Here’s someone who really, really loves Native Instruments’ B4 (II) software rendition of the Hammond B3 organ. The work of Markus Berger, this dead-ringer for a real B3 is actually a carefully crafted replica with elaborate MIDI control inside. The body is built by hand from cherry wood. Electronics were prototyped with the open source Arduino platform and implemented with electronics from Doepfer, then finished with manuals (that’s “keys” for you non-organists) from Fatar (as seen in Nord’s organs). Authentic-style drawbars finish the project. Correction: I got my wires crossed and originally claimed this had Fatar drawbars, but it’s Fatar manuals. Thanks to comments for spotting that.

The integration of the hardware design with the B4 is extraordinary: the creator notes that every single function is perfectly replicated, so you never have to touch a mouse or look at a screen. Of course, you can then make meticulous models tweaked on the B4 software that wouldn’t have been possible on the original hardware – and this hardware, while substantial, should be dramatically lighter.

More on those custom electronics:

The main controller electronics were actually custom developed and prototyped with Arduino. They were complemented by electronics from Doepfer for the two manuals.

Most of the electronics had to be custom developed as there was and still is nothing available to cover all the functionality of a classic Hammond B3 with the full drawbars set, preset keys and all the switches.

And yes, the bottom line is that this puts every controller for everything I’ve ever seen to shame. Thanks to Germany-based Twitter reader tillephone for sending this my way.

B4 Controller Project Page

I hesitate to even suggest this, but – is a Leslie cabinet next?

More photos after the jump:

The iPhone and iPod touch are getting more in the way of playable software instruments that could ease its transformation into a handheld idea-capturing gadget. noise.io lays claim to being the first full-featured soft synth on the platform, with unusual FM synthesis control – and I still like the fact that it isn’t anything like most soft synths on your PC. And of course there have been beat machines like the surprisingly capable Intua BeatMaker drum machine/suite. On mobile platforms, though, the more the merrier – especially given the bargain-basement prices. So I’m pleased to see the likes of noise.io and Beatmaker joined by two recent apps.

Released today, iSyn is a mini-suite of music apps released by online retailer AudioMIDI.com and a known quantity in soft synth design — VirSyn, makers of Tera and Cube. I’m giving this a try now, but the feature list looks impressive:

• Touchable drum pads, keyboard
• Three-track sequencer: two virtual analog synth tracks, one drum track
• Programmable virtual analog synths with tilt, X/Y pad for modulation control
• Sample playback drum machines pre-loaded with 808, 909, synth drums, other retro kits

It’s a little vanilla compared to noise.io – though the more conventional UI may be welcome to some for the same reason. It’s apparently missing the ability to use your own drum sets as on the iDrum app (with the desktop app) and Beatmaker. But it nonetheless looks promising, even a little reminiscent of the Korg DS-10 for Nintendo DS in presenting a simple combination of 2 synths and 1 kit.

Oh, yeah — and it’s a quite-reasonable $4.99.

Full information, videos, forum and such at the app site:

iSynApp.com

A Strummable Virtual Guitarist

(Ocarina killer? Hmmm… Amidio / Smule smackdown, perhaps?)

In a different vein, Star Guitar, from the makers of noise.io, simulates a guitar in software, down to passable imitation of the sound and strumming patterns. Tap the chords you want, choose a style and timbre, and Star Guitar produces accompaniment that’s more than good enough to noodle with song ideas. It could be a huge boon to songwriters, especially with mic input for iPhone and second-gen iPod touch.

The sounds are similar to Steinberg’s Virtual Guitarist, but the developers at Amidio get the idea right: a virtual guitarist makes a lot more sense when it fits in your pocket and costs $3.99. Star Guitar is ideal for quickly sketching out an idea while laying on a hotel bed or working out a new chord progression on the bus. The strums are mechanical, to be sure, but realistic enough to get an idea flowing. A metronome means it can even become a practice tool. Not being a guitarist, I was surprised to find myself trying new ideas I might not have sitting at a piano. (But where’s the flat-13 button?)

Details on this and other apps:
Amidio [makers of Star Guitar, noise.io]

And that to me is ultimately the way in which these apps start to make sense. Transposed to a mobile device, the instruments take on a different meaning, and you use them in different ways.

