So the other reason I've been a bit slack with keeping up on the blog, is that Yesterday I had to go into Moorefields Eye Hospital for an appointment. I've had Corneal Transplants in both eyes, one quite a few years ago, the other pretty recently. Was due in to get the stitches removed, and take my word for it, it's a pretty intense procedure, feeling someone picking at microscopic threads on your eyeballs is not at the top of my favourite things ever!
Still, Lucy had the day off too, and so we decided to make a day out of it. Especially wanted to get some pictures around Canary Wharf. It's pretty cool around there, though the security are a bit tetchy about people wandering round with tripods and bags of lenses. Still, we managed to get some pretty cool shots.
Here are some of mine:
And here are some of Lucy's:
It's a really nice place for photography, I didn't find any of the architecture that interesting, the overall impression of the place is quite striking, We're definitely going back there, didn't get nearly enough this time round, and hopefully I'll get my white balance settings a bit better next time.
I have to say, looking at them side to side, just shows me I still have a lot to learn! I think my favourite is the second one of Lucy's, really cool!
Wow what a tiring last few days, really annoyed at myself for having missed a few days. To be honest I figured it would be somewhat inevitable that I might not manage a sound a day every day. That's the way life goes I suppose.
So, FINALLY got my PC back on its feet. Ended up buying a new Hard Drive, and starting a complete reinstall of everything, backing up everything onto a spare drive, and then moving it all back to the right place. With near enough a Terra Byte of things to keep track of, it took a while!
Kept myself amused in the mean time by drawing on my IPad. I got myself Sketchpad Pro, its really good! Slightly cumbersome interface but you get into it after a while. Here's a doodle I was doing while everything was copying across.
Anyway, I've got some catching up to do, so here's a sound! As I mentioned above, my Ipad has been keeping me busy while my computer recovers, and aside from doodling, I've also been playing with Reactable. It's growing on me I have to say. The oscillators have some nice functions especially. The can each supply 3 different voices, with independent control for waveform, volume, and tuning. Nice way to thicken things up, so long as you keep everything relative. This was an attempt at using this function to make a nice full pad sound. I did at first use the Reactable Reverb as well, but to be honest, it sounds rubbish. Instead I ran the patch dry into Reaktor and used the Space Master verb, and Duel Sync Delay Instruments.
I think it sounds not half bad! Although the Space Master is one of my favourite sounding reverbs, Reactable still has a pretty decent quality coming out of it. And to be fair, reverb is a CPU intensive effect, so there's no surprise that the Reactable one is a bit crappy sounding.
There are still a few bugs that I'd love to see ironed out. You get some weird glitches when muting event data, and I wish there was more modules over all. Also I get frustrated when not all parameters can be modulated. But still, Reactable is definitely a cool way of noodling out some ideas when there isn't a functional PC nearby!
So following on from Friday, as I mentioned one of my monitors decided it was time to die, and did so. I managed to arrange someone to repair it for me thanks goodness, and bought myself a lovely new pair of headphones to keep me going in the mean time.
Get home and get back into a couple projects I've been working on. Just getting into it when wooop, PC crashes.. ah bugger. No worries, saved not so long ago, can redo the things Ive just done. Restart, reload project, 5 minutes later booof, down she goes again. Repeat this process for the entire duration of yesterday and today.
Trying to make anything in 5 minute stints is pretty much impossible, it's driving me round the bend, not to mention the sheer amount Ive got on at the moment. So much work I need to be doing! STRESSSSssss..
Well, I'm certain that a complete back up and reformat/reinstall is on the cards for tomorrow, that'll be fun!
Anyway, not wanting to be a sore bod all day, I've still managed to get something together for sharing which feels somewhat appropriate.
It's a short little fun track I made a using more or less no computer at all, only running a couple sequences. All sound sources are analogue, and with the exception of the compression, all processing is external too.
Since a few people who check this blog are folks from www.watmm.com, I thought I'd put something together especially for them, something with more than a little Aphex influence...
Well, hope you enjoy it. In all honesty it is really fun to have a break from a computer and make music on outboard kit, I hope to be back on the DSP tomorrow, wish me luck!
Finally Friday evening. Been a long week, still a bit sore about my speakers but what can you do, I guess these things happen. Gonna go looking for some new headphones tomorrow which will ease the pain I think, and then spend the rest of the weekend experimenting with sending OSC to Isadora, and taking a few more HDR, weather permitting, Should be fun!
In the mean time, here's the last sound of the week. Not quite sure where to being trying to explain this one... Started out as a bit of a mess around really. I built a kinda generative patch in Reaktor which responds to Frequency and amplitude of an input and controls the routing, and numerous parameters of a bunch of simple effect macros.
Next I gathered up a collection of metallic objects, springs, gardening tools, tea tray, a medium sized gamelan gong etc. I put these into a large sturdy box and put a condenser and a couple contact microphones in with them. I ran the mics through a small mixer and into Reaktor. Then, I beat the living crap out of them with a crowbar, and recorded the result.
