Obscure and famous, people touch us in creative ways, ways that reverberate in patterns that reach clarity at odd times. With just such a story, our last entry in Bob Moog’s birthday this week, from Moog Music veteran and experimentalsynth.com artist Chris Stack:

Driving a truck into the night, headed to Nashville to tell the world about a new way to play guitar… no, wait… that’s a different (but related) story. Back on track… Here goes…

It’s late evening, May 23, 2012. Bob Moog’s birthday. It has been a great day with people remembering Bob in many ways. His birthday five years ago was a very special event in some very different ways. Michelle Moog-Koussa and I have been talking about writing about it ever since. I promised some people I would do it now, so here it is…

For me, this story encompasses not just Bob’s birthday in 2007, but also other events separated by many years, so this may jump around a bit. To understand the full impact on me you’ll need to know about these somewhat disparate points in my life.

An elementary school music teacher let my class listen to the Album “Swithced-on Bach”. As most (or all) of you know, this album was performed by Walter (later Wendy) Carlos on synthesizers designed by Bob Moog. This starts my near life-long interest in electronic music.

Around the same time I see Nipsey Russell on the Tonight Show recite the poem “Abu Ben Adhem”

“Abou Ben Adhem”
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An Angel writing in a book of gold:

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said,
“What writest thou?” The Vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord
Answered, “The names of those who love the Lord.”

“And is mine one?” said Abou. “Nay, not so,”
Replied the Angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerily still; and said, “I pray thee, then,
Write me as one who loves his fellow men.”

The Angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And, lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest!

– By Leigh Hunt.

I loved the poem, looked it up and memorized it. I still remember it.

I graduate from highschool and work various factory jobs, primarily to enable me to buy synthesizers. My interest in electronic music (and five years in a zinc die-casting factory) prompts me to return to school to get an associates degree in Electrical Engineering, after which I go to work as a printed circuit board designer. I spend the next ten years designing PCBs for the industrial computer industry.

During that time, I learn that Bob Moog lives in Asheville and is giving a public lecture at UNCA. I attend the lecture and afterwards introduce myself. Bob calls me the next day and I wind up designing a few boards for him. This was back in the Big Briar days. These boards were for the Multi Touch Sensitive Keyboard that he designed for John Eaton, a product that according to the Moog Foundation, he considered to be his crowning achievement. This is of course a very significant event for me since he played a large part in me choosing electronics as a profession.

Many years go by…

After ten years as a printed circuit designer, I make a switch and spend the next ten years working primarily as a marketing manager, broken up by a year and a half stint as an engineering manager (high frequency CATV analog electronics). In addition to electronic music, I start playing music (on oud, flute etc) for belly dancers every weekend in Asheville, NC.

Mid-afternoon, Sunday, August 21, 2005 – Preparing for a bellydance music gig, I get the idea to start a song by reciting “Abu Ben Adhem” over a low drum beat with Ishani, the dancer that night, playing the part of the angel. I call her to see if she has a “book of gold” to use as a prop. She does.

Sunday night approximately 10:00pm, August 21, 2005 – We perform Abu Ben Adhem at Hookah Joe’s hookah lounge. Ishani is a great dancer and it is very well received.

Monday morning, August 22, 2005 – I get an email from Barry Darnell who also did printed circuit design for Bob. The email informs me of Bob’s death. I had been out of touch with Bob for a while at that point. I heard he was sick, but had no idea that it was terminal. Needless to say, it came as a shock.

Tuesday afternoon, August 23, 2005 – Barry and I attend Bob’s funeral at a local synagogue. After the rabbi finishes his part, one-by-one he calls the family members up to speak. The first one to speak is Bob’s oldest daughter. She says she wanted to start by reciting one of Bob’s favorite poems…
…Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream….

When I heard that, I almost passed out. I was standing at the edge of the room. My legs got weak and my vision grew dark. And then I remembered that the email mentioned that Bob died at 2:00 on Sunday… right about the time that I got the idea to add the poem to our performance. I was in a daze for quite a while after that.

I cannot say I knew Bob well. After doing the projects for him, I would see him occasionally here and there, but we never really hung out or talked about anything much other than electronics. The subject of poetry never came up.

I’m still trying to understand the significance (if any) of this. The mathematician in me says that everything we do, think or say is an opportunity for a coincidence. That would add up to billions, trillions or more opportunities in a lifetime. If some amazing ones didn’t come along every once in a while, that would be the strange thing. But still, when something like this happens to you, it’s hard to be objective about it.

In May of 2007, Moog Music hired me as Marketing Manager. This actually had little or nothing to do with the previous work I had done for Bob. Bob was gone and the only one there from the Big Briar days that even remembered me was Steve Dunnington.

