analoq

I hate animals but at least it's an interesting use of SynthEdit... MeowSynth:

Funny this got bumped, I was just thinking about this remix the other day... I've never had any of my music referred to as a "stoner anthem" before or since this remix. I wonder why it earned praise from some of Mary Jane's faithful patrons. Not that I'm complaining, on the contrary, I'm trying to figure out how to duplicate this sort of response.

That could be automated as well. YouTube's API provides uploading functionality.

MacBook Wheel. Don't think your feeble attempts at humor are safe from my pedantry.

It's rather difficult for me to see how that sort of arbitrary logic can be validated. I can tolerate any opinion, but this is mindless bigotry.

In this case, that vote was very disrespectful to the remixers and the criteria for picking the 3rd place was juvenile. IMO the vote should have been discarded.

Ask a stupid question... ... get a stupid answer.I am difficult, but I am fair.

You could try closing mIRC, IE, Word, Outlook and everything else and see if it still errors.

Maybe it doesn't have enough memory to load the selected soundfont?

It boils down to immaturity: Philosophically impoverished adolescents who are naive enough to think they are entitled to take what they want for free. That sums up every pirate I've ever seen.

The couple times I went to the AES convention I saw a lot of trackballs. We used them in my recording classes back in college. It is easier to do finer movements with them, such as track automation, tweaking crossfades, etc.. I use regular mice because that's what I'm used to, but I do think trackballs are better for music.

You can use Cubase or a wrapper but the VST still has to be compiled for Mac. DLLs are Windows-specific files, OSX doesn't know what to do with them (it uses .vst) All the plug-ins I mentioned were Windows VSTs (DLLs)

Some pedantry on the Mac side of things... There are no Mac versions of: - Kjaerhus classics - Synth1 - GSnap - Continuous Velocity Piano GarageBand is not free. Yeah, it comes free when you buy a new Mac but you can't just go and download it. If you want upgrades you have to buy iLife which is $80. Cacophony is not free. You're supposed to pay for it, at least. It's a $25 shareware product.

I was introduced to Reaktor in one of my music technology courses in college. I think Reaktor 3 was the newest at the time. We had been assigned to make a patch. I made a simple subtractive synthesizer with a UI, it was missing a filter envelope but it had some neat crossfaders for the oscillators and filter types as well a basic delay circuit. When I demonstrated my modest creation to the class they were in disbelief: It turns out I was the only one who completed the assignment; everyone else had given up. If you ever talk to me for more than a few minutes you realize I'm a bit thick, so it wasn't that I looked really smart as much as I had made everyone else feel really stupid. Good times.

I wouldn't really know where to start with a tutorial, but I can go over the general steps that brought me to where I currently am: My conceptual knowledge comes from a music technology program I went thru in college. The important thing was understanding how digital audio works: Pulse-Code Modulation, Nyquist sampling theorem, etc.. wikipedia has some articles on digital audio. Knowledge of synthesis came about from this program as well. Important topics include waveforms (phase, frequency, amplitude, overtones, duty cycle), filters (lopass, bandpass, highpass) and control signals (envelopes, LFOs). SOS has a great collection of synthesis tutorials (part 1 is on page 3). I used modular synths and software like Reaktor to help me understand how all these components work together (signal path) to make different sounds. If you're on PC a good free program along these lines is SynthEdit. After being comfortable with a variety of modular software synth engines, I began checking out sound programming environments like ChucK Then I started playing with a set of C++ classes for synthesis, Synthesis ToolKit. This gave me an idea of how to organize code in a software synthesizer. Now I was ready to try making my own software synthesizer. I set up my classes in a manner similar to STK and adapted code from musicdsp.org for my oscillators and filters. I used the cross-platform RtAudio library to interface with the sound device and RtMidi to interface with MIDI. After I got everything working I dropped the Rt libraries and wrote my own Audio/MIDI interface code using the APIs provided by the OS (Leopard, in my case) So yeah, pretty much a top-down approach. All that may be too general to help you at all, but hopefully I've given enough background so that you can direct me towards more specific topics you're interested in. Last thing I have to mention is inspiration: what keeps me motivated and interested in this stuff? ... - http://matrixsynth.com - http://synthtopia.com - http://createdigitalmusic.com Keeping up with the blogs and watching all the cool things other people are doing, I can't help but want to contribute. cheers.

That keyboard bothers me. It's like a smile with missing teeth.

oh, you've already got an audio interface -- it just doesn't have phantom power. Ergo, your problem. I see. So you either just need the external pre-amp or sell your FastTrack and buy a MobilePre/other audio interface which has phantom power.

What you should invest in is an audio interface with a built-in pre-amp that provides phantom power (+48v) Even if you have the pre-amp to boost the signal to line-level, you're not going to get a great recording thru your soundblaster/onboard audio.

Back to the Axis64... I made a video demonstrating this: Also, the aforementioned layout inventor Peter Davies is on YouTube, can't help but post this video of his: cheers.

Sorry SLyGeN, understand this thread falls into the category of "Help me with this software I just got/pirated" that we've seen many times