It was... interesting, if somewhat distorted in places =D
I got about 5 mins worth and edited out the best bits, made them into a sample map and loaded that into Metaphysical Function, played about with that for about an hour, again recording the results before editing out the best bits. One sound in particular I really liked, had something that really reminded me of a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica. Like a Mechanoid idling noise. So I took that as the basis for developing the sound a bit further.
Loaded that along with a few more of the sounds into Logic and made a bit of a montage with them. I've also used a few recordings I made of a VHS loading mechanism, a DSLR auto focus, one of the coffee machines at work, an old flatbed scanner, and a broken HDD. Then just a couple subby sin waves to move the air a bit, and it's kinda done!
Really love making these montage type things, a nice way to give the sounds a bit more life and context. Might have to do this more in the future. The thing I find pretty difficult with them though, is keeping them arrhythmic, guess just turn the grid off and use the ears!
(Edit: again soundcloud is being weird and doing it's transcoding nonsense. Hope this one finishes uploading ok, will check back tomorrow)
So I'm always interested in trying to make robotic and mechanical sounding music, and one of the things I like to do is use recordings of servos and other types of electrical motors. No exaggeration, I have folders full!
This sound started out as an attempt to synthesize the same type of sound, although I ended up getting quite sidetracked.
The sound started off as something resembling a servo, but I decided to try playing about with it in Absynth, I've really fallen in love with the Granular sampling features it has.
I thought it might be fun to try and turn the servo noise into something a little more atmospheric, and Absynth is always great for that type of thing. The servo noise got time stretched with an envelope changing the time parameter. That then runs through a Low Pass filter with a very fast LFO modulating the cut off frequency slightly, to give a bit of colour to the sound. Next it's going through a frequency shifter set very low, which is what causes the gating, and finally through a panning delay effect.
It's not quite what I had in mind when I started, but I guess that's just how it goes sometimes. Still came out with a pretty nice sound, more musical than atmospheric perhaps, but that's maybe not such a bad thing!
Sat down to make some music and stuff last night, switched on my monitors and "Bbbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrap.. Crack!"
"Bollocks...."
So I think the Amp in the right one has gone, really annoying. Spent the rest of the night trying to get it working but to no avail. Gave up and went to bed. Still, hopefully get it fixed on the weekend.
In the mean time, I have some passives which I wired up this morning. They're not great and I don't really trust them, but at least it means I can make some noise for the moment.
So back to the matter at hand. Last entry I posted a kinda glitched out circuit bent robot sound I made with a little Reaktor patch I built. I discovered that it was a cool way of making some WALL E sounds as well, a bit like this:
Just finished polishing it up a bit, making it look all pretty for you all to enjoy, so if you fancy having a play you can download it here This time its a much smaller file, only 2.1mb. It's really easy to use, just select the sound you want to play with, and click & drag on his body.
There's something I really like about this type of sound design, and it's just another reason why I'm such a fan of Ben Burtt. It has this amazing cross over between sound design and Foley work. I think WALL E's voice is a great example of that, both the initial recording and the playback manipulation have such a strong effect on the end result. The guy is a genius!!
Anyway, hope you enjoy the patch, I really recommend loading some of your own sounds into it, gives some really cool results, and also means you wont have to listen to my terrible vocal takes!
So, the first sound of February! Have to say, I'm pretty pleased with myself for keeping this up, loads of sounds uploaded and at least 25% or so are half decent =D
Today I had something very particular in mind for what I wanted to make. Something nice and robotic (well THERE'S a surprise!). I'm really into the sound of circuit bent stuff, especially things like speak n spells and other voice toys. But the thing that puts me off that type of thing is the lack of control, it's all a bit random and hap hazard which isn't really my thing. So as well as making a nice robotic voice, I wanted a way of making it sound similar to a circuit bent device, but also with the ability to control the "bent-ness" so to speak.
The robot voice started out using the Fruity Voice generator in Fruity Loops. Set it to monotone for extra mechanical effect. Once I rendered the sample, it was loaded into Sound Forge for a bit of tweaking. There's some bit rate reduction, and pretty hard compression to make sure there is no emphasis what so ever, as mechanical as possible. A bit of fine tuning and it was pretty much there. Next I built a pretty neat little patch in Reaktor based around the resynth sampler module, and an XY panel to control it. I assigned the Y value to control pitch, and the X value is controlling the sample start point. Loop point and speed are set so that moving through the X scale allows for rapid scrubbing through the sample play position.
Really fun way of doing this type of effect, great for allowing a degree of performance. I tried it out with a few different voice recordings, and you can get results VERY similar to the voice of WALL E.
Anyways, I'll upload the patch too for people to have a play with, just want to refine it a touch first.