My first week at Moog was also the week of Bob’s birthday. We had a nice birthday party at the office in his memory, and over ice-cream and cake we found out that SonicState.com (who had been doing a weekly countdown of the top 20 synthsizers of all time) had “coincidentially” just named the Minimoog as the top synth. When Mike Adams (President of Moog Music) called them to thank them for doing that on Bob’s birthday, their reply was something like “What… we didn’t know it was his birthday!”

It was at this party that I first met Michelle Moog-Koussa. When I told her the story about the poem, her response was “Oh my god, you’re the “Abou-Ben-Adhem-Guy”. After Bob’s funeral, I sent my story to the Caring Bridge website set up for Bob and his family. Mixed in with the hundreds (if not thousands) of other comments, I didn’t think that anyone had seen it. I was wrong.

Michelle and I spent much of the party talking about this coincidence… and many others. It turns out that my story was one of many surrounding Bob’s passing. She related numerous other similar stories (many of which I unfortunately can’t remember). There were one or two that were along the lines of “when I heard that Bob died, I went to turn on my old Minimoog that hadn’t worked in years… it worked!”

I thought that the birthday party supplied a nice end to the story. I was wrong. The next day Michelle called me. Our conversation went something like this…

Michelle: “Did you see LOST last night?”

Me: “No, why?”

Michelle: “It was the season finale (of season two). They were breaking into a bunker to stop the device that was jamming their radio transmissions. In doing so, they mortally wounded the person inside. As this person was dying they divulged, “The programmer was a musician. The password is GOOD VIBRATIONS”.

Me: “Yeah? Beach Boys… so?”

Michelle: “GOOD VIBRATIONS is the epitaph on dad’s tombstone.”

Me: “Hoe-lee _________ !!!!!!” (Insert uniquely Southern expression of surprise)

It wasn’t over then either. At NAMM shows or during factory visits I heard many similar stories. It helped give my time at Moog a very surrealistic edge.

Every year about this time Michelle and I talk about how all this needs to be written down. This was the year it happened.

Chris also sends this image along, with another story:

Trying to think of a good photo for this. I remembered this image. It has a bit of historical connection to the story. I created this in the early 90s. It was one of my first forays into computer graphics and photography. I think I did this in Aldus Photostyler on an 80386-based PC.

It kind of has a vaguely cosmic/spiritual feel that fits the story.

The circuit elements came from my PCB design work for Bob. He got a kick out of seeing it used this way. This image was used in the poster and ticket design for the first (and possibly only) rave in Spartanburg SC.

Here’s to all the ghosts in our machines, from Bob Moog to Max Mathews. I certainly feel their gifts in the work I’ve done just in the last couple of weeks alone.

Steve Reich had his Music for 18 Musicians.

Here’s a modular made of 18 Moogerfoogers.

And for those of you who complain that modulars can become large, expensive, hard to carry, and unwieldy…

This absolutely, positively … doesn’t help with that at all. (Happily, new desktop modular tools do, but… this is… also possible.)

And to those of you who say this seems impractical or silly, well, maybe you have five friends, and each of you has three Moogerfoogers, and you’ve wondered if you could ever form a band. Yes. Yes, you can.

This is the creation of Shout Out Out Out Out:
http://www.shoutoutoutoutout.com
http://www.auxgang.tumblr.com

After the jump, we’ll see some more practical work they’ve been up to in the studio.

First, here’s part 1 of 2…

Found via Kent Williams, on Google+.

There’s some great musical nerdery as Shout Out Out Out Out show their process tracking in the studio.

Part three of the Shout Out Out Out Out new album video diary. Winter finally drops down like a metric tonne of hammers! Gravy finds “The Button” and Will explains how recording works.

The upcoming record they’re working on here is Spanish Moss And Total Loss, due July 17th in North America from Normals Welcome Records (digital, vinyl, CD). Based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, they have … a lot of analog. So much analog. And for that, and their fresh, crisp songwriting and expansive imagination, we love them!

It’s a collision between a twenty-first century tablet and some of the most iconic analog instruments ever produced. It’s MIDI and digital meeting up with control voltage and analog. It’s our friend Chris Stack, endeavoring to find the path that allows him to take the best pieces of his studio and put them together, pushing all that gear to its limits and finding a sum that exceeds the parts. In short, it’s music making, how a soloist can make an ensemble out of their tools. On ExperimentalSynth.com, Chris has been very interesting indeed. But it’s nice to pull together a few of these recent episodes to get a sense of the larger theme.

First, let’s have a look at Moog’s Animoog synth as it’s crossed with the Moog Voyager. Now, some will recall my original criticism of Animoog and iOS synths in general was the lack of tactile feedback on the iPad. But that makes Animoog’s support of MIDI significant. And put these instruments together with your hardware instruments, and something very different happens. (I find it interesting that the most active users of Animoog I’ve met all have it as an addition to a conventional hardware studio – it’s all pieces of the puzzle.)