The challenge is also on to me to provide these kinds of capabilities on other mobiles. The Google Android currently lacks real-time synthesis capabilities – something that otherwise should be perfectly workable, even without a floating-point unit onboard (as on the G1). As far as I know, the Palm Pre SDK lacks these capabilities, too. Windows Mobile has long been capable of such things, but the instability of that platform, middling handset quality, and other problems have prevented breakout synth hits. So while I really like the idea of something like Android, it’ll be interesting to see if it can deliver these kinds of features. (In fairness, the iPhone didn’t even have an SDK in its early months, so we’ll see.) I raise the point only because I think there is great potential to making music way, way out of the studio.

We’ll have some hands-on tests of these apps and a guide to actual music workflows on the iPod touch and iPhone. So here’s a question: how would you like us to cover these apps? (I’m thinking hands-on tips for actual production, rather than just some dry reviews or round-ups.) And if you could wish for any mobile music app, what would it be?

What do you do if Tascam lets you down, and you’re a sound house dependent on their GigaStudio/GigSampler player? For major soundware development house SONiVOX, the answer was: make your own software.

Somerville, Mass-based SONiVOX has announced “announced the existence” of an in-house software development team. Read: the team has been there already, but they haven’t wanted to talk about it until news broke that Tascam’s GigaStudio was going away.

SONiVOX says they have developed “a universally compatible player technology that focus on intelligent MIDI performance, intuitive interfaces, and the highest sonic fidelity.” It will support not only SONiVOX’s own products, but third party-products, as well. SONiVOX points out their experience working with clients like Motorola, Analog Devices, and Google, on sound software.

The press release apparently went out on Friday, but I missed it. Now, with it clear that Giga is dead, the news makes more sense. Peter Alexander at Film Music Magazine, who also broke the GigaStudio discontinuation story, correctly read the signs as early as Monday. He has a long, excellent opinion piece on that site that laments Tascam’s failure to develop their own, long-promised player. He wrote then:

“SONiVOX, an American company substantively smaller than either Tascam or their publicly traded parent, TEAC, has beaten the Giant to market by creating their own dual platform player for both PC and Mac with product ready for shipping by late July early August.”

Memo: To Sample and Software Developers [Film Music Magazine]

Nor is SONiVOX alone. They join EastWest and Spectrasonics, as Peter observes, along with Garritan, whose Steinway-authorized piano instrument runs on the in-house ARIA Player. And that’s to say nothing of developers like Native Instruments, Cakewalk, Steinberg, MOTU, and Apple, all of whom might be considered soundware developers themselves, running on their own virtual instrument products.

Of course, this also illustrates just how tough the market is for any sampler, even one from a company the size of TEAC. In fact, it seems to be the independent companies who are most willing to keep fighting in that climate.

What remains to be seen is how well SONiVOX can support third parties. If they can do so affordably and effectively, you could see serious migration to their sound platform.

SONiVOX’s own virtual instruments, the first for the platform, are scheduled for release at the end of the month:

http://www.sonivoxmi.com/

Circle from Future Audio Workshop is an upcoming virtual instrument that’s gotten our attention in a big way. In terms of sound, its capabilities are familiar, if very complete. What’s different is its approach to interface design and usability, refocusing on “Flow” and ease-of-use while looking forward to new interface capabilities in touchscreens, multi-touch, and OpenSoundControl. What makes that doubly interesting is that Circle appears to embody a trend in a new generation of music software — not that it stands alone, necessarily, as much as it seems to present a glimpse via an independent developer of where things may be going.

Eoin Rossney, our new writer and contributor to the Kore minisite, got a chance to talk to FAW co-founder Gavin Burke, a fellow Irishman. We’ll have more on the instrument itself soon, but it’s an excellent, coffee-fueled discussion of instrument design in general. -PK

I had the opportunity to visit Future Audio Workshop’s office in Connemara, County Galway, Ireland to have a chat with Gavin Burke about their upcoming synth, Circle. While instrument design is a collaborative process for FAW, Gavin’s area of expertise is in Signal Processing algorithms. I wanted to talk to FAW to find out some more about how the synth came to be, the company’s ethos, and the inclusion of OSC. What I got was a fascinating insight into the world of softsynth design and a sense that a shift may be about to occur in this area. If you haven’t heard of Circle check out CDM’s preview.

