Chris Stack (formerly of Moog) inaugurates a series of experimental synthesis sounds with a stereo modulation effect, using two of the terrific Moog MF-102 ring modulators as the canvas. It’s a dead-simple combination of cables – you connect the carrier output of the first MF-102 into the input of the second, and the LFO out to the frequency – but once interconnected, the double ring mod effect is capable of a wide range of sounds.

(“Double ring mod … oh my God.” Yeah, I know.)

In fact, for the impatient among you, you might here the experimental synthy sounds at the beginning and miss the subtler pads just before three minutes. This is a technique that really has a broad potential palette, beyond the conventional (and admittedly alien) sounds of the ring mod.

The Moogerfooger has a very recognizable sound, and it’s a wonderful unit. If you can’t afford two or more of these beauties, though, watch carefully – the routing here could easily be replicated in software, once you understand what’s going on. (Pd patch, anyone? Upload to comments and I’ll send you … some kind of prize.)

And if you have a computer and some Moog boxes, you can do this twice.

Chris, I look forward to what you do next! (Bonus, below – the answer to that question, and the question of what to do if you own a Little Phatty and a Slim Phatty. Or … perhaps what do if you’ve got one Phatty and your friend has another?)

OTO Machines’ BISCUIT is new 8-bit effect processing hardware from a boutique design firm in Paris. The essential effect is all 8-bit: using 8-bit converters and processing, you can add crunchy, digital waveshaping, delay, pitch shift, and step filter effects. But because those processes produce distortion and aliasing, BISCUIT combines its 8-bit effects with an analog resonant filter. (It’s switchable, so if you want to retain all the artifacts, you can – but you also have a filter at the ready.)

The whole design is a lovely exercise in reducing a set of sound capabilities to their most essential elements. The appearance of the front panel, though, is deceptively simple. Multifunctional uses, all provided within the eight buttons at bottom and the parameter controls at top, allow effects from filtering and basic bit reduction to wild, radical bit destruction, step-sequenced filtering, delay, and even a little synthesis.

The BISCUIT is also fully MIDI-enabled: every control sends MIDI, and every function receives MIDI CC. Critical to its step-sequenced and delay functions, BISCUIT receives MIDI clock, as well, or you can use tap tempo.

Finally, quality and local production figure prominently in the OTO: the company advertises that they don’t outsource production and work entirely with local companies in France.

Price: EUR529 including VAT (so 442,30 if you’re outside Europe). Available now:
http://www.otomachines.com

That’s pricey, I know, but it also packs as much sonic power as a collection of several Moog effects – and likewise might be the only effects box you need.

And, oh yeah – the future of BISCUIT may provide more than it does now.

I got to look more closely at the BISCUIT (think “bis-QWEE” as in French), at least on paper. I’ve also had the chance to talk to one of the creators about the evolution of this box, which reveals something of the process of hardware creation in general.

First, let’s take a closer look at the hardware.

Inside the Hardware

Onboard controls include:

• Drive: Input gain, up to +15 dB (which can clip your sound prior to conversion)
• Naked: dry signal
• Dressed: 8-bit (wet) signal
• Filter controls: set to green (low-pass), yellow (band-pass), or orange (hi-pass), then adjust cutoff (20-15kHz) and Q
• Brain: changes the function of the rectangular switches at the bottom, between selecting parameters and muting/inverting the 8-bit signal
• Clock: 250-30kHz sample clock frequency
• Bypass: a true relay bypass
• Switches 1-8: mute or invert your 8-bits, select effects and parameters, and recall presets/snapshots

The main issue is that it’s using the 8 rectangular switches along the bottom of the unit that most directly shapes the sound, by allowing you to set each bit independently – literally, the eight bits of the signal itself. Switch off “Brain” mode, and you can directly manipulate the bits of the signal, then mix that signal with your dry source.

The presets portion can incorporate all of your own presets, with 16 slots and SysEx dump functions for storage and recall on your computer. (Hmmm, may be time to dig up an editor/librarian tool, or make a new, simpler one.)

I/O:
Unbalanced 1/4″ inputs (2x mono L+R)
Unbalanced 1/4″ outputs (2x mono L+R)
MIDI in, MIDI out
9V AC adapter

Form factor:
Metal case
1.27 lb (580g)
7.48″ x 2.36″ x 4.60″ (190mm x 60mm x 117mm)

Interview with the Founder/Creator

I talked to Denis Cazajeux, creator of BISCUIT, about his work.

