I’m saddened to learn of the death of Richard Lainhart, the New York-based composer and artist who has been inseparable from the experimental electronic scene for many years. I knew Richard to be a gentle and imaginative soul, an inventive technologist, someone capable of dreaming up endless soundscapes and auditory worlds. He was also a great contributor to the CDM community, including playing one of the early installments of Handmade Music at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn. (Photo above; full video at bottom.)

I think it’s fitting to illustrate Richard with a terrific self-portrait on Polaroid, one that illustrates his sense of humor and artistic adventurousness:

Richard’s wife Caroline posted a note with the news, which most of us found via Facebook:

Richard Lainhart February 14, 1953 – December 30, 2011

Dear friends of Richard,
It is with a heavy heart that I that I must tell you Richard Lainhart, composer, musician, technologist, filmmaker, and digital artisan died Friday, December 30, 2011.

On December 17, Richard complained of pains in his side and was admitted to the hospital for tests which showed an intestinal cancer. He was operated on on December 21. After the surgery (which showed the cancer had not spread), there were infectious complications which took his life on December 30.

He struggled valiantly to overcome his infection, but it was not to be. We are all in shock and cannot grasp the idea of his not making music, talking music, teaching, posting and playing.

Caroline Meyers
Richard Lainhart’s wife

Richard leaves behind a massive body of work and digital footprints; I’ve selected some of those below, including music, a wonderful set of images working with digital manipulation and Polaroids via Flickr, and his series on creative sound design tutorials.

Playing Messiaen:

Audiovisual work:

Richard’s most recent album, via Bandcamp:

Most recent SoundCloud contributions, including the winds after Tropical Storm Irene (that sound certainly is part of my sonic memory of 2011)

Sounds of my World – Post-Irene Winds 8-28-11 by rlainhart

200e-Continuum Percussive Study 2 by rlainhart

Sounds of my world – Rainforest V, New York Electronic Art Festival, 7-30-11 by rlainhart

I adore his photographic work:

A bio:

Richard Lainhart is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker – a digital artisan who works with sonic and visual data. Since childhood, he’s been interested in natural processes such as waves, flames and clouds, in harmonics and harmony, and in creative interactions with machines, using them as compositional methods to present sounds and images that are as beautiful as he can make them.

Lainhart studied composition and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at the State University of New York at Albany. He has composed music for film, television, CD-ROMs, interactive applications, and the Web. His compositions have been performed in the US, England, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Recordings of his music have appeared on the Periodic Music, Vacant Lot, XI Records, Airglow Music, Tobira Records, and ExOvo labels. As an active performer, Lainhart has appeared in public approximately 2000 times. Besides performing his own work, he has worked and performed with John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, David Berhman, and Jordan Rudess, among many others. He has composed over 100 electronic and acoustic works. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation to contribute a work to New York Soundscape.

Lainhart’s animations and short films have been shown at festivals in the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, and Korea, and online at ResFest, The New Venue, The Bitscreen, and Streaming Cinema 2.0. His film “A Haiku Setting” won awards in several categories at the 2002 International Festival of Cinema and Technology in Toronto. In 2009, he was awarded a Film & Media grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for “No Other Time”, full-length intermedia performance designed for a large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics with four-channel playback, and high-definition computer-animated film projection.

quotes

“Lainhart crafts sounds in a tonal, musical fashion – sustained tones, drones, melodic fragments – and electronically manipulates them into beautiful tapestries of sound.” (Waterfront Week)

[His] “music reflects the spirit of possibility that once defined electronic music, bringing with it a sense of past, present and future that transcends time, technology and cultural assumptions. The spell- binding music seemed to evoke feelings that can’t quite be named, and suggest music I might rather imagine for myself in silence than trust most composers to compose.” (The Village Voice).

