Sound technology pioneer Bob Moog’s birthday is May 23, and just about the whole Web will be in on the celebration.

Play Google like a Minimoog: Google’s Doodle, the image you see on their homepage, is one of their best yet: it’s a fully interactive, playable Minimoog synthesizer. You can even record and playback little musical sketches and share with friends. Since the Earth is round, Google Japan gets an early scoop. (Yes, the Moog sun will rise first on the land of Roland, Yamaha, and KORG.)

Bonus (for Web nerds): this all uses the Web Audio API, which promises to bring real sound into the browser. Check out the technical details on html5audio.org, but if you love synths, and you use the Internet, this is good news.

Get swag, save cash, benefit the Moog Foundation: Rags and riches will be on sale for your shopping pleasure, including a benefit for the Moog Foundation on Moog-logo merchandise and clothes, with 50% of proceeds going to the Foundation’s educational and historical mission, which goes far beyond just Bob Moog to synthesis in general. That one-day birthday sale includes the lovely new Moog travel mug (I need one, after mine sadly broke in the mail to Germany), and a huge knob on a t-shirt (nice). See image, below.

Moog Music is also discounting their iOS apps, in case you missed discount pricing on their superb Animoog synth.

I Want My Moog TV. But let’s get back to the man himself, with a series of videos shared by the folks at Moog Music.

From an 80s BBC TV special, here’s Bob Moog demonstrating the synthesizer:

Moog Music are painting their spiritual father and founder’s image on their offices in North Carolina; see a timelapse of this gorgeous mural:

And in the sweetest gesture for the day:

To #celebratebob on what would have been his his 78th birthday local Asheville piano teacher, Kim Roney, brought two of her pupils to the Moog Store to perform a song in celebration of Bob Moog’s life and legacy. Bob Moog is still inspiring creative exploration in children of all ages. Thank you Dr. Moog, Happy Birthday! How has Bob Moog inspired you? #celebratebob

Finally, here’s a five-part series on synthesis fundamentals that uses the Moog Voyager. That seems, perhaps, the best way to celebrate Bob Moog’s legacy: it’s a chance to learn ideas about sound that can allow you to unlock the world of electronic music. With that knowledge, you can use any synthesis, anywhere, with or without a Moog logo on it – or use your imagination to invent the next great music technology, something Bob Moog I’m sure would have loved to see you build.

Moog Music Inc. is proud to present Dr. Joseph Akins’ five part series on the fundamentals of synthesizer programming. Dr. Akins is an associate professor at Middle Tennessee State University and strives to teach his students a complete understanding of synthesizers and computers as tools for modern music production. In this five part series Dr. Akins uses a Voyager to teach the process through which a synthesizer’s sound is generated and the techniques needed to program your own sounds and sonic experiments. In part one of this five part series Dr. Akins gives a brief history of synthesizers, goes over basic synthesizer theory, and overviews basic signal flow.

http://www.moogfoundation.org/

Some of you are probably already sitting on top of a Max for Live license for your copy of Ableton Live. It’s there, just waiting to do … something. Maybe you’ve loaded one of the many extraordinary patches out there – good move. But as for building your own patches, you may easily have become overwhelmed by choice. Max is a blank slate, and a blank slate that can do everything can make it hard to start with anything.

It’s easy to overlook simple first steps. Max was originally built just to do simple math on messages, before it even had audio capabilities. So that means simple message processing is a great place to start. The Ableton Cookbook’s Anthony Arroyo introduces Max for Live in just that fashion, by starting you out building an arpeggiator. No fancy granular audio processing, no mind-bending processing of the event engine in Live – just some simple, old-fashioned arithmetic. You’ll learn MIDI in, MIDI out, monitoring what’s going on, basic math, and sliders. You can always go deeper after that.

This is the first of more videos to come, all promising to focus on simple devices; I’m curious to see where they go.

Not quite your speed? Here are two more intro tutorials – and one advanced tutorial – to get you going.

Ready to get a little advanced? It’s an older video, but still relevant to new versions of Live – don’t let the date stop you. Here, a serious Max for Live guru goes deep into spectral mixing. It’s not at all the simple, step-by-step approach I’ve just endorsed, but … hey, you’re still with me, and this is fun. Description:

In this video new addition to the Dubspot team Dave Linnenbank, creator of Puremagnetik’s Max Fuel collection of patches for Ableton and Cycling 74′s Max For Live walks us through his Spectral Mixer patch. It allows you to adjust the volume of the loud, medium and quiet parts of a sound and create some very interesting sounds.