It took time to design this device. I started by building stompboxes in my kitchen under the name Cazatronics (http://www.myspace.com/cazatronics). I built some MIDI controllers, SID and FM Midibox synths (I lover [MIDIBox creator] Ucapps !), analog reverb stompboxes…

Few years ago, I built a box in a plastic butterdish, to simulate the sound of an old Fairlight CMI, but without have to sample through this machine.

The idea was simple: use an 8-bit AD converter with a parrallel output, and connect these 8 outputs to an 8-bit parrallel input DA converter. The sampling frequency was controlled by a special pot. You could pass sounds from a modern hardware or sofware sampler through this box to get an old-school 8-bit sampler sound.

I discovered that I could get some very harsh and radical digital distortion by simply mute (always 0) or invert (a 0 becomes a 1 and the opposite) one or several of the 8 lines between AD and DA converters. The initial box was then upgraded with 8 toggle switches, each with 3 positions (on, mute and invert).

As the sound can become very strong and aggressive, I added a 12db/octave low-pass filter with a Q control.

I forget a little bit this box in my kitchen for some years. One day, I met an engineer/producer in a vintage studio near Paris, where I worked as a sound engineer and maintenance tech. We shared the same passion for music, electronics, lo-fi, 8-bits,… (Thanks for your blog, we really love CDM and have a look on it few times a week!).

He loved the 8-bit box and we started the idea to sell this thing, as there were no other things like that on the market (except Frostwave Sonic Alienator). It took me 2 years to set the company, find the money, improve the initial design (MIDI, stereo, FX, multimode filter, pads instead of toggle switches,…), find subcontractors…

I wanted a strong box, with soft switches similar to a monome, customs knobs…

There’s more than 350 components inside BISCUIT, most of them are SMD (Surface Mount Devices) to keep the product small and not too much expensive. This is small and local economy: all parts (electronics boards, metalwork, pad and knobs design, packaging…) are made in french factories (most of them are in Normandy). Each Biscuit is assembled by our hands and tested by our ears in our workshop.

Input gain (Drive pot), little mixer (Naked and Dressed pots) and filter are analog, but with digital control (using Maxim digital pots IC’s), so you can memorize some presets and have a MIDI control.
I choose to use hi-quality parts (Panasonic low signal relay for bypass, Polypro Caps for filter, Neutrik jacks, linear -8v/+8v power supply…).

Digital processing (waveshapers, delay, pitch, bit manipulations) is pure 8-bits, using a simple Microchip PIC microcontroller. Delay and pitchshifter use the internal PIC RAM (3kB !).

The PIC microcontroller can upgrade its firmware, using a MIDI SysEx utility (SysEx Librarian for MAC users or MIDI OX for PCs).

All firmware upgrades are for free, as a simple SysEx file to download from our website.

In case it wasn’t evident from the gorgeous design of the case and associated graphics, yes, there was a significant design collaboration behind all of this, says Denis:

We worked with graphic artists H5 (http://www.h5.fr/).

They design the:

OTO and BISCUIT logo,
Knob design,
Silkscreen drawing,
User Manual layout.

They work in advertisment for companies such as Dior, Yves St Laurent, Audi…but also for music (record cover and videoclip) : Air, Royksopp (“Remind Me” videoclip), Massive Attack, Goldfrapp, Etienne de Crécy, Alex Gopher,…

They did a very nice job for us so I wanted to talk about them!

Producer/engineer Stéphane Alf Briat is the partner with Denis, and the man who prompted actually releasing BISCUIT as a product.

Let us know if you have further questions for Denis. This is far more information than I usually do for a product preview, but it’s fantastic, of course, to be provided with this much detail. It looks like a fascinating design, and I can think of a couple of friends I expect will want one. More coming soon.

http://www.otomachines.com

Ed.: Make no mistake about it: digital sound tech, from mixing to processing, has evolved to a fidelity on par with its analog predecessors and opening possibilities well beyond what they offered. But the making of that evolution wasn’t easy, and it was more than a technical challenge. You can thank the creative spirit of people like Paul Frindle. As contributor Primus Luta explains to CDM, his work is about more than just engineering or tools – it’s driven by creative, musical energy. -PK

Author’s note: I wanted to bring this piece to the CDM audience because, whether we know it or not, if we Create Digital Music, we are indebted to people like Paul Frindle.  While this piece is on the technical side, one of the things that I hope readers will pull away is his creative spirit. May Paul inspire you to bring that same energy to the work that you produce in the digital realm.  You can read the full interview, with war stories from Virgin Records, Trident Studios, SSL and more at AvantUrb.

