| Although there are no breakfast stations way up here in south Dallas, I biked to work today. I haven't done so in quite a while, so it was a decent stretch for me. The workplace did have a small welcoming committee, and I ate a muffin of some kind in about 46 seconds. The high point of the trip was catching up with my manager biking to work for the last mile in.
My route, more or less.. google maps wont let me draw lines through fields or parks where I took some short cuts. 8.3 miles and about an hour, ridden in a mostly leisurely manner.
Now if I can get myself to do this once a week.. | comments: 2 komentoj or Afiŝu novan komenton  |
| Today leans technical instead of musical, just a heads up to the civilians.
I wanted to look into SID emulation, started working on it, and it was a bit overwhelming. The UGens available here are wonderful, but the documentation is light. I am assuming because they are giving a raw interface that someone familiar with the chips in question are, well, familiar with. I found the 2600 emulator to be a bit simpler to start working with, and made some random voice changes and patterns to demo it. It might be interesting to make some game style music with this, and I at least have working code for the ugen.
scoundoff 15 MB 1:36 | comments: 4 komentoj or Afiŝu novan komenton  |
| So, no real work on the synth/sound side, but on global controllers. After the work, this essentially works like the pitch wheel on a hardware keyboard, but could you make each note respond to the pitchwheel in a slightly different way? I added little bit of randomness in the speed of response. The notes are within 19TET, and the quick scaling is via pythagorean-ish straight fractional intervals. It sounds almost MBV-ish.
scoundoff 14 1.6MB 1:11 | comments: Afiŝu novan komenton  |
| Trying to do some metric modulation. I think that subtle fading might work better, but this is the general idea. Dotted quarter note becomes a quarter note, and then back again. Saws and sines with detuning for the synth sound.
scoundoff 13 1.8MB 1:19 | comments: Afiŝu novan komenton  |
| This might be inspired by staring at some high resolution photos of an MS50. As much as I argue for software synthesis, it would be nice to have one.
Just going for deep levels of modulation in this one. Starting with a sine wave, then making that the modulator for something else, taking every static parameter and modulating it either slowly or at audio speeds. If I had coded it in a more organized manner I might be able to show you a classic synth modulation chart. But I didn't. Friend in town = sleep is a second third priority.
scoundoff 12 1.1MB 0:49 | comments: Afiŝu novan komenton  |
| Resonating filter banks (Klank), tickled by physical models of balls bouncing on high gravity planets (TBall), put through a single resonating filter (Ringz), and played back in a big room (FreeVerb). In a slow 7/4, and 19TET. It's pretty today I think.
scoundoff 11 3.6MB 2:36 | comments: Afiŝu novan komenton  |
| I wasn't really in the mood til after I took a nap. Another more technical exercise, I wanted to set up live control with an Axis Pad Colors. I had a chance a while back to pick these up by the dozen for very cheap, so they have been the core of many of my controller projects.
For today's exercise I set the buttons on the right and shoulder buttons trigger some additive sines and saws, but then the analog controls filter, detune, and wrap-clip those notes into the product heard below. Lower your volume at first, it gets noisy.
scoundoff 10 1.8MB 1:19 | comments: Afiŝu novan komenton  |
| Today's exercise is technical instead of being musical. I have been working with the WX5 on and off, and trying to create in supercollider not a model of a real wind instrument, but a viable and responsive instrument with the response of a real instrument. One of those things that you hear when you listen closely to your favorite oboe concerto is key noise. What I figured out in today's exercise was how to make a sound trigger at the beginning of a phrase, and then also to trigger a sound at each note change, even if they are part of a legato phrase. The winning ugens were Slope.kr and Trig.kr. In this case instead of key noise you hear quick bursts of filtered white noise because by the time I got that working reasonably I was done for the day.
Like I said, a technical exercise! We will try again to make this musical, but it is still a worthwhile exercise to extend the amount of control I can coax out of a live performance.
scoundoff 09 0.5MB 0:25
Also, yes, 12TET. I'll work on a key mapping for 19 soon enough. | comments: Afiŝu novan komenton  |
| Combining many slow-low-frequency detuned sine waves with a saw at lower volume, using a long decay percussion envelope gives sort of an analog steel drum sound. The melody and upper harmony parts are semi-random rhythms playing over a set order of notes. Also working with multiple master effects channels, although they got tuned down to the point of subtlety.