Chris tells us this video has gotten an especially-enthusiastic response. The video demonstrates “some of the many possibilities when using the Moog Voyager as a MIDI controller for the Moog Animoog app and feeding the iPad audio back into the Voyager’s filter.”

What you may not have seen is the “extended,” “noir” version of that video:

But that’s just one direction to go with combinations of gear. Here’s a look at what happens when you augment a synth with outboard effects, also in this case from Moog Music. Chris writes:

These next two are a pair showing how to use the Env Out CV from the Moog MF-101 filter and MF-107 FreqBox to bring tempo-synced filter effects to the Voyager (which is somewhat limited in that regard compared to the LP and SP which have MIDI synced LFOs and arpeggiators). First the MF-101, then with a bit gnarlier and more complex setup with the FreqBox.

One thing you get out of computing platforms versus analog gear is worlds of sound that are impossible in the analog domain. That’s why it’s especially nice to see Chris combine csGrain, the out-there granular effect in Csound’s new incarnation on the iPad, with a Moog guitar:

But just as with desktop computers, a terrific role for mobile and tablets, particularly the MIDI-equipped iPad, is as a sequencer. The tablet interface becomes as natural an editing and composition tool as the gear is for tweaking and performance. Chris offers:

Here’s a really quick and dirty one I shot on my Droid while playing. It is on my other YouTube channel. Here I used the Koushion app to sequence the LP. The LP has the CV Out Upgrade so I sent the Pitch CV to the CP-251 which inverted it, then sent it to control the Voyager’s filter cutoff. As the LP note goes up, the Voyager Filter Cutoff goes down. This was all tied together through Ableton which was sending the same clock to a Line 6 Echo Pro so all the echos were synced to the same clock…

Of course, there’s a strong Moog Music emphasis in all these videos, but they all demonstrate more broadly where the productive overlaps of digital and analog can lie, adaptable to much humbler rigs and combinations.

If you find this sort of thing inspiring in your own music, you can follow Chris’ site directly:
http://experimentalsynth.com/

And give Animoog a try, or visit Moog Music:
http://apps.createdigitalmusic.com/apps/animoog
http://www.moogmusic.com/

We’ll be watching.

We’ve heard the new Fhloston Paradigm; here’s an up-close look at the studio setup on which it was made.

Making music can be about collecting the best, not just the newest, finding what’s inspiring to build your own tradition. Perhaps that’s why so many artists increasingly turn to vintage analog gear not just because they idolize the sound, but because it opens up working techniques that move their music forward. After all, digital emulations get better by the day at copying sounds, but it may be less a matter of old and new and more unlocking some personal creativity. In hybrid setups, each different, everything from a flea market find to a custom software patch can take on new meaning.

Two weeks ago, we heard veteran sound designer/producer/journalist Francis Prève talk about how he integrates analog gear with Ableton Live. Now, here’s King Britt showing us the rig he used to produce the sounds for his Fhloston Paradigm EP, released yesterday on Hyperdub to great acclaim.

The gear, in case you aren’t quick enough in the video, includes some very-classic vintage equipment:

(Roland) BOSS “Doctor Rhythm” DR-110 (1983)
Korg MS-20 (1978)
Korg Mono/Poly (1981)
Roland JX-3P (with Roland PG-200 programmer, 1983)

I don’t want to drive up their eBay value any higher, but it is worth noting that even these legendary synths are available for less than a modern digital flagship; some of their lesser-known counterparts are far more affordable. And they sound utterly terrific. There’s also some new equipment – one digital box from Pioneer, the rest analog from Moog Music:

Pioneer EFX-1000
Moog Music Moogerfooger MF-101 Lowpass Filter
Moog Music Moogerfooger MF-105M MIDI MuRF
Moog Music Moogerfooger MF-102 Ring Modulator

It’s a great compliment to the Moogerfooger that you’d feed even the superb sound of an MS-20 into it and be that much happier. (Side note: it’s my admiration for the EFX-1000, the one digital effect in this signal chain, that makes me enthusiastic about the new RMX-1000 from Pioneer. Non-DJ producers may not give Pioneer any love, but the company really does effects nicely.)

All of this gets piped into Ableton Live. In this video, it’s just acting as a multitrack recorder, but I know King works extensively with Live in editing, alongside effects like the Universal Audio line.

There’s something inspiring about the personality of this setup that goes well beyond just analog or digital, old or new, especially when in the hands of someone with the musical instincts King has. I should know – I spent some quality time fiddling with the rig as I waited out a hurricane/tropical storm warning in King’s Philadelphia studio in the fall. If you don’t have this particular gear, you can achieve some of the same effects, just by multitracking in audio, connecting sequencers, and avoiding too much synchronization and control, letting your instincts drive some of your music making. Heck, you can even do it in software by assigning extra external control and turning off some of the sync on effects and the like. (Let go … use the force and all that.)