Blog post and downloads: Max for Live Tutorial :: ‘Spectral Mixer’ [Dubspot Blog]

“So,” you say, “I’ve got a … and I want to connect it to a … to make music. How do I do that?”

One strong answer to that question, if you’ve got a Mac, is junXion. Developed by the landmark audio research laboratory STEIM – a hotspot in Amsterdam that for years has been imagining new ways of making music by connecting things to other things – it got a big update recently.

It takes lots of the inputs you might imagine (joysticks, mice, touchscreens, MIDI, OpenSoundControl, audio, Arduino-powered hardware and all of its sensors, and video sensing) and connects it to a lot of the outputs you might imagine (using MIDI or OSC). You can set up rules in between the input and output to make that connection musically meaningful.

OSC input and output wasn’t entirely optimal in past versions; a total rewrite now makes it work with useful OSC sources like the iOS TouchOSC and Lemur apps. You get nifty new Actions, like remote mouse control. You can use a Nintendo Wii “Wiimote”‘s infrared-sesnsing capabilities and vibration support. If you’re using video, you can now support multiple “blobs.” And the whole app promises to run faster and look better, with more help tags in the UI, and added stability.

75 € for the full version. You need Mac OS X 10.5 or later, including the latest 10.7 Lion. (Upgrades for version 4 are free; Lite users can upgrade for 60 €.)

http://steim.org/product/junxion/

Of course, talking about this doesn’t really make much sense; it’s better to see it in action. We have a whole bunch of videos from the folks at STEIM showing features like Wii and joystick control and video sensing from a camera – plus a couple of fascinating demo/tutorials submitted by users.

Let’s watch, shall we?

Via https://vimeo.com/steim/videos

Far from the walls of STEIM, though, intrepid users have concocted their own demos. Here’s a look at controlling Reason with a Wiimote:

Here’s a live performance, also controlled by Wiimote, in the modular live environment AudioMulch. The creator writes:

A basic soundscape in AudioMulch controlled by two Wii remotes via JunXion IV.

Buttons in Wii Remotes control: start and stop buttons, presets of the main mixer, transient parameter of the granulator, frequency of the pulsecomb_1 (processing the drum), a junxion-timer controlling the volume of the granulator.

X-Y-Z accelerators control: 10 harmonics of a frequency generator, parameters of the rissettone

And yes, a camera can be a Theremin:

Got your own solution using junXion – or another tool? We’d love to hear about it.

See also two fine Mac-only tools:
Osculator [Much like junXion, supports nearly anything as an input, adds advanced OSC routing]
ControllerMate [not music-specific, but very powerful modular game input utility]

In fact, what’s largely missing is easy solutions on Windows and Linux, though you can roll your own with a free tool like Pd, which also supports HID, Arduino, video, and the like.

Get a whole new Live, for free. Smart users can make it happen.

Sure, just a mere mention of Ableton can bring out angry hordes of Live users waiting for whatever they imagine they want out of Live 9. We can’t comment on Ableton’s internal development process. So, why not instead make Ableton new for yourself – no need to pay for anything, all with free downloads, free tips, and more musical power? (Hint: I do expect an upgrade from Ableton – I, uh, don’t think they’ve abandoned their development efforts – but when you can upgrade your own music making, it’s even better.)

Our friend AfroDJMac, NYC-based producer and musician, has been producing amazing Live Packs over the past year. (In fact, while I expect I frightened away any non-Live-users with this headline, the audio is perfectly usable in any software you like.) Setting himself the ambitious goal of producing one Live pack every single week, he’s done the unthinkable. One year later, he has 52 Live Packs, all free giveaways on his site, all wonderful and unique. Everything conceivable and inconceivable is there: Commodore 64 drums, a Casio MT-68, Justin Bieber (third-ever mention of Justin on this site), water bottles turned into synths, Christmas Trees, Game Boys, glitches and resampling and bizarre sounds, Melodicas and Fenders, the works.

Grab #52 – built with the Korg iMS-20 app for the iPad as a starting point – then lose hours perusing all the other entries.

1 YEAR OF ABLETON LIVE PACKS! AFRODJRACK #52 “KORG-ASBORD”

(I read that initially as SAT word “abscond,” as in “I absconded with your MS-20; I’m very sorry.” If someone can make that pack, let me know.)