In the world of audio, Paul Frindle is a legend.  During his tenure at Solid State Logic, he was responsible for the channel electronics of the SSL G Series Console.  He was also a part of the team that broke the “damnable black art” of digital conversion.  He went on to cofound the (pre-dot=com) startup Oxford Digital Ltd. Their first contract was with Sony (who would eventually take over the company), developing the application design of Sony’s flagship digital mixing console.  The result of this work was the OXF-R3, to this day regarded as the pinnacle of digital mixing consoles, not only in music, but also in film.  Like everything Paul has worked on, as much of a landmark as the OXF-R3 was, it proved to be but merely a stepping stone.  Where it was leading, however, could have been much different.

“I think there was a fantastic opportunity to revive the large studio concept, by integrating non-linear storage and editing into the OXF-R3,” Paul says. “It was already a massively-powerful workstation, wide open [enough] to accept it. This would have been amazingly powerful and creative, and would have knocked underpowered workstations off the map for many years to come, restoring a much-needed differential to the elite studios against the upcoming project studios.”

The OXF-R3 has only continued to blur that line in favor of the project studios.  Strapped for the kind of clients who could appreciate — let alone could afford — high-end studios, the great studios of their time have faded away one by one. If those studios could have stayed on the leading edge of digital tech, would it have been enough to halt those closures? We may never know.  Fortunately for all studio buffs, high-end and project alike, there was another avenue of exploration left for Paul that would give his work the broadest audience to date.

“The design of the OXF-R3 was amazingly ahead of time. It was a great big, highly flexible processor with a whole load of software running on it, which was restricted and presented on a panel just for conformity and convenience. It was already ‘software in a box’. It could even be controlled remotely. All of the design systems and debugging tools I was using on it consisted of on-screen GUIs.”  This was a dramatic, yet understated shift from the way technical engineers had previously worked.  It was a physical product, but the brains of it was moving into the virtual space.

“I was warning that the OXF-R3 product concept was obsolete even before we finished it. The large digital tape recorder was nothing more than a very costly and highly delicate ‘bit bucket’ organised like an analogue machine. With the meteoric rise in performance of digital technology, it was fairly easy to envisage a time when a unit bought for £1000 would be capable of doing a large chuck of what a mixer needed.  In the near future, we would be able to make art without all this paraphernalia, at a miniscule fraction of the cost. I was far more excited about this than doggedly hanging onto established formats and design constraints.”

Not one to let this excitement lay dormant, Paul and a few others started their own pursuit.  “The plug-ins project was initially hatched from humble beginnings, almost by us working in our spare time and at nights. My colleague actually did the first proof of concept EQ plug-in over the Christmas break and it all grew from that.

“What people needed most were high-quality, refined and indispensable applications; the EQ and Dynamics were adapted to provide that. Making them identical to the OXF-R3 applications was a link to our existing reputation. Of course running these in 48bits for TDM or double float in RTAS actually provided better performance than was available in the OXF-R3 32-bit, fixed-point environment. And it has to be said that we ironed out a few bugs along the way too, so these were actually better than the applications in the large format console.”

For users, this resulted in what are still being called the best equalizer and dynamics processing plug-ins on the market.  For Sony, however, the greatest deliverable was the system they built to create both the OXF-R3 and the plugins.  “It was a complete hierarchical graphic design system running on a specially-designed processor, which allowed real-time interaction and analysis of the action for almost every instruction in your processing design!”  If this description sounds familiar, it is because what Paul is describing is a modular environment for signal processing, much like tools like Max/MSP, AudioMulch and Plogue Bidule.

“Not only did it allow engineers without formal programming skills to build highly complex applications, it also very crucially allowed us to experiment freely and actually listen to what was happening in real time! It was this system that enabled me to delve so deeply into what we could hear and why, exploit that knowledge and realise the applications for the OXF-R3 console and subsequently the Sony Oxford plug-ins. Quite simply, I was able to ‘play around’ with all sorts of  wacky processing models to get the behaviour that matched the all-important sounds in my head.”

This freedom of experimentation allowed Paul to move from traditional audio utilities like EQ’s and dynamics processors into more creative arenas.  “The Transmod was something that I have always wanted since the mid-1970s, and over the decades had tried on several occasions to make out of analogue technology. But it was doomed to failure because of the relatively poor accuracy and stability of [analogue] components. During a lunchtime, I knocked up a digital version of my old idea as proof of concept, and it just worked!