Over copious amounts of coffee, Gavin told me a little bit about how FAW came to be. Having spent a long time designing synths that strive to emulate old hardware (with many of hardware’s inherent limitations creeping across into the software effort), Gavin and the guys from FAW wanted to design a synth that does away with old conventions and embraces the type of advances in usability that we have come to take for granted in interface design over the last few years.

After giving a general rundown of the instrument (for something similar, check out Sonic State’s video from Messe), Gavin took me through some of the features that make Circle unique. The main things here are in the details. Changing a modulation amount is always a horizontal mouse movement, no matter what the current value is. The LFOs include a healthy number of wave shapes, and each can be crossfaded between two waves. Each wave is variable-phase: you just click and drag the picture of the wave horizontally to change phase. There are five modulation slots, and each can contain an LFO, a sequencer or an envelope. LFO and oscillator wave shapes are represented as simple pictures which are easy to see. And there’s no right-clicking — anywhere.

FAW say they’ve tried to create a workspace that’s simple and conducive to sound design. Gavin maintains that sound design is essentially an easy practice. Watching him quickly build presets from scratch, it’s hard to disagree. He quickly built for me a “faux beatbox,” with an LFO triggering white noise as a snare, another LFO triggering an oscillator as a kick drum, and yet another modulating the rate of a sequencer, slowing down and speeding up the sequencer’s rate organically.

This isn’t to say that Circle is short on features – there are quite a number of advanced features on offer here (hard sync on wavetable oscillators, anyone?), it’s just that anything that might obstruct or distract your workflow is neatly tidied away, or at least doesn’t jump out at you. It’s clear FAW have taken a good look at what makes interface elements work well, and they’ve taken inspiration from such sources as the iPhone and… multimeters?

Interface Design

Gavin: There is a very famous book by [Apple pioneer and founding Mac team leader] Jef Raskin called ‘The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems’. The inspiration for the color-coded connections came from Raskin’s example of how a simple device such as a multimeter has very easy-to-use, color-coded cables. He describes how all of the multimeter’s functions are different. Here you’ve got these leads: one’s red and one’s grey. That’s your positive and your negative, and when you actually have color representations of things that you can connect up, that was one of the influences for Circle.

This book just goes through all those things and tells you how to do, for example, switches properly. If you look at 99% of softsynths — if not 100% of them — at the moment they haven’t done this. The reason why people like OS X, or like using a Mac, is that it’s easy to use. You never even think about all of these things, but you find that all this talk about workflow, that’s where it comes from, from this guy. [Ed.: Some of the Mac team might well dispute that, actually, as Raskin ultimately had less of an influence on the Mac interface. But if you want some radical reading on interface design, this should absolutely be on your reading list! -PK]

There’s another guy called John Maeda and he writes a book called Simplicity — ‘The Ten Rules of Simplicity‘, and that was an influence. There were other influences, ‘The Paradox of Choice’, where the more choices you have the less likely you are to make a decision about something. We took that to the level of the interface, where… if you’ve five different note-stealing algorithms, you don’t need them. You’ll only ever use one, so why have you got five? It’s like when you get a Swiss Army knife – you only ever use the knife, but it’s got a magnifying glass, a spoon, maybe three different types of bottle openers, and when you want to use the knife all these other things get in your way. We still have all the bits and pieces, but we’ve just put them down on the bottom panel or moved them out of the way so that they don’t get in the way of the basic thing, which is the sound design.

The Beginnings of FAW, and Future Frameworks

Gavin: So these were the things we were thinking about when we were starting, and we went to the guys in Germany [Christophe and Johannes] and they were also influenced by the same stuff like Maeda and Raskin. We got in contact with them, went over to Germany, spent two days with them and went for a few drinks and said we’d start up the company — the four of us just got together and did all the bits and pieces. Pierre and I moved to Ireland about a year ago and we started coding, and we had all the ideas drawn on a sheet of paper and had a think about the workflows. Then we started putting it together, and as we found that if something wasn’t working as imagined [in the workflow], we could make a change very easily.

Pierre and I were actually users as well as designing and coding [Circle] at the same time. So if we wanted to change something, we didn’t have to go through that big mechanism of making change orders and someone signing off on them. I could just say across the room, “Pierre, I don’t like this, can you change it?”