So, when you’ve pulled off those 52 packs, how do you one-up yourself? How about by starting all over again with a weekly series – this time, with two-minute video tips. (Seriously, man, can you let us know what you’re having for breakfast?) Episode #1: having learned the lesson the hard way, our hero AfroDJMac remaps the “stop” button on his APC to avoid utterly destroying a live set. (Doh!) Video:

2 MINUTE ABLETON TIP #1: REMAP DANGEROUS CONTROLS

Still hungry for more? We turn, then, to another friend, Austin, Texas-based Francis Prève. When we last joined Fran (who I hear turned 23 yesterday, making him one year older than me), we got to download via Vulcan Mind Meld and the Internet a wealth of tips, sounds, and Live Packs:

A World of Sounds: Academik’s Francis Preve Shares Label’s Music, Studio Advice, Samples for Live

Well, Fran didn’t stop there. His latest addition is a really cool patch, not so much because it manages to steal a sound design trick from Sweden’s OP-1 synth and Sweden’s Swedish House Mafia (though that is nice), as much as because the resulting use of Racks to morph from kicks to leads could help you find all sorts of new instrumental effects. Go. Download. Enjoy:

Free Ableton Instrument: One Trick Pwnage [Francis Prève blóg]

I do look forward to what’s coming in software upgrades – but I can’t wait to upgrade my own music-making first. Go forth. May your set not coming to a screeching halt as you play, may the white noise generator always be at your back.

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+]

Too much comment here will spoil the fun, so enjoy – particularly with Dubstep how-to videos becoming, bizarrely, some of the most viral things online. (Hmmm… it’s almost like kids are interested in producing a wildly-popular music genre. Strange. But I hope you’ll stick around for CDM’s new Csound Drones That Hurt Your Ears series, comi– hey, where did everyone go?)

I at least can see lovers and haters of the genre now known as “dubstep” (not to be confused with the previous genre known as dubstep) finding this amusing. But should I turn off comments, just in case?

Thanks to Berliner and serious sonic scientist Martin Backes for the find. Yes, Martin, I am stalking your Facebook page. In the blogger “journalism” field, we call that “research.”

Apple yesterday described their iPad as “this magical pane of glass that can become anything you want it to be.” So – how about making mobile devices into what you want it to be?

With the help of author Peter Brinkmann and publisher O’Reilly, we’d like to give you a taste of Peter’s new book, Making Musical Apps: Real-time audio synthesis on Android and iOS. Imagining that a lot of you are especially curious about iOS, we’ll include the chapter on how to get started with development. It really gives you a sense of how easy this can be; the challenge is, as it should be, coming up with musical ideas. And Apple did say that they thought that technology was at its best when it was “invisible,” not when it was “inaudible.” So let’s make it make some noise.

(Android developers, libpd actually got its start on Android and runs quite well even on very primitive Android handsets, so consider this a sample; the full book – and the libpd site – include loads of examples on the Android side, too. In fact, because libpd works basically identically on the two platforms, it’s a great choice for making cross-platform development easier.)

In this excerpt, Peter covers:

• How to set up your development environment
• Starting a project with Xcode, and including Pd
• How to make a Pd patch run in your app
• Making the Pd patch and your UI connect with each other (here, from the app’s UI to Pd; the book covers both directions)

In fact, in just a few pages, you’ll have a working guitar tuner for iOS. Have a look:

Read it on CDM’s Scribd page:

Making Musical Apps (Excerpt: How to Build a Music App for iOS)

Direct PDF download link, hosted by CDM (please don’t link to this file directly):
Making Musical Apps (Excerpt) [PDF]

I’ve read an advance copy of the whole book, and my review is simple: if you’re curious about this stuff, get this book. Peter’s style is friendly and precise; no technical detail is left out, and yet those details aren’t overwhelming. The book can be accessible to those new to development, which is essential for a title that’s likely to be read by people who are used to Pd, but dipping their toes into Java and Objective-C for the first time in order to get their patches running on a device.

Ready for the full book?

Get a printed copy on Amazon:

Or read the Kindle edition:

For multi-platform epub, mobi, and PDF formats, head straight to the O’Reilly page:
Making Musical Apps [shop.oreilly.com]

http://libpd.cc/read-the-book/

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)