And naturally it is in 19TET.
scoundoff 08 MB 1:45 | comments: Afiŝu novan komenton  |
| Didn't think I was going to make the post today. QuickTime was continuing to do a bad job distorting the conversion. Figured out how to change to 16 bit recording, but that didn't really help, as then Supercollider plays, and lets the recording clip. I thought that using Logic might help, but Logic didn't even recognize the file. Soundhack was my saviour.
Sweet sweet noise. I was experimenting first with the physical modeling ugens, without much luck. I ran across Logistic.ar, a chaotic noise generator. Feeding it sine waves, Dust.ar, and slowly panning the notes across the listening field produced the turd gem below. The note generation was pretty random, and I think in the context of a song this would benefit greatly from a Markoff chain or genetic algorithm, something that would give it a bit more continuity. As it is, the sounds change, but don't really seem to have direction.
scoundoff 07 5.4MB 3:54 | comments: Afiŝu novan komenton  |
| Formants! Lots of formants! Working with a bank of similar sounds as a synth, and then setting them to have different attack and decay times. Along with slightly detuning left and right they sound thick quickly. The rhythm sounds are also formants with quickly dropping formant frequencies, and a bit of noise in a dropping low pass filter to add to the drum like sound. Technically this could be said to be in 7/2.
QuickTime seemed to have a hard time converting this from 32 to 16 bit. Supercollider defaults to 32bit and I normally leave it there and convert later when recording. There is some definite distortion in the conversion process on this bit. Normally I like a bit of distortion, but this was unintentional. .softclip(0.95)-ing the harmony sounds helped some, but it is still there. I'll dig into it another time though..
scoundoff 06 4.6MB 3:19 | comments: Afiŝu novan komenton  |
| 17/16 time. 19TET although by the time I am through with it, it may not matter, as I added a lot of non-pythagorean overtones using SC's Klank ugen which is a bank of resonators. The bass is a couple of saws glissing off into opposite directions, and filtered. The rhythms and notes are partially written out, partially random. I like this one, although it is far from a complete song.
scoundoff 05 1.3MB 0:55 | comments: Afiŝu novan komenton  |
| Trying out the reverb generators that were not there last time I looked, granular synthesis with sine waves, stirred up by low frequency noise generators. In 19TET, naturally.
scoundoff 04 1MB 0:53 | comments: 2 komentoj or Afiŝu novan komenton  |
| 19TET on the synth sounds, which is a detuned saw going through filters and some soft clipping. The voice is a tiny snippet of esperanto, pitchshifted, heavily overdriven and wrap-clipped.
scoundoff 03 1.4MB 1:10
EDIT: My hosting company had a wee problem with my VPS the past two days. They say it is over now, so all the sound files should be available again. | comments: Afiŝu novan komenton  |
| Yay, day 2! Polymeters, some randomization of patterns in note length seems to work as a way to make things less absolutely metric sounding, and some intentional and semi-intentional detuning/microtones. As far as the synths, using a lot of attack overtones, but fairly simple sines in the sustaining portion.
scoundoff 02 1.2MB 0:52 | comments: Afiŝu novan komenton  |
| In my desire to get back to using SuperCollider on a regular basis, I have decided to submit you, and myself, to daily audio exercises. Every day I am going to try and make some sound out of SuperCollider and post the results. It will end, so don't just unfriend me right away. I am going for 30 days of it though. Cxu vi pretas?
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For this one I lifted a bass synth from here, and modified it slightly. Everything else, I can take the blame.
scoundoff01.mp3 1.5MB 1:04 | comments: Afiŝu novan komenton  |
| With all three of my new clones, this will be no problem. Just starting to work on the day shows over here, mainly trying to work out seeing bands that have conflicting showcases.
( the list.. ) | comments: 2 komentoj or Afiŝu novan komenton  |
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