The main idea is just, you know, you’re on a computer. Why would you have a hardware panel with cables everywhere or right-clicks, all that kind of stuff? Why not show the LFO, why not put a dot on the envelope so you can see it? You know, let people see what’s actually happening rather than everything always being hidden behind the scenes. Then modulation is no longer this kind of thing that’s just ‘LFO 1 Amt’, you can actually see that the LFO’s moving.

When you can see everything on the interface, it means that you know all your options, you know what you can connect to what, and you can have ideas you wouldn’t normally have. That was another thing; keep it all on one panel. Then put the more complicated stuff down on the bottom. The other thing is to keep all the modules in drop menus as single clicks, so hopefully if there’s a touch screen around at some time, everything can be done in a very easy way.

And you start to get into it. That’s the whole idea of Flow. If you have an idea it’s very easy: you just grab the circle and drop it, rather than right-clicking and flicking between pages and that kind of thing. You’ll see some synthesizers have these modulation matrices with cryptic names like ‘KF2 to F1 in Trig.’ There should be no reason why anybody would do that in the first place. I can’t understand it. I think a lot of it has to do with the graphics frameworks, that the graphics just couldn’t do those kind of things, but now they’ve evolved to a stage where you can, and we’re taking advantage of that.

Eoin: And do you think that’s an advantage of the frameworks themselves — the languages that you’re building the software with?

Gavin: Yeah.

Eoin: Or is it that the hardware has come of age?

Gavin: It’s a bit of everything, really. If you look at a lot of the companies that started ten years ago, they’re still using all their legacy graphics frameworks, and they haven’t been thinking about all these things. We wanted to correct that a bit with what we’re doing and still be able to do sound design, because sound design isn’t complicated. It’s just that the way it’s presented makes it complicated, so we want to make it easier.

Eoin: I can’t take my eyes off that LFO…

Gavin - [laughs] Yeah, it’s hypnotizing.

Eoin: But that’s the thing about it is, it’s an engaging interface. Looking at it you just want to go in and grab it and –

Gavin: – start doing the bits and pieces. Even MIDI Learn, you know — the majority of software synthesizers at the moment, if you want to learn a control you have to go Ctrl/right-click, click through a menu, click Learn, then go over here and move that, then go back out of the learn mode. We just said — [clicks the MIDI learn button, which like Ableton Live takes just one click] — like that. That’s the way it should be, then you just turn it off again.

Extensibility & Agile Programming

Gavin - For us, because we’re using Agile development, it’s very easy for us to be responsive and to get stuff done. We don’t have to check with ten people first before we can do something. We’re [talking about] adding to Circle [over time]. So we’re maybe going to do some nice, fancy FM oscillators, and as we get feedback from people, we can make changes. During beta testing, someone wanted OSC control over the individual steps in the sequencer and to be able to use MIDI Learn with them.

Eoin: And when you talk about Agile programming, can you describe what you mean for people who aren’t familiar with it?

Gavin: It’s just a set of rules for programming. It’s quite popular at the moment, and it’s starting to gather steam. It means that people like myself, Pierre and the two guys in Germany, Kristoff and Johanne, we could do something equivalent to what a big company could just by… not having the big company there! You can actually do more. It’s not just in audio software. It’s in loads of different fields where you’ve got small groups of people who are very dedicated. With the Internet and communication, people like us can get together and start to give the big companies a run for their money in terms of features and what we can do. So that’s very interesting, and when you apply the Agile rules and whatever it starts to work.

Eoin: I saw on the website that JUCE is the platform you’re running on. [Ed.: JUCE is a C++-based class library for cross-platform audio and graphics.] What’s that about?

Gavin: JUCE is a set of controls, that’s all it is. It’s all these sliders and stuff. [He demonstrates using the mouse to program OSC program as an example.] So what Pierre uses JUCE for is he can then position knobs on the screen. There isn’t an actual editor where you can drag and drop, you have to code it in, but it’s [easy to add] a knob or panel [in code]. It just allows us to do a lot of these things, to draw a line like that (using filter indicator line as an example).

Eoin: It lets you do your job more easily?

Gavin: Exactly. All the graphics are done in Photoshop, and it also lets us do stuff like fading. We’re using vector graphics and transparency layers and [JUCE's timing features].

Eoin: So this functionality is all built into JUCE?

Gavin: Yeah, and you can do any type of program with it. There are a number of developers using this framework.