“He’s evolved a singular vision as a composer, performer and engineer of darkly seductive minimalism.” (Peter Marsh, BBC)

And here is Richard’s performance for us at Handmade Music on the Buchla 200e synth and Continuum Fingerboard, from 2007:

http://www.otownmedia.com
http://www.vimeo.com/rlainhart
http://www.youtube.com/rlainhart
http://richardlainhart.bandcamp.com/
http://soundcloud.com/rlainhart
http://twitter.com/rlainhart
http://www.facebook.com/rlainhart
http://www.downloadplatform.com/richard_lainhart

You’ll find plenty of contact mic tutorials floating around the Web, but bassling (Jason Richardson) – working with a learned technique – has what I think is a really nice example, one that sounds really good. It’s easy to do, but unlike a popular tutorial (and one I’ve tried myself), you won’t wind up dis-assembling a Radio Shack piezo speaker. The result is an inexpensive, versatile microphone that will happily go places your conventional mic won’t, giving you new possibilities for sampling and sound design.

bassling credits his source:

This technique was taught to me by Alan Lamb when we worked together as part of the 2006 Unsound Festival. He’d developed this approach for recording ‘the wires,’ a large-scale aeolian harp modeled on telegraph poles he recorded in Western Australia.

Full tutorial:
How to make contact microphones [Bassling / Selectronica blog]

Here’s what it sounds like:
Piezo contact mic demonstration using a biscuit tin as a hand drum by bassling

I’d love to hear from readers: have you built contact mics? Which technique worked best for you?

And, if you try this one, any suggestions on various suppliers for the piezo crystal part itself? (Particularly in the US, Germany and continental Europe, UK, Japan, other places we have lots of readers.)

More:
Creme Dementia’s handmade bottle cap mics, on GetLoFi
Tutorials on the “Radio Shack” approach (though I like the one above better):
furious contact microphone assembly
Make a DIY Contact Microphone

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)

God Bless Russian engineering. As of this summer, it’s the only ticket to and from our space station, via a capsule that Just Works. It gaves us the very first electronic instrument (thanks, Professor Theremin). And it gives us an insane music tracker slash production tool slash soft synth selection slash modular hosting environment that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, Palm, Windows Mobile (yes, you’re reading this list right), and now iOS and iPad.

Well, don’t just thank Russian engineering. Thank Alex Zolotov, who sends along his latest work. Highlights:

• Waveform drawing
• A drum synth
• Sample recording
• Side chain compression (top)
• iPad MIDI keyboard support (second from top)

Fortunately, if you’re not a mad scientist, we’ve got a lineup of videos that show you what all of this does and how to get started with this eminently affordable, insanely powerful tool. (Cue someone complaining in comments that they can’t read the interface, etc. Uh… well, you can’t have everything, eh? Bifocals?)

And in case you don’t believe this is a music tool, we even have some music created in it. (Actually creating digital music – interesting.)

Now, let’s Crash Adobe Flash(TM) with a bunch of videos:

More New Features

Where to Start

And yes, even where to start performing live on an iPhone / iPod touch:

More video tutorials:

SunVox Video Tutorials @ warmplace.ru Forum

Official SunVox page:
http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

In the ongoing struggle to make a laptop into an instrument, there’s inevitably the scramble onstage (or even in a studio) to get everything primed and ready to play. You want to adjust settings, launch certain applications, and generally get your laptop ready for actual music making.

Wouldn’t it be nice to make all of that happen automatically, magically, instantly, and robotically? It is, after all, a machine. (They’re supposed to be working for us, I’m told, assuming they’re following the Three Laws.)

Martin Delaney, London-based Ableton Live trainer, has put together a nice tutorial for production education center Dubspot with one way of accomplishing that using Apple’s free Automator. I was always a fan of Automator, particularly in its use in the workflows for the Soundtrack Pro audio editor from Apple, but it seems like almost no one else (Apple included) seems to remember it’s there. So here’s a way to put it to some free, powerful use.

Of course, there are probably other ways of accomplishing this – shell scripts and the like – if anyone wants to suggest something. Automator has the advantage of some serious ease of use.

Have a look, and download this set of Automator actions free:
Video Tutorial: Simplify Your Ableton Workflow Using Apple’s Automator [Dubspot]

Whether you’re an absolute beginner – or just want to help turn on a friend or bandmate to computer music production – starting at the very beginning is indeed a very good place to start. So, it’s nice to see Ableton’s official channel this month covering the very first steps of working with their flagship Ableton Live.

In fact, even if you don’t own Live, you can make use of the demo version and try this out. I typically find that getting audio interfaces working properly is the biggest hurdle for first-time music users. (Okay, sometimes it stumps us advanced folk, too, but ideally we have it working!)