And here’s what it all sounds like:

Listen to more from King and read our review of his latest:
Analog Frontiers: Listen to King Britt’s New Fhloston Paradigm EP [CDM Track Stream, FACT Mix]

And keep on creating … music.

kingbritt.com
Hyperdub release page

The abundance of music, and the preceived ease of producing it, comes to some as bad news – or even harbinger of apocalypse. But load up a craft with quantity, and quality is what stands out.

Francis Prève is a perfect Renaissance producer. With years of experience as a music technology journalist and sound designer, his own, signature flavor of tech-house is uniquely focused on timbre. His label, Academik Records, debuted last year at Austin’s South by Southwest, but it’s just now kicking into high gear. (If you are in Austin for the world’s best known week of music, be sure to check in on the second party, running downtown from afternoon past midnight, for free.) Sure, a city like Berlin is associated with such things, but in the Internet age, Texas works just as well – minus the vitamin D deficiency.

Academik Contest giveaway
Lanai Rooftop Party, Saturday March 17 3p – 2a

Francis has rounded up a gang of emerging and known artists for Academik, and while age range and style are loose – sometimes dubstep, sometimes tech-house – what those signees have in common is attention to detail. They’re a veritable faculty in how to use Ableton Live and Massive so that you don’t sound like everyone else who’s using Ableton Live and Massive just because everybody else happens to be using Ableton Live and Massive.

The output is nicely represented in a podcast, mixed by Francis, that very much embodies his style:

Alternatively, check out the SxSW 2012 Chart Francis put together for Beatport.

Anyway, party – if you’re in Texas, go there, dance, have a good time.

But if you’re not from Texas, or you’re avoiding it because all your exes are there (okay, darnit, I’ll stop quoting song lyrics), through The Power of The Internet, we have a bunch of music to hear and tips and techniques and samples and loops and Ableton Live Instrument Racks and Sets to download – all free.

That’s because Francis has been as sharing music and techniques for how to produce it as he has the usual label activities (remix, release). Now, disclosure: I’ve known Francis for a long time, as a colleague at Keyboard. But it’s partly because I know him that I have a sense of that quality of attention to detail – because we’ve spent countless hours discussing the fine points of synth design and production technique, because he’ll call me up to talk about some particular I happened to mention writing, because he even spent hours with me and James Grahame talking about the exact organization of knobs and switches on the MeeBlip. I figure part of my responsibility in this world is to get to know people like that really well. (It happens to be a lot of fun, too.)

As it happens, you can be in on the same conversations.

Analog+Digital, Hardware+Software

One ongoing discussion has been ways of bringing in a few, select pieces of beloved hardware into a software studio. Even before talking about sound, the motivation is clear: it can make music making a lot more rewarding. And we’re not talking wildly-expensive modular setups, either – even inexpensive offerings like the KORG MonoTribe can get in on the action.

A lot of people working with software aren’t clear on just how to make hardware and software integrate nicely. Francis wrote a really comprehensive article on that subject, using his own rig as the subject, for Keyboard recently.

He writes about the process of using Live’s brilliant – and sometimes underused – External Instrument and External Effect devices:

The first order of business was to create custom devices in Live for sending MIDI to a specific synth—for example, the Phatty—then routing its audio output back into that same device via the MOTU [UltraLite Mk. 3 audio] interface. I then saved the results as presets. Thus, when the laptop is docked, all I have to do is drag the device I’d created for the Phatty into a track, and the Phatty comes online…

The next thing I did was create an External Audio Effect device that sent audio to a device but didn’t receive any audio back … by setting it up to send audio but not receive, I can drop it at the end of an instrument chain within an Instrument Rack and send any soft synth into the Moog, SEM, Dark Energy, or Monotribe. From there, the combined analog-plus-soft-synth audio runs from the analog synth back into a free input on the MOTU, to be recorded in Live.

By doing this, I can use Operator, Razor, Kontakt or any soft synth as the “oscillator bank” for one of my analog synths. The whole of digital tone generation combined with the warmth and fuzz of analog filters and the snap of analog envelopes is far more than the sum of its parts.

Francis also describes “hybrid” devices, combining Ableton instruments like Operator with outboard ingredients like the Moog Little Phatty filter and amp — all while controlling modulation and step sequences and such on the hardware with MIDI and Live clip envelopes. (He even talks about how to tame the MonoTribe, despite its – cough – lack of MIDI.)