Eoin: The fact that it’s mentioned on your website, that kind of caught my eye because people don’t normally say what tools they’re using.

Gavin: Yeah, and we’ve a lot of respect for Jules [JUCE's developer], because he’s on his forum there and he maybe has, you know, 200 people there asking him questions at the same time and he’s never short with anybody.

OpenSoundControl

Gavin: We’re always thinking about what we’d like for ourselves, and personally I’ve always wanted [OSC support; see opensoundcontrol.org for more on this control protocol]. I was using this Mouse-to-OSC to test, and I was just getting the idea that it would be cool to have a single interface controlling Circles on different channels. If you want to control different plug-ins on different channels inside a host, it’s a bit complicated for the general user.

I can do it here now, I can add another Circle. Now we’ve got two Circles. But rather than having these two screens open and maybe a third one — so you’ve got three big screens open at the same time — you’ve just one screen. And you’ve got these controls assigned to the most interesting stuff on each of the synthesizers [via OSC assignments].

You’re not trying to think about MIDI and what MIDI channels you’re on and all that kind of stuff; it just keeps it nice and simple. [OSC] is where it’s heading. It’s where most people want to be; most people don’t want to [have to do MIDI mappings]. The Novation [ReMOTE SL's Automap feature] isn’t too bad, but it’s still not that easy.

Eoin:It’s something we’re interested in, because there hasn’t been a massive adoption of OSC.

Gavin: We put in OSC with the view that, once it’s in there, we can develop it more, add transmit [capability] and also be able to have the interface so that, let’s say, if you move something on the interface that it also updates on the Lemur [multi-touch controller hardware]. It’s just to keep things open.

That’s the main idea, really: to keep everything open and easy, to avoid getting crazy with the options.

Back to Basics

Gavin: If you look at the Maeda laws of simplicity, one of the laws is, do you really need it? And if you don’t really need it then don’t put it in there just because you can. I think a lot of other companies use the spec sheet. It’s like the bigger the spec sheet the better it is, but I think that just makes the thing more difficult, more complicated and more trouble, really. You know, if you’ve got a big massive spec sheet and they haven’t even bothered to do a proper MIDI learn, it’s a bit ridiculous. And they forget about the simple stuff, and for us using the software we want that stuff. We take it for granted that we’re going to have a hundred wavetables and it’s going to do oscillator hard sync.

Eoin: You don’t want it to be shouting it out from the interface.

Gavin: No, no. Because that’s not what you want to know about when you’re using it. You want to be into the circles and stay away from the big long spec sheets and five note-stealing algorithms and modulating the modulation with the modulation.

Eoin: That’s basically what you’re selling, then, is workflow. That’s your edge: you’re coming at it from a usability point of view.

Gavin: Yeah, we’ve done everything else. All the stuff that everybody else does, it does, as well. We do everything that everybody else does in terms of the sound, if not more. We have the width on the triangle oscillator there, small things like that. But the most important thing for us is to make it easy, and when you’re actually using it, it’s not the spec sheet, it’s the actual playing of [the instrument]. Adding features to get a big spec sheet doesn’t affect the end user, because it’s getting back to that thing about the Paradox of Choice. What we’re doing is concentrating on what we want ourselves, and whatever comes out of it in the workflow.

And the sound is good. We’re very happy with it, and we’ve put a lot of work into it.

Eoin: So, what’s down the road, looking at the future of the tool?

Gavin: We’re going to have a look at the iPhone SDK and see is there anything interesting in there, because that’s the next big thing. I’m not sure whether you could do a professional product on the iPhone but even for ourselves to do something cool, to give it a go.

We’re going to start using computers in a different way. There’s a bit of that in there with Circle, looking forward to the touchscreen [as an interface]. I think those things are going to change — usability, the things you get with Windows. I can’t use Windows anymore; it just drives me crazy.

Eoin: I have to say — and this isn’t trying to pay you a false compliment, but it does genuinely seem like a bit of a revolution in terms of the way that we think about music software design, that things are starting to change. The way we use things is changing, and one of the reasons I was interested is you guys seem to be forging ahead with that.

Gavin: We’re very interested in usability. I think it’s because I’m getting older <laughs>. My father, he’s 72, and he finds it hard to use the remote control for the television. After a while you get tired — not of learning new things, but putting up with things that should be fixed. You just want to make life easier for yourself when you’re using stuff. You don’t want to have to be getting involved in complicated things when you’re trying to do your music.

Now their sleeper hit sampler Shortcircuit is being released for FREE!

Details after the jump.

Yes free folks. In a move similar to Mackie’s back in 2003 when it gave Tracktion 1 away for free, and DiscoDSP’s release of Highlife as freeware last year Vember Audio is releasing as freeware their now aging version 1 in an effort to generate buzz for the forthcoming version 2 (the beta of which is available for free as well).

This is not crippleware. This is the same full version of Shortcircuit 1.1.2 that used to go for $139 just a few days ago. Check the specs:

User interface

Streamlined user interface for fast editing at the sample-zone level.
Fast editing of multiple zones.
“In context”-sample preview.
Extensive drag & drop support (onto the keyrange-view or the list-view).

Sample/Intrument import

RIFF wave-files (.wav) (8/16/24/32-bit & 32-bit float, mono/stereo at any sample rate)
AKAI S5000/S6000/Z4/Z8 .akp banks (partial)
NI battery kits (partial)
Soundfont 2.00 (partial)
Propellerhead Recycle 1 & 2

Sampler engine

High-quality sinc interpolation
Oversampling used when needed to prevent aliasing
Double-precision float math (64-bit) used where it matters (IIR-filters).
Single-precision float math (32-bit) used elsewhere.
Supports any sample-rate.
Max polyphony per instance: 256 voices
Multiple outputs. (max 16 mono AND 8 stereo-pairs per instance)
Supported sample-playback modes:
forward
forward loop
forward loop with crossfading
forward loop until release
forward loop bidirectional
forward shot
sliced (maps slices accross the keyboard)
on release
reverse
reverse shot

2 filters / voice:
Lowpass 2-pole (2 types)
Lowpass 1/2/3/4-pole ladder-filter
Lowpass 1/2/3/4-pole ladder-filter with saturation
Highpass 2-pole
Bandpass
Peak
Notch
Dual bandpass
Dual peak
Comb filter
2-band parameric EQ (2 types)
graphic EQ
morphEQ
mörder OD (overdrive)
Bitf*cker
Distortion
Clipper
Gate
Limiter
Slewer
Microgate (does glitch/loop style effects when the gate is open)
Ring modulation
Phase modulation (equivalent to FM)
Frequency shifting
Pulse oscillator
Pulse oscillator (with sync)
Sawtooth oscillator (with 1-16 voices in unison)
Sinus oscillator

3 stepLFOs / voice. Doubles as 32-step stepsequencer and wavetable LFO.
2 AHDSR envelopes / voice
Powerful modulation system with the ability to modulate itself. Destinations include envelope-times, loop-points in addition to traditional destinations.
Group LFO
Group modulation routing.
Group effects. (2 effects / group)
Effect types:
digidelay (feedback, filtering & optional midi-sync)
freqshift delay
chorus
freqshift flange
digidist
stereo width
MS decoder

System requirements

Microsoft Windows 2000, XP or newer.
Processor with SSE-support (includes Intel Pentium 3 and newer, AMD Athlon XP and newer)
Software capable of hosting VST-instruments.

Get it HERE.

If you play with Shortcircuit and like what you’re hearing please consider picking up Surge and Shortcircuit 2 when it’s released. Cats like these need the support of users like you and me to stay in business. If you’re a PC user, give it a shot… you’ve got nothing to lose!

Enter online photo sharing. Screen grabs can make software rigs visible. For example, someone’s been busy putting together a monster bass channel strip in Ableton Live:

Contained: the synth source is Vember Audio’s Surge digital synth, fed into Ohmforce’s Ohmicide saturator/distorter, Waves’ C4 (a multiband parametric compressor), L2 (ultramaximizer) and Maxx Bass (bass enhancement), and Ableton Live’s own Auto Filter and Saturator. Kids, don’t try this at home. I’m amused because this is hilarious, goes-to-eleven overkill.

Got some screen grabs you want to share? Add them (and anything else music-related) to the Create Digital Music Flickr pool, and drop us a line if you think we’ll find it especially interesting.

I’ll be interested to see if tools like plasq’s upcoming Mac utility Skitch also catch on for this purpose.