There are many commercial online training services for Live, but since spending more cash may be a disincentive to getting things going, a free videos are an ideal way to get a taste. (Then, when you’re ready, schools like Dubspot and training series like MacProVideo – the latter relevant to Windows users, too – can get you going, just to name a couple.)

Huston Singletary, the clinician in this video, is one of the most knowledgeable Live experts inside or outside Ableton – and a really nice guy, to boot – so I look forward to his series.

A parallel discussion in a Live group on LinkedIn got some similar ideas going. Much to my delight, that included not just the generic stuff, but also how to work with wind controllers and “glitch up your sax.” Here are some more videos for you:

NYC-based training house Dubspot has a ridiculous, ridiculous number of training sessions — check the Dubspot channel, choose Playlists, and then Ableton Live. But since the theme here is supposed to be getting started, I’ll be choosy.

Thavius Beck, one of my other favorite Ableton clinicians, covers the basics of chopping – an ideal place to get started once you have worked out how to record:

Mike Hatsis covers keyboard shortcuts:

And as an excellent illustration of how this can all fit together, DJ Kiva shows an integrated dub performance using the APC40 controller. It’s a nice place to close here, because it shows a bit of where you can take all of your new-found skills.

Found a tutorial that’s helped you get starting with Ableton Live? Specific software for which you’d like to see a beginning tutorial – or, perhaps, that hasn’t been covered to death in the way that Ableton has? Basic techniques you’d like to learn that aren’t specific to a certain tool?

Let us know in comments, or contact us directly.

365 Days of Knowledge! Lastly, the best free resource for learning Live I’ve ever seen – more tips than anywhere else, more useful beginner knowledge than anywhere else, and the most you could hope to get free even with a manual included?

http://www.heatercore.net/livetipslist.html

May has brought two new Web projects from manufacturers – one a titan name from analog hardware, another the king of the software studio. In each, the product itself is downplayed to focus on artists actually making music. That means if you’re looking to kick off your summer music making with a little inspiration, you’ve got some video to watch, and not just the usual gear lust. I don’t think I can be an entirely objective judge of websites, since I do work for The Internet, but that seems like a good trend. (So, yes, I’m not only being partial to Moog and Props here – I always welcome real musical discussion from the folks who make our music tools!)

First off, Moog has a much-welcome rebuild of their previous site, replacing a hard-to-navigate kludge with tiny images. The new site I have to say is one of the best I’ve seen yet from a vendor. Of course, it’s the actual content we still care about. For that, turn to a lavish legacy section. (You can even reminisce about the year 2000 and those heady Big Briar days.)

The nicest feature – back to the idea of getting to the music – promises to be the Sound Studio. First up is The Dandy Warhols, surrounded of course by tasty Moog gear. They have a mixed lineup coming – and don’t worry; that includes the likes of Thereminist Dorit Chrysler, lest you think Moog is abandoning their synthy roots. Now, if they could just find a way to put the pronunciation of their name front and center. (Hint: if you sound like a cow, you’re saying it wrong. Rogue.)

Moog Sound Lab

Propellerhead has a unique approach in May’s “Music Making Month.” Hands-on how-to videos appear first as live webcasts, then on-demand YouTube clips, showing how to get into some real music making. Reason and Record are featured, of course, but the series is as much about production and performance as those tools. Check out the start of the terrific series by Josh Mobley on keyboard finger-drumming, for instance. (Skip a couple of minutes in, and check out Josh’s percussive dexterity.) Artist guests are doing Q&A and video how-to installments on everything from control voltage to sequencing to songwriting, and it looks like there’s a nice artist/tech balance. I like the first week’s videos; tune in for more to come. (This also, though, confirms some of my reservations about the “Like” button; I wouldn’t read too much into those numbers.)

http://www.propellerheads.se/

There are plenty of reasons to consider free software tools as part of your toolchain for music making. They might fit your budget, give you needed flexibility, allow you to use a tool driven more by development needs than commercial ones, give you tools that would otherwise lack proprietary commercial niches, allow you to run (via Linux) on a wider variety of hardware or with greater low-latency performance, or allow you to contribute more directly to a project, from documentation to actual development. And increasingly, they don’t mandate some sort of philosophical choice, either – I routinely use free software tools on the proprietary Mac OS, and use commercial, proprietary projects (Renoise) on Linux or (Harrison Mixbus) to make free projects more powerful.

