Hello, harp feedback!

I love my job. I get to watch as Peter Dines, contributor on our Kore/Komplete site for NI, constantly cooks up brilliant ideas for sound design. His latest screencast plumbs the depths of Native Instruments’ Massive synth, which he uses in conjunction with Kore. We’ve already seen Peter make song arrangements out of morphing sequenced patches. Now, he focuses on preset design – and gives away some free presets for you to enjoy.

Feedback, Routing and Modulation in Massive from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Feedback, Routing and Modulation in Massive, with Free Patch Downloads [Kore@CDM]

Part of why playing with routing and modulation is such fun in Massive is that it has this semi-modular, drag-and-drop architecture. That’s something I’m gratified to say has been improving in soft synths in general; rather than simply emulating the interface of hardware synths, we’ve really seen some interesting ideas in how to design interfaces as software. I’d also include in this category instruments like Future Audio Workshop’s Circle, which I hope to look at a little more this month. Circle, in fact, was compared to Massive, but while they both have drag-and-drop, color-coded routings, the actual implementation is very different, they’re philosophically different, and sonically different.

Have a look, and let us know if you have your own thoughts on Massive, tips, questions, or anything else.

To me, the ideal kind of music tech writing is when you get to spend quality time with tools for musical reasons - not simply to talk about the technology, but to make stuff. Over the past weeks, we’ve been gradually assembling ideas, sound designs, knowledge, and tutorials into a string of blog-style posts on the CDM Kore site. I’ve organized those into an evolving guide to working with Kore as a musician, from getting a handle on the basics (including some stuff that initially befuddled us when we tried to use it!), to some “experimental” techniques for pushing the envelope.

Using Kore

We’ve been spending a lot of time with Reaktor, too, so expect a follow-up with that. The idea isn’t really to advocate any tool over another one — on the contrary, for me it’s about figuring out, okay, now you’ve got something, what do you do with it?

It’s been great to get all this input from Peter Dines, Eoin, and the readers, as well (particularly Jonathan Adams Leonard) — the guide above is sort of a “collective knowledge” about the tool. Having written a book and various magazine articles, it’s a totally different experience: more learning than teaching.

On the same lines, I’ve also put together a guide to working with the Kore controller without touching the mouse. That’s part of the whole appeal to me of the Kore system, but it may not be immediately obvious how to do it. If you’ve got Kore in front of you, this will walk you in front of how to do it. I’m still learning to assimilate this with my live sets, but when I get it going it makes me really happy — I’m able to focus directly on sound.

Reference: How to Navigate Kore 2 with Hardware - No Mouse!

This is good timing, as I’m just now back from Berlin where I got to do a short set which happened to combine Ableton Live and Kore. So, separate from this other stuff, I do want to say a big thank you to everyone in Berlin who came out. It was great to meet you, and I hope to come back soon — you have a really fantastic town; I loved being there. It was really creatively inspiring.

Several bloggers were nice enough to write up / photograph the evening:
MIDI Mechanics
Hundertmarknow

– both blogs in German, but they look great; just added them to my RSS so I can keep practicing my German reading skills.

Big thanks, as well, to everyone at the DEAF Festival and in Dublin, in another wonderful and energizing town. I’ll be putting together my notes from the DEAF presentation soon to share.

Having looked at two examples of what the Lemur multi-touch hardware can do, the videos above illustrate directly what I’m talking about when I describe two different approaches. Metrognome is an insanely-talented guru in the modular instrument/effects-building environment Reaktor. He’s working to build new live performance tools that meld live arrangement / remixing / DJing with a kind of computer meta-instrument. It’s really a great illustration of how software can become a live instrument. It also represents one of two paths in thinking about what touch can do for live music performance.

1. Multi-touch as virtual controller: The Lemur’s design assumes that what you want to do is create virtual hardware, using a stock set of knobs, faders, gestural controllers, envelope editors, and the like. The advantage is, these interfaces are modular and consistent. The disadvantage: you’re limited to pre-built screens and pre-built widgets, so you can’t do anything outside what’s given.

2. Screen as direct controller: The difference with the Reaktor examples is that there’s no intermediary. Whatever is on your computer screen is the interface. The downside: that includes all the usual UI clutter, and the open-ended possibilities could be overwhelming. The upside: as Metrognome artfully demonstrates, you can imagine any interface, build it, and immediately control it – including things the Lemur may not do. The other, not insignificant advantage: you don’t have to buy another piece of hardware, making this route much cheaper. Your screen or projection simply becomes the touch controller surface. Multi-touch isn’t quite ready for prime time on computers yet, but it could be soon.

I’m not saying one is better than the other. In fact, I suspect some people will prefer the Lemur approach even if it means spending additional money, because they want something that has some of the flexibility of a screen, but still behaves more or less like a dedicated controller. But I think it’d be a mistake to miss that we have two very different angles on touch here.

Of course, none of this stops you from building or buying a $50 or $100 knob box and being perfectly happy with that.

For more details on what Metrognome is doing (including an up-close shot of that beautiful ensemble), see our Kore minisite – and expect some more details on this soon over on that site, thanks to our Reaktor contributor Peter Dines:

Reaktor + Touchscreen = Touch Grains, Touch Performances, Wild UIs [Kore@CDM]

Reaktor is a massively powerful toolkit for building instruments and effects, but that power can easily be overwhelming at first. Peter Dines has completed a five-part introduction tackling sequencing events. It’s one of the trickier bits, but also the skill that will help you have the maximum amount of fun.

Be a Reaktor Sequencer Ninja

Here are the five parts for CDM’s Kore minisite:

Part 1 - introduction
Part 2 - the X+ module
Part 3 - the event table
Part 4 - the snap array
Part 5 - the mouse area

(See the clocks/events refresher to get going.)

See also: Reaktor forum discussion

Downloadable Instruments, Effects

As you’re learning, it can help to grab more ready-to-use instruments and effects. Here’s a sampling, though of course you’ll find many more in the NI User Library.

Don’t believe the tutorial can spawn new creations? Boombox is a drum machine built with the Roux sequencer macro Peter Dines uploaded for his tutorial series.

Boombox Drum Machine (Direct download link)

HaasCheezburger is a new LOLcat-powered stereo delay effect from Peter.

You can also download Peter D’s Grain Delay effect

Teaser: New Spiral Ensemble

This is an upcoming Reaktor 5 ensemble from one of the great virtuosos of instrument/effect patching (in any tool, not just Reaktor), Lazyfish. The creator of Gaugear and Newschool turns his attentions to a new, swirling, animated modulating synth. It demonstrates what’s possible when you take sequencing to the edge, and has the typically inspiring take on user interface Lazyfish is known for. I’ll be able to share more about this soon, but NI has already said on the forums that this ensemble will be free to existing Reaktor 5 users.

Our own Peter Dines notices the similarity to the Whitney Music Box. The possibilities for where instruments can go conceptually and in terms of interface just continue to unfold.

For more Reaktor getting started resources, see our story from last month:

Learning Reaktor: 10-Step Path to Building New Sequencers, Beatboxes, and Effects

Updated: Native Instruments has announced the SoundPack this comes from, the new Reaktor Animated Circuits. If you don’t own Reaktor (or Kore, for that matter), you can run Reaktor Animated Circuits and get all the sound goodness from SpaceDrone, Metaphysical Function, Skrewell, Newscool, and this new ensemble Spiral Sequencer. But, of course, we think you’ll be even happier if you get Reaktor and start tinkering yourself (and you need Reaktor to see Spiral’s nifty graphics). That’s just how we roll.

How to use it: Spiral is a sequencer, so you do need to hook it up to a sound source. Wondering how to do that? We’ve got a screencast that explains from resident Reaktor guru Peter Dines.

If you do have Reaktor, Spiral is now available for download via Service Center, so have at it!

Every time you turn around, someone else is holding some sort of promotional music contest. But this week, we have not one but three contests I think will really appeal to CDM readers — and I’m especially eager to hear what results you might submit.

Guitar Rig Hero is a huge contest with some big prizes. Native Instruments notes that users were already, without prompting, posting Guitar Rig videos to YouTube. So, they’ve put together a jury to properly judge the best possible contributions, with jurors including the likes of the Deftones, Dweezil Zappa (yes, the offspring of Frank Zappa), and (one of my personal favorites) Mogwai. Prizes: a quad-core Fujitsu-Siemens laptop, NI software, and (non-software) guitars from Gibson.

NI says participants are “asked to capture a video of their most original and spectacular performance using GUITAR RIG 3, without any sonic or artistic limitations applying.” What’s interesting is that not all the entries are using guitars — there’s already an interesting experimental entry with violin and Guitar Rig, and I suspect if we unleash some of the CDM community on this contest, there will be more.

You don’t have to own Guitar Rig 3 to participate; the demo version will work (and then you can try to, you know, win the full version). The contest ends September 30.

I’ve run synths, keyboards, and even sitar through Guitar Rig, so I’m interested to hear what other not-guitars you can come up with.

Guitar Rig Hero Contest Page @ NI

Guitar Rig Contest YouTube Channel (with various videos up already)

Matthew Dear, performing as Audion, is coming to Minitek in New York this weekend, and we know from reader feedback that you’d like us to talk to him. (Yes, some of the endless minimal entries in Minitek, true to the festival’s name, start to blur together, but Matthew to me is someone really musically special.)

As it happens, among Beatport’s regular contests, there’s an Audion remix contest for “Billy Says Go.” Downloads started this week, and you can submit through the end of the month. This is public voting as opposed to juried voting, but since I know there are some Audion fans out there, let us know if you do something nice. Prizes: Traktor Scratch, $100 Beatport gift card, and a grab bag of Beatport swag. Those of you trash talking Richie Hawtin, maybe this is your chance to show us your skills.

Audion Remix Competition @ Beatportal

Sonoma’s RiffWorks software and accompanying community is apparently popular among readers here, so it seems worth passing this along. The RiffWorks site is awarding RiffWorld.com community members IK Multimedia software and other downloads and goodies. That in itself isn’t that interesting, but what is a bit different about this particular competition is that you can collaborate on entries; if you decide not to go solo, you can invite up to three other people to work with you. I still prefer collaborating in person rather than online, but I’ll be interested to hear how collaboration is working out for people. (Naturally, the reason they’re emphasizing this is to promote the collaboration features of the site — but you’re the best judge of how that works.)

RiffRumble 12

Seriously, do let us know if you choose to participate in these contests, or if there are other online communities you’re working on; we’d love to know. I imagine running this means a dozen PR folks will be breathing down my neck tomorrow with other contests, but these do seem up the CDM alley and … well, for the rest, that’s what the “mute conversation” feature in Gmail is for. Enjoy!

Richie Hawtin actually topped the list of people CDM readers don’t want us to interview at NY’s Minitek this weekend, which I’m tempted to take as a challenge. (Hey, I’m all for combating hype and talking to the many talented but under-appreciated artists out there. I just find it amusing how much negative energy Hawtin attracts.) In the meantime, CDM’s resident electronic scenester Liz McLean Knight notes that he has revealed some of how he works live on his blog.

M_nus label owner and minimal techno pioneer Richie Hawtin has eschewed the “trade secret” mentality (and ridiculous toupe-combover hairstyle, thank god!) and shared brief videos on his myspace blog explaining his live setup.

Traktor lies at the base of his arrangement, and in particular he makes use of Traktor’s Four Decks. Much in the way Ableton Live enables live syncing of basic elements, Hawtin uses elements of unfinished tracks, such as a partial demo track from label-mate Marc Houle, as building blocks in a live set.

And in a move that some people consider controversial in the DJing world, he admits to using the Sync function, as it allows him to focus on other things such as four-deck manipulation and playing with effects, a view to which digital musicians are more sympathetic.

Richie Hawtin: My Setup

I don’t think using four DJ decks can really be considered innovative any more, frankly — not with Ableton Live in common usage and live electronic musicians pushing in other directions. But this is how Hawtin works, and he’s more than entitled that. It’s also nice to see someone who actually uses NI’s four decks rather than just talking about them. And for all the hating around here, I do think Hawtin does deserve credit for having been at the digital DJ phenomenon from just about the beginning. (Whether that phenomenon has been a good thing, that’s a separate issue to debate.)

I’m equally interested to see, though, where people go next. I think Hawtin rightfully deserves credit for his taste factor and the influence that had — even if you hate him, here’s a guy who was able to really build a brand an a musical identity not only for himself but his label and self-imagined genre. If the ongoing attention following Hawtin seems disproportionate, perhaps that’s because others have failed to fill the void or find a way to be that successful moving in other directions.

Yes, that’s meant as a challenge.

Update: here’s a compilation of all the videos. (Thanks, Louis!)

Richie Hawtin 2008 DJ Setup from Dean Koch on Vimeo.

“What if you had to take just one software instrument with you to a desert island?” It’s not an entirely silly question, with so many choices in software potentially distracting you from real music making. I say, cheat: take a tool that lets you build your own tools, specific to the job. Reaktor immediately springs to mind.

On the Kore @ CDM site, one of my goals has been getting deeper into making musical tools in Reaktor. We’re lucky to have Peter Dines onboard, who had already been dabbling with documenting the basics of Reaktor construction before we got some support from NI to do more. It was important to my own music making to be able to quickly assemble some of the tools I was imagining, so it’s been a real treat to get this rolling.

A sign that it really works – there’s already a free drum machine up on the User Library based on Doc Dines’ useful foundation sequencer, designed to be reused in your own patches. I’m assembling some of the steps here partly for my own musical/educational purposes!

Here’s a guide to what we’ve got so far, in the rough order I’d suggest to start learning:

Gustavo Bravetti has put together a free, exclusive FM8 drum kit in Ableton Live for CDM readers. More on the kit, FM8, and how to make the most of it, plus our download, at the Kore@CDM NI minisite:

Free Exclusive Download: FM8 Drum Kit for Ableton Live from Gustavo Bravetti

Here’s what the kit sounds like, using the demo clips included with the package (naturally, you’ll want to make your own patterns):

fm8kit.mp3

I love that it’s a synth kit rather than a sampled kit, as you can do things like this — just a quick demo I whipped up, same clips, modified only using synth and effects parameters in FM8, to "mess up" Gustavo’s pristine kit:

fm8kit_2.mp3

A quick survey revealed quite a few Live users I know who use both Operator and FM7 or FM8 from Native Instruments, proof positive that you can never have too much synthesis or too much FM. I know I regularly swap between the two, plus Image-Line’s Sytrus.

The kit is calling out for a Koresound and a full Live Drum Rack, so I’ll see what I can do. But I really do enjoy fabricating drum kits with synths. Whether I do it terribly well or not, I always feel closer to the resulting sounds. (Previously, Gustavo made bass drums and snares with Operator in video tutorials, though I prefer the FM8 sounds he’s done, personally!)

The current holy grail of sampling seems to be getting at more memory by providing 64-bit memory addressing, as I said this morning. With Tascam’s Giga out of the picture, it’s up to competing sampler products to deliver. Cakewalk’s Dimension Pro is already 64-bit support, as is their host, SONAR. Native Instruments points out that their flagship sampler Kontakt is on track to be 64-bit soon.

Kontakt 3 does support disk streaming now, but it can’t yet do 64-bit memory addressing. With 32-bit memory addressing, you’re limited to around a couple of gigs of available RAM. That should change soon for Kontakt, with a cross-platform release supporting as much RAM as your machine and OS can handle in the works.

The official announcement was made back in January; I think I missed it amidst the NAMM hoopla. It’ll be a free update for existing Kontakt 3 users. NI’s forum admin Thomas wrote then:

I want to bring you the good news that NI has started development on a Kontakt version that supports 64-bit memory addressing for Mac OS X 10.5 and Windows Vista 64.
This will be a free update for Kontakt 3, and will allow to go beyond the 32-bit memory addressing limit and utilize as much RAM as your operating system or host makes available.
This version of Kontakt 3 will also run as a VST plugin under 64-bit hosts in Windows Vista 64 (Windows XP 64 will likely not be supported; standalone and 32-bit plugin operation under Vista 64bit are already possible with Kontakt 3.0.1).
No specific info on the release date yet, but you can expect it sometime in the second half of 2008. It is a substantial development effort and requires a lot of testing and optimization.

Details of the update and a thread you can follow for further news is available on the NI forum:

Official update status - Kontakt 3

I expect, with the release of greater 64-bit support in Mac OS X Leopard, other cross-platform sampling solutions are likely to go 64-bit, too; any vendors with news, we’re happy to run it.

See also:

Cakewalk has a 64-bit Computing for Musicians site that talks more about what 64-bit means; their SONAR host would also provide access to 128GB of RAM for Kontakt 3.1 for 64-bit Windows, when it becomes available, so this is information that’s important across vendors.

Disclosure: CDM writes about Kontakt on our Kore minisite, which is sponsored by Native Instruments.

Building and Using a Reaktor Grain Delay in Kore 2 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Let’s cut straight to the reason we use this stuff: we want crazy-sounding delays we can play with. Reaktor guru Peter Dines shows just how you’d build such a thing in Reaktor from the ground up for CDM’s Kore site. He also takes it one step further by creating not only the Reaktor ensemble, but also a Kore performance preset to match. The advantage of going this route: Kore provides a way of organizing parameters for control, performance, and automation.

This is another all-free download, so have at it. Now I feel like I’m in a patching race with Peter, because I’ve got some ideas of my own for how you might modify this basic idea; let’s see if I can actually make that happen.

Making sense of Kore

The other side of the minisite is we’re further exploring what Kore is for and how to make it work. We asked readers of the minisite to tell us their thoughts on how Kore is going and how they use it, which has yielded an interesting comment thread:

How Do You Kore?

Our main focus, of course, is simply teaching people how to use the tool effectively – from there, you can decide whether it’s for you and how you want to use it. To that end, I’ve got the first half of a tutorial up that explains what for me was the biggest draw and the most initially confusing, which is the control pages Kore uses to assign automation and physical control. I walk through why you’d want this, how it works, and how you manage different levels of the control pages:

Demystifying Kore Control Pages for Automation and Performance, Pt. I: Different Page Types

We also have some important basics, like Kontakt automation, how to get a normal mixer view, and external MIDI control.

Coming soon: I’m planning some short features on each of NI’s instruments. We’ll have to call it the “get it out of the shrinkwrap” series, especially for people who got the overwhelming set of instruments that comes with Komplete.