“The Inflator came about because I received a late night call from a friend who had been doing high-profile sessions in L.A. with Eric Clapton and BB King. He had slogged away for months doing recordings and mixes, but had been beaten into production by another engineer who managed to make it louder. He wanted to know if there was anything he could possibly do to make it louder without wrecking the sound completely.  I was reminded that I had to make my first transistor power amp design in 1970 twice as powerful as the previous tube amp design to get the same volume and impact. All I had to do was to apply all this old knowledge into a digital process and the same effect would be available. I used a combination of math packages and the OX-R3 design system to experiment and extract the salient details of what made the tube amp louder. This was definitely a walk on the wild side, since for the first time in this employment I was making something whose sole purpose was to generate a heap of distortion!”

After leaving Sony Oxford, Paul set out on his own again to further explore the creative possibilities opening up through digital audio.  The result is his latest venture Pro Audio DSP.  “This initiative was conceived as a way of getting this stuff done without too much interference from marketing executives and sales infrastructures.”

The first product is the Dynamic Spectrum Mapper plugin.  “It was yet another object I had always wanted to have, but the idea was given greater urgency from listening to what people were trying to achieve in their productions using greater amounts of compression, the kinds of character they were trying to produce, and the difficulties they were battling with along the way. This, and a deep personal dislike for the artefacts produced in conventional multi-band designs, gave impetus for the design of the DSM. Digital processing seemed to provide the possibility of actually making it at last.

Dynamic Spectrum Mapper introduction from Paul Frindle on Vimeo.

“I am particularly pleased with the DSM because it’s exactly the sort of thing I want to bring to the marketplace – serious processes that have groundbreaking practical purpose and facility.  They are, at the same time, artistically capable and great fun! Such things excite me because they bring genuinely new capabilities and artistic power to the production process.”

If there is a theme to be found throughout Paul’s career it is a continuous effort to push forward this idea of the technology as art.: “I don’t want to waste the rich experience of the past in some manic push for ‘newness,’” says Paul. “Neither do I want to simply try and blindly copy what was there, in the hope that it does the same ‘kind of thing’. I want to understand it and use that understanding to produce new stuff, which is truly creative and actually advances our art. We should be carrying the past forward with us in a continuous process of advancement, not writing it off to history, or reverting to it in a religious search for past success.”

Speaking with Paul, his mind is so focused on the present or even the future, it’s easy to forget his historical relevance.  Working dilligently to realize the ‘sounds in his head’ and put them out into the world, he is not only an inspiration for the work he produces, but for the creative ethic it exemplifies.

The Didgeridoo is one of the human race’s great triumphs in instrument design, simple but capable of producing profound sound – thanks, indigenous Australians. Kyle Evans sends us his project to extend the instrument with powerful digitally-augmented sound-making capabilities. The ingredients:

• Bluetooth wireless data transmission, connecting to a wireless mic
• Additional controls, including pots, push buttons, and toggles. (One limitation of the original relative to other blown instruments is its lack of any kind of keys or finger holes – an issue if you want to play with more than one note or modify the sound with something other than your mouth.)
• Max/MSP-patched synthesis and signal processing, analyzing the input and making lots of wonderful sounds

As he describes it:

I created this instrument to experiment in the combination of the organic sound qualities of a didgeridoo with the advanced signal processing capabilities of modern computer programming and sound synthesis. This custom built didgeridoo features externally mounted modules that allow the performer to process and manipulate the sound of the instrument in real time. All control data is transmitted wirelessly via blue tooth and is controlling several audio processes created in a custom-built software environment. If you have any questions about the instrument please feel free to ask.

Truly inspiring work, Kyle!

See also: Perry Cook’s DigiDoo. I’m familiar with the instrument, but couldn’t find any good documentation online; if someone has any (or, if Perry is out there reading), send it our way. The more digital digeridoos, the merrier!

The mda-vst collection of effects has been a long-time favorite for me. It’s a set of no-nonsense, unique, simple effects, just useful stuff that doesn’t have any unnecessary bells and whistles. Oh, yeah – and it’s free, making an easy way to fill out your effect arsenal. But until recently, the collection was proprietary freeware. Now, it’s GPL-licensed open source for Mac and Windows.

Included: multi-band distortion, drum replacement, amp and speaker simulators, de-essing, degrading, delay, detune, dither, dub delay, compressor/limiter/gate, envelope following stereo imaging and simulation, a Leslie simulator, multi-band compression, an overdrive, a really insane pitch changer, a 3D panner, a sub-bass synth, a couple of vocoders with different numbers of bands, test tone creator, flanger, pitch tracker, and more.

I imagine the access to code for these things could help people launch their own effects projects. And as Windows VSTs, it can run easily in Linux hosts that support that format, too.

http://mda.smartelectronix.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mda-vst/

Thanks to Marc Resibois for the tip. And you budding C coders out there, if you dig into the code, let us know.