What usually holds people back from free software projects is, simply, not knowing where to begin. Software in general can overwhelm with choice; free software, often, doubly so.

Fortunately, some software gurus have jumped into the legwork so you don’t have to. I have some of my own thoughts on how to put this together, but first I wanted to share the input of these esteemed colleagues. These aren’t all Linux-only – many run on Windows and Mac, too – but if you are looking for a way to put together a robust studio on Linux, they’re a great start.

Webcast, Software Picks, Knowledge Databases

If you like real-time feedback, today, you can join Red Hat’s Adam Drew in a live webcast for “Open Your World,” entitled “Making Music with FOSS.” [Free and Open Source Software] It runs at 11:00a Pacific / 2:00p Eastern, and will be archived. (I’ll update that link here.)

Learn to make open source music–Register now for a webcast with Adam Drew

Warning: I just discovered that this thing pops up an annoying survey that assumes you use JBoss. (And, heck, CDM is indirectly a Red Hat customer – the whole site runs on RHEL.) Trying to tell it you don’t use JBoss makes the whole survey fail. I’m going to try to schedule something separately, as this is … more than a little ridiculous for a music-making survey, and sadly shows Red Hat’s blind spot in regards to end users.

Day job in tech, night job in music making – yup, that’s the M.O. of quite a few people around this community.

I asked Adam for his top picks, and he explained he would demo:

• JACK / qjackctl (the GUI for JACK), the tool for interconnecting audio, MIDI, and sync between applications
• Hydrogen Drum Machine
• Ardour, the terrific, all-free DAW
• Rakarrack, a free guitar effects tool set for Linux (one new to me, in fact!)
• ZynAddSubFX, probably the most capable free standalone soft synth – ugly, but very powerful, and a candidate for a “desert island” synth.

For additional resources, there’s a superb guide on the Fedora site (one that Ubuntu actually might mirror). It’s Fedora-focused, but the advice often applies to other distributions:
Fedora 14 Musician’s Guide

Adam himself operates the FOSS Audio KBase, full of articles on configuration and individual software programs. It’s about the most productive guide I’ve seen:
FOSS Audio KBase

Adam has some more philosophical thoughts:
Webcast preview: Free and open source software for music production [opensource.com]

And you can check out Adam’s music (CC-BY-NC-ND) and Linux-oriented personal blog. I tend to be more pragmatic about some of these issues, so I’m not endorsing all the opinions on Adam’s blog, but it’s a compelling read, and often comes with useful practical advice. (Mainly – I disagree with two points, one, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that proprietary DAWs lack interoperability, and two, I’m far more pragmatic about the future of Android as a platform, mainly because I think it’s currently the best bet for the distribution of free software on mobile. Oh, I don’t trust Google, either, though – that’d be silly.)

Picks from Dave Phillips of Linux Journal

Last weekend, I had the pleasure to meet Dave Phillips for the first time. Dave, an Ohio-based musician and teacher, is bar none the most invaluable writer when it comes to free software and music-making on Linux. His series for Linux Journal in particular is a must-read.

Dave and I joined Columbia’s Brad Garton at Virginia Tech to do a bit of teaching, a bit of playing, and to enjoy the hard work of the Linux Laptop Orchestra. I’ll cover more of that soon, but in the meantime, I took some notes as Dave walked through a current take on the software for Linux that most excited him.

His picks:

• Ardour, naturally
• Ardour 3, the next-generation update to Ardour that at last adds MIDI support (and beautifully executed). Dave noted that you can and should install Ardour 3 alongside the stable Ardour, so you can test both. There are even pre-built alpha binaries, so there’s really no excuse: you could be up and running in less than the time it took to read this. (See a much earlier story from Dave on testing 3.)
• Harrison Mixbus: It’s not free software, but it is now Linux-native and supports Linux plug-ins, and it’s built on Ardour (and, in turn, contributes back to Ardour). As Dave put it, Mixbus is a mind-boggling value “from a company that thinks of a budget console as costing $100,000.”
• IR: LV2 convolution reverb. The work of Tom Szilagyi, IR is a brilliant, no-nonsense plug-in for powerful convolution effects; LV2 support means it runs beautifully in hosts like Ardour 2.8.x and higher and Renoise. I’m really grateful to Dave for turning me on to this one. woo, tangent has a nice blog entry on the plug.
• LV2, generally. Dave credits the evolving state of LV2, and the work of its principle developer, David Robillard, for a lot of innovation in free software and Linux audio. I’m surprised LV2 hasn’t gained more attention, in fact – it might be the best bet yet to finally help plug-in developers escape the shadow of formats like VST. But that’s probably a topic for another article.
• RubberBand Audio Processor Powerful time stretching tool, now on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. Available as a library, too, if you’re a developer – or just use it to mangle your audio files as an end user. Someone has already ported it to Renoise.