The full article is online:
The Integrated Synth-Based Studio [Keyboard Magazine]

Free Sounds

Apart from being a producer, Francis has long been a sound designer, working for the likes of Roland and Ableton His free-sampling, hardware-loving, sound design-addicted spirit has been gradually developing a vast selection of free sample packs on his blog. Some come from software (NI’s Razor), some from new hardware (Moog’s aforementioned Slim Phatty), and some from oddities (my favorite being the Mattel Synsonics drum machine toy).

But whereas the Academik Records music will be dependent on your personal taste and aesthetic, here these are sound packs that are versatile enough to bend to your will and needs, and to produce something very different from what anyone else might produce. And that, ultimately, is the point.

So here, all in one place, are those great downloads from Fran’s blog:

21st Century Sawtooth Pad [Instrument Rack/Live Set, Live 7+]

The String Machine [Instrument Rack and Live Set, Live 7+]

Arkade [8-bit emulating Instrument Racks, Live 7+]

Ableton Preset: Wavescraper [Simpler-based Instrument Rack using Saturator waveshaping, Live 7+]

Sine of the Times [All sine-wave Instrument Rack, Live 7+]

Mattel Synsonics drum machine toy [Drum samples, Live set]

M-Audio Venom Loops [128 bpm, in C | Raw audio, Live 7+]

Native Instruments Razor Loops [128 bpm, in Cm | Raw audio, Live 7+]

Moog Slim Phatty Loops [128 bpm, in C | Raw audio, Live 7+]

Okay, I may be in Germany (see you next week, Messe!), but if you’re in Austin, Texas, the CDM radar is picking up some strong blips of things you probably want to be doing, starting today, Do. 15 Mär. (Erm, uh, sorry, Thursday March 15!) Highlights include a Neon Indian show paired with visuals, music, and the good folks of Switched On, fine music from Robot Koch, TYCHO, and Sepalcure, a Saturday night dance party with Academik on a beautiful rooftop in the heart of town, and workshops – much of this free and not requiring a badge. A few, select picks:

Daytime plan: Dubspot workshops. If you are in Austin, by all means stop reading this and go to a set of afternoon matinee workshops that starts with Maschine and proceeds to Moog Minitaur and Voyager and wraps up with Livid’s CTRL:R for Live. Friday and Saturday are packed with more free workshops ranging from production and sound design to DJing, theory, and licensing. Faculty DJ Shiftee, DJ Kiva, Martín Perna Chris Petti, Daniel Wyatt, and Pat Cupo – some seriously talented guys – are on-hand. These are folks I feel I learn from every time I’m around them, so highly recommended, and the price is right.
http://blog.dubspot.com/dubspot-sxsw-2012-edu-sessions/

Also during the daytime, if you do have a badge, you should check out Exhibit Hall 5 for a bunch of gear showcases – a bit like being at NAMM, but in the middle of a massive music festival instead of in the middle of Anaheim. (No Disneyland, though.)

Thursday night plan: Switched On / Moog / Neon Indian showcase. Moog Music and Austin’s best music gear store, Switched On, are teaming up tonight for one hell of a showcase. Neon Indian is headlining, but that band’s Alan Palomo is bringing along synth-laden music from his Static Tongues imprint. By the way, 2012 is somehow bringing back the acronym EBM, among other “pinch-me-I’m-dreaming-and-went-to-synth-heaven” aspects of this year. The action runs 7pm-2am.
Facebook event

Thursday night backup plan: high-quality bass. The name’s a bit misleading – SxSWhomp is perhaps to appeal to those American kids – but if you can’t get into Switched On, this nicely-curated range of bass music from dubstep to experimental looks like the perfect ticket. Just after midnight is one of my favorite solo artists and producers at the moment, Berlin’s own Robot Koch (also the guy behind the excellent Jacoozi), alongside the likes of Kraddy and Noah D. It’s no cover, first come first serve.
Facebook event

Friday night plan: Tycho, then Sepalcure. Tycho, aka Scott Hansen, is both one of our long-time favorite artists and favorite taste-makers, as helmsman of the ISO50 blog. His new live show is terrific, and hits at 21:15 at Clive Bar. Then, it’s the team of Machinedrum and Praveen, aka Sepalcure, for some warm beats after midnight.

Saturday night plan: dance with Academik. Academik Records is back on the rooftop of Lanai in the heart of Austin – an ideal way to cap off your week with some actual dancing, courtesy some high-quality electronic dance music. DJ sets from Francis Prève, Jan van Lier, The Chaotic Good, and SecretPandaSociety ensure music ranging from finely-crafted tech house to breaks. (CDM is a sponsor in absentia, and you can win a MeeBlip on the spot, among other analog and digital hardware and software prizes.) There’s a great lineup of tech sponsors (Dave Smith!), no cover, and having DJed the same party last year, just the kind of atmosphere you’ll need Saturday.
Academik Blog Post
Facebook event
Giveaway (including some prizes you can win if you aren’t in Texas)

Don’t miss the Academik podcast, mixed by our friend Francis Prève, on SoundCloud, natch:

I’m sure I’ve missed some stuff, so send it in and I’ll consider adding it to our top picks. (And obviously, there’s the rest of SxSW – but this is just the kind of electronic-leaning material I expect you might otherwise miss.)

Deep thought: if this is what this young person’s baby toy looks like, what will his computer look like?

Father Matt Durant writes to share a surprisingly spacey, expressive solo by his 16-week-old baby son:

My baby son, Austin, touched an iPad for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I loaded up Moog’s new Animoog app and was blown away with what happened. Mom & I have never seen him so dexterous and thoughtful with any object before. Luckily I had my iPhone within reach so I was able to record his ‘performance’ in video.

I’ve sent it to Moog and they have posted it on their Facebook page, and I have received personal emails from Michael Adams (President CEO of Moog) and their head of Marketing with praise.

cheers, great site! I’ve enjoyed CDM for years now.

http://www.moogmusic.com/products/apps/animoog

Animoog, while otherwise a beautifully-designed app, now has two downsides to consider: its cost is up from a buck cut-rate intro price to US$29.99, and you’ll know, in the back of your mind, you’d darned well better find a way to play better than a 16-week-old infant. That’s right. Austin just p0wned you.

I was accused by one commenter recently of drawing topics into a “polemic” discussion of iPads and interface design. So, true to form, let’s draw a baby – albeit an older one – into polemics. Baby Baphomet prefers the more tactile feel of a conventional Moog. The performance here is definitely less sensitive and nuanced. Perhaps we can agree to disagree – Baphomet as your top choice for your more forceful punk act, Austin clearly as the more lyrical of the two on Animoog. Watch:

(Side note: what kind of people “dislike” a video of a baby on YouTube? Like … really? Fortunately, if either of these young’ns does get trolled, they won’t actually be able to read – and, honestly, whatever they’re doing with their time is a better use of their life than us reading those kinds of comments as adults.)

Thanks, Matt, for sharing this, and hopefully CDM will last into Austin’s later years so we can find out how his playing evolves. Keep on synthin’, kid!

Something I always appreciated about classical music training was learning to appreciate the particulars of each instrument, whether or not you played them yourself. A French Horn, for instance, is not an instrument without challenges: everything from tuning to balancing dynamic range to how you look when you add and remove muting can be demanding. And in technology – whether acoustic instrumental or digital – every design is about tradeoffs. You very often can’t get one thing without giving up something else. So I stand by the questions I asked about iPad synths in general last week, particularly as I had Moog’s own, brilliant analog synths and effects as a point of comparison. My aim was not to dismiss the iPad or Animoog – I was quite serious in my praise for Animoog and I think I’ve been reasonably committed to ongoing, often enthusiastic iPad coverage since its launch. Instead, I wanted to begin a conversation about how these tools are used as instruments that includes real critical discussion.

And that’s what I think we got. Readers responded en masse, and amidst some heated discussion (some of it having more to do with whether I’d lost my mind than the particular merits of Animoog), I thought there were some compelling points. I heard from developers, too, on and off the record, and I suspect this will continue to lead to experimentation in mobile software. I also really enjoyed Marc Doty’s impassioned response, which I thought raised some equally worthwhile questions about soft synths on computers. Incidentally, I also heard from a lot of people who went out and bought Animoog because they saw the story on CDM.

In the meantime, hordes of synth lovers have descended on Moog’s Animoog, making it very likely the most successful virtual iPad synth launch yet, at least in the traditional synthesizer mold.

Learning Animoog: The best of these videos is at top, a video tutorial as many readers had requested. Tip of the hat to Synthtopia here for following up on this issue. The video tutorial makes it really clear how to navigate Animoog’s deep and powerful synth interface. See also the official Moog tour at second from top for a speedier walkthrough.

Working out how to play it: Other videos investigate performance. One common theme with Animoog, and iOS apps in general, is whether you’ll focus primarily on the touch interface or external control hardware. Animoog applies a unique control solution to the touch UI, and one that many readers seem to feel is very effective. This gives you two principal advantages of the iPad as a tablet: you get the novel multi-touch controller, which allows gestures that something like a MIDI keyboard wouldn’t, and you retain the device’s superior mobility.

Mark Jenkins’ extensive video review really does the best job, I think, of examining the Animoog on its own terms, as a standalone iPad synth, using the multi-touch interface. I couldn’t possibly have topped the depth of this video review; kudos to Mark.

