power it takes to reproduce the original sound, which was far simpler (and yet still sounds better). Sound designer Ben Burtt explains:

… we had a projection booth with some very, very old simplex projectors in them. They had an interlock motor which connected them to the system when they just sat there and idled and made a wonderful humming sound. It would slowly change in pitch, and it would beat against another motor, there were two motors, and they would harmonize with each other … it was just a humming sound, what was missing was a buzzy sort of sparkling sound, the scintillating which I was looking for, and I found it one day by accident.

… the microphone passed a television set which was on the floor which was on at the time without the sound turned up, but the microphone passed right behind the picture tube and as it did, this particular produced an unusual hum. It picked up a transmission from the television set and a signal was induced into it’s sound reproducing mechanism, and that was a great buzz, actually. So I took that buzz and recorded it and combined it with the projector motor sound and that fifty-fifty kind of combination of those two sounds became the basic lightsaber tone.

From FilmSound.org, which has more wonderful Burtt stories and lots of other fantastic info on sound design. You could probably learn everything you need to know about sound design just from sound cues from Star Wars.

Still, there’s a lot to be learned from synthesizing sounds, too. Lay people I think don’t appreciate how much harder synthesis is than recording. What the two have in common: listening closely. Ben Burtt had an unusual talent for that, one that makes you want to pick up a microphone and a synthesizer. Well, after you’re done playing lightsaber battle, anyway.

Previously, because I never get tired of talking about this:

Star Wars and Sound Design

This is by far the most exciting free-plug release so far this year. It’s comparable to Reason’s Maelstrom, but allows one to import any .wav files (mono only) into the plug for manipulation.

Audio Demos:
Grain_Demo_1.mp3
Grain_Demo_2.mp3
Grain_Demo_3.mp3
Grain_Demo_4.mp3
Grain_Demo_5.mp3
Grain_Demo_6.mp3
Grain_Demo_7.mp3
Grain_Demo_8.mp3

Direct Downloads of plug + support files:
Grainz_0-1-0.zip
Granular.zip
SKGrains_manual_draft.pdf

Developed by Sknote

Ed: Some really fasinating ideas here: 1 pluck oscillator, physical modeled, plus 2 graintable oscillators, and interaction between the two, plus filters and multi-stage envelopes. Future versions plan an arpeggiator, control matrix, bow model, and other features. The developer has some other interesting plugs, though thanks to Adrian for sorting out the links — site is a bit disorganized. Now go enjoy! -PK