The focus of Dave’s presentation, though, was one tool so deep, it could easily be your only tool, for the rest of time. AVSynthesis couples visual output in OpenGL with the veritable Csound sound and composition engine. It includes built-in sequencing capabilities, basic sound generators (themselves written in Csound), envelopes and modulation, the powerful MatrixSynthMod instrument, MIDI control, and effects (phasers, choruses, filter, waveguide filter, and so on). There’s shader support on the graphics side, too. The result: based on built-in building blocks or, if you’re adventurous, your own code, you can produce 3D audiovisual musical-eye candy performances. I hope we’ll take more look at this soon; the one question that came up repeatedly – and that Dave couldn’t answer yet – was what the workflow might be for adding your own Csound creations. (The package itself is built in Java.)

More information:
http://www.avsynthesis.net/
AVSynthesis: Blending Light and Sound with OpenGL and Csound5 [Dave in Linux Journal]

AVSynthesis Tour 1

Composing With Csound In AVSynthesis [Dave in Csound Journal]

Lest you think we’re all a bunch of “neckbeard” Marxist free software revolutionaries, though, Dave – who’s had drinks with Stallman on occasion – was also full of questions about Mac OS and curious about it for his own music making. I think largely we’re all technologically curious; if anything, the only people I’ve met who have gotten really emotional are the people who mistrust free software, perhaps because they just need to loosen up and accept that something really can be free.

But as with proprietary software, I think the biggest danger with Linux and free software is that you can become overwhelmed with choices rather than focusing on music. That’s part of why I find these choices so appealing: deep, capable, well-designed, and rock-solid, I’ve found them to be eminently musical. Some of the best demonstrate that free software can provide choice – not, as many believe, only compromise. And I see absolutely no reason that they can’t coexist with other popular proprietary options in your studio. You may not be ready to leap into Linux, but especially given that by now you’ve likely accumulated either extra machines or machines that can easily dual-boot, there’s no reason not to add these free tools to your arsenal.

Got favorites of your own? Let us know; I’ll continue to feature this stuff in coming days.

Native Instruments has a new synth based on the Reaktor engine, and it’s one about which to be genuinely excited. Taking additive synthesis to a new conceptual level, it works with the concept of per-partial control but adds functions like wavetables, enveloping, and effects to each partial individually. The result is a synth that gets sonically surprising in a hurry, and it represents the sort of multi-dimensional thinking I hope catches on in synthesis.

In a step forward for Reaktor, this synth doesn’t just sound different – it looks different, too. Whereas incredible sonic creations have been hidden too often in software behind banks of bland, faux knobs, Razor’s dynamic spectral display makes both the partials and their transformation in time clear and hypnotically beautiful.

Under the hood, the project packs some 320 partials and internal sound shaping, dual filter sections with 20 filter types, “dissonance effect” modulation, and in case your mind remained somehow unbent, a 34-band vocoder. There’s also a genre-spanning preset library, though the ubiquity of NI tools in Dubstep have caused people to already make that connection. (Fine. Spite them. Go make something that doesn’t sound like any recognizable genre. You have my blessing.)

The software is the result of a collaboration with artist Errorsmith, and represents an ongoing series of artist co-produced software releases from the Berlin-based Native Instruments. For his part, Errorsmith (also part of MMM and Smith n Hack) has been a forward-thinking Berlin staple for many years, and a DIYer at heart, combining just these sorts of modular monsters in his own work. What strikes me is that, working with NI, he’s come up with something that could be widely used. It’s one thing to create a strange creation for yourself, and there’s something even strangely pleasing about making it idiosyncratic. Making a tool that a wide audience can use to vastly-differing results is another matter entirely.