On the other hand, that won’t stop people from experimenting with adding an external interface. As our friend and MeeBlip co-creator James Grahame put it, the tactile experience of the iPad is the same as running your finger along a bathroom mirror. Instruments have frets and keys for a reason; tactile feedback allows you to play them without looking directly at them. So, I think it’s an advantage that iOS’ MIDI input hardware support at least gives you a choice. You still get a software instrument that runs on an instant-on tablet rather than buried in menus on a computer. And as readers point out, it’s affordable, though I’d say the cost of Animoog isn’t exactly “$1″ — you do have to buy that iPad and its dongles and keep it running, just as a computer requires care and feeding. Even if you only ever ran Animoog on your iPad, though, you’d be at the cost of a lot of low-end synths that are far less interesting in the hardware domain.

Geert Bevin has been talking to CDM behind the scenes – more on the Eigenharp soon — and I think has some real insights into comparing the iPad’s input and an external input. Like me, he has some good things to say about Animoog’s solution; he just suggests that you can have even more fun with an additional controller. A MIDI keyboard might well be disappointing, so enter the more-exotic Eigenharp. He also uses the Alesis iODock for better I/O capabilities; at least one reader via Twitter complained that the Animoog wasn’t “professional” because of the iPad’s poor built-in minijack. So, what you get in this rig is definitely not a “pure” iPad experience – you’re adding some weight and additional devices. But it might be one that you really enjoy, and that still gets you away from your MacBook for a bit.

This video gives a brief overview of the Animoog’s features and also shows how expressive it is when played with an Eigenharp Pico over MIDI using poly-pressure.

The Eigenharp and Animoog seems like a match made in heaven since the Eigenharp is able to send three independent detailed per-note performance data streams and the Animoog is able to react to this on a per-note level. Also, the visualization of the sound on the Animoog is marvelous, it gives a great representation of what your sound is doing.

The iPad is hooked up to my MacBook Pro using USB MIDI from the Alesis iODock, the Eigenharp Pico is also hooked up to the laptop and sends MIDI from the EigenD application to the ‘dock’ MIDI port. This uses a small MIDI-only Eigenharp Pico setup that loads very quickly and provides 16 MIDI playing keys with poly-pressure and three independent data streams for each key (pressure, left/right, up/down), as well as two 3D controller keys that are somewhat similar to little joysticks and are sending each three independent streams of MIDI CC data also.

The sound: A video compares audio fidelity of Animoog to the “real” thing — analog hardware. A number of commenters also noted that Animoog most likely uses sampled wavetables as its oscillator sources rather than modeling, but that approach can indeed yield good sounds. I’m not terribly surprised by the success of the Animoog in standing up to these other instruments; years of experience in soft synths suggests that you can get good results from virtual instruments. In fact, I remain more interested in what people actually do musically, and what about an instrument makes them happy more than splitting hairs about audio fidelity. If this video helps liberate you to go play with Animoog, have at it!

Synthesis, Still the Frontier: One closing thought: part of what interests me about synthesizers is that, even with a huge volume of music made with them and some generally-understood conventions, there are really no shared rules about how to play them. In acoustic instruments, there is at least a rough notion of certain folk traditions, or classical traditions, or “extended techniques” as something that stands apart from common practice. I think we’re still learning what the heck synths are.

Every aspect of the design of a synthesizer can therefore be fair game for consideration, including the spaghetti tangles of modular patch cords or the keyboard + mod wheel + pitch bend Minimoog-style arrangement. What synths are, how they might sound, and how we might play them and turn them into music remain open-ended. So, I hope that any criticism is not grounds for hand-wringing, as someone put it, but an added motivation to go and experiment and play. I know it is for me. Synth on.

Next up: we’re long overdue giving a look at the various iPad synths and how you might use them. Since Animoog isn’t the “first professional” synth, it’s time to line it up with some of its rivals. Unlike with a computer soft synth, though, you probably aren’t terribly concerned with outlay of cash; it may be a more “what are all of the synths you’d buy” question than comparing x, y, and z. If you have nominees you’d like to see explored, or ways in which you’d like to see us cover iOS (or anything else, for that matter), let us know. And remember, tell us what you really think — okay, I probably don’t have to say that. (ducks)

If you think Moog’s entry into iPad synthesizers is too new-fangled, something for the kids, and nothing compared to the authentic analogness of … uh … analog, you’ll like this, at the opposite end of the spectrum.

In the same week they unveiled their first iOS synth, Moog has their first 500 series module – and it’s a classic, derived from Dr. Moog’s legendary Ladder Filter design. Engineering audio isn’t quite like engineering bridges and airplanes: it’s actually the unique flaws in what might have otherwise been a forgettable filter design that led to a distinctive distortion, first heard in Moog modules but made famous by the Minimoog. That signature sound is what you get in this module.

I propose we celebrate Ladder Filter Day on October 28 – the 45h anniversary of Dr. Moog being granted the patent for the “Electronic High Pass and Low Pass Filters Employing the Base to Emitter Diode Resistance of Bipolar Transistors.” (I also propose that you greet everyone you see on that day with “Happy Electronic High Pass and Low Pass Filters Employing the Base to Emitter Diode Resistance of Bipolar Transistors Day!”)

Here’s some good reading on the original Ladder Filter:
The Classic Sound of the Moog Ladder Filter [Universal Audio Blog; check out their references at the bottom, too]
Analogue Systems has some good thoughts on what made the filter special, in the commentary for their own module, influenced by the same

But seriously – what’s in this module?

• Low pass and high pass analog filter modes with cutoff
• Attack and release parameters
• Amount (positive/negative), which you can drive hard enough to make compression-like sounds or even reverse filtering, claim Moog
• Resonance, which you can push into self-oscillation
• 2Pole/4Pole: (12db per octave/24db per octave)
• Relay bypass switch
• Modernized design, including XLR (Via 500 rack) balanced line level

Better trade in your 64GB iPad 2 now — US$769, available in December 2011. That our else you need a special relationship with Analog Santa Claus. (Can I actually please have a chat with Analog Father Christmas?)

One downside: it doesn’t play Angry Birds. But you could make a sound like a flock of angry birds – which, by astounding coincidence, is also how I’d describe CDM comment threads earlier this week. Have at it:

http://moogmusic.com/products/500-series/500-series-ladder-filter

Among a volume of reactions via Twitter, email, and comment, Marc Doty, who is featured in the brief teaser video for the Animoog, responds to today’s earlier article. Apart from taking issue with what I expressed about the iPad, it’s worth noting that he has some criticism for software synthesizers and MIDI controller keyboards, both of which are also regularly-featured topics on CDM (and yes, I’ll join him in some of those criticisms / limitations):

I’d just like to point out that I’m a musician with an extensive experience of synthesis, and especially analog synthesizers. I am a major proponent of using synthesizers as musical instruments where there is a physical interaction between the user and the device. I spent over a decade programming synths with sequencers and presets, and abandoned all of it so that I could physically interact with synthesizers and be expressive with them… make intentional choices which reflect the music I intend to portray. Software synths, thus far, have put a lot of barriers between the expressive physical musician and the device making the music, which is why I’ve basically had little time for them.
When you see me ::ahem:: “looking ridiculous” in the video, what you’re seeing is my honest and heartfelt response and excitement about the really startling expressive capabilities of the Animoog.
To be honest, I think your gripe is ridiculous. As a person who is absolutely BENT on expressive physical experience, let me just tell you that the “useless” iPad provides an insanely expressive and potentially creative interface. As an exclusively key-pressing guy, I am saying this.
While you go on and on about how stupid the interface is, you should know that these keys that you’re so willing to immediately replace with a shitty MIDI controller (and thereby totally ruin one of the best aspects of this app) are based on a design by Bob Moog himself… the MTS keyboard. He worked for years to build this extremely expressive keyed device for John Eaton. The result was something really special, but never marketed to the public. The physical interface of the iPad allows for the same intentional level of control that existed in the MTS, and it WORKS. In addition to being able to control a stunning variety of aspects of the sound with the keys alone, you also have access to the x/y wavetable, which has it’s own expressive capabilities. I am absolutely baffled as to how you could dismiss the iPad as a lame interface with all of these functional capabilities.
You will NEVER see me playing a soft synth with a stupid plastic shit MIDI keyboard or some TRULY ridiculous knob-twiddlers filter-sweep generating device, but you will definitely see me playing an Animoog next to a Minimoog in live settings, in videos, and more. Is it because they both say “MOOG” on them? Not remotely. Is it because they have really anything in common at all? No, not remotely. It’s because both of them are extremely expressive and great sounding musical instruments.

I don’t want to editorialize further in this response except to say that it was not my intention to imply that Mr. Doty’s reactions to the software were what I was criticizing, but the mode of interaction necessitated by the design of the iPad, as seen when the form factor is visible but the user interface is not. It’s worth noting that because the video I used as illustration was intended as a teaser, the camera angles intentionally hid that touch interface from view. These were certainly not a commentary on Marc Doty himself, whose work I respect.

You can read the rest of what I wrote:
Moog’s iPad Synth Arrives, Looks Great, But is iPad (and Moog) Hype Crossing a Line? [Editorial]

Naturally, we’ll continue this discussion, not just today, but on an ongoing basis.

(Update – for the record, I’m now in touch with Marc, and glad for it! I think we have a lot to talk about here, and I’ve loved his video series in the past. I’m hardly staking out an extreme position here; I like the app, like exploring the potential, and had some criticisms of the marketing and the constraints of the platform. I’m glad we got to hear Marc’s side of the story, too.)