Thanks to advance availability, NI has already got some buzz going around the creation, so we’ve got a tutorial and free loops from our friends to share with you.

Steve Horelick, the man who gave us the Reading Rainbow theme song on his Fairlight CMI and then went on to make Logic Environments that produce otherworldly musical landscapes, has his own take. He walks through the interface one module at a time. Steve does not work for NI – this is what it sounds like when he’s excited about something. Listen closely to what he’s saying, breathlessly, because as always Steve has immediate, sharp insights into what everything’s for and why it matters. If you pay attention, class, you’ll learn something. (Let me say it again: this is someone who finds the Logic Environment intuitive, and can explain it to others. Apologies to Apple and Emagic veterans, but that has to count for something big.)

Updated: In comments, Random Chance does spot two errors in the video – hey, this thing is barely out, so I know it’s easy enough to make mistakes:

The spectrum display does not show the waveform, but rather the real (as in real numbers) spectrum with time as a thrown in as a third axis. And filtering is precisely altering the spectral shape (although you may as well call every signal transducer a filter).

I concur, but otherwise have some patience with Steve’s narrative style (people either hate it or love it), and it’s a solid walkthrough of the modules and why they matter.

Steve also creates training for, and now helms, the massive training site Macprovideo, which in turn has its own blog now, well worth reading:
http://www.macprovideo.com/blog/

Francis Preve, fellow Keyboard writer who just launched his new Academik label last week (I was grateful to be there armed with a laptop and KAOSS Quad to open the celebrations), is prolific as always. He has two posts up on Razor, and also tells CDM he’s got some free loops for you to grab built with Razor:

With its über-pretty FFT display of harmonic motion, tons of really unique filters and a couple of beat-synced LFOs, RAZOR makes a deep cut into additive synthesis territory (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun).

So, I decided to beat everyone to the punch and drop a RAZOR-edged free loop six-pack on ya, so you can get a taste for yourself.

Tech notes and linkage after the jump…

Tech notes:
- Everything’s in the key of C minor-ish.
- All loops are 128 BPM.
- All loops are eight bars long.

Download: NI RAZOR Loop Six-pack [Francis Preve]

Steve Horelick: Francis has a life-sized Yoda figure in his studio, and the force is strong with him. (Seriously.) Synth programming deathmatch, anyone? New York versus Texas?

All in all, that should give you somewhere to start if you’re interested in Razor. I’ll be curious to hear what people do with it. If you’ve got questions you’d like to direct to NI, or if you’d like to hear more about how this instrument was produced, let us know.

As we’ve been looking at live looper options from BOSS and VOX, Mike Nelson from Boomerang points us to his company’s live-oriented loopers, boutique-made in Texas. And they look as delicious as Texas BBQ.

What’s unique about the Boomerang III “phrase sampler” is just how much it can do with loops once recorded, with computer-like manipulation of your samples. You can undo and redo, play back one-shots, stutter, re-sample, line up loops in sequence, play up to four loops as once, sync to tempo, drift to different tempos, fade, play at half speed, and play in reverse. (Software makers, take note.)

Of course, you could do all of this with a computer, but having this in a dedicated box has a lot of appeal, particularly if you’re an instrumentalist. There’s also expression volume control support. And your computer doesn’t have a “Bonus” button. (Well, mine doesn’t, anyway.)

There’s a lot more; see the full specs:
Boomerang® III Phrase Sampler

The one thing I’m looking for that isn’t here yet – and that would help integrate this with a laptop setup, if you so choose – is expanded MIDI support. Right now, you can use MIDI to upgrade the firmware, but can you control the looper with MIDI? Mike says:

Not yet. The next MIDI addition will be the ability to respond to a companion pedal, called the Side Car, that will be released in about 2 months. It will allow all of the III’s many functions to be available by foot control at once.

See our image of the new front panel below.

You can get the Boomerang III from your local dealer; street price in the US is well under US$500. That’s a premium versus the larger brands, but you get what looks like a unique pedal, and it’s made in Texas. Now, that’s right, you may not be from Texas, but I hear Texas wants you anyway.

Without further ado, the promised videos — first, from the makers:

And here’s an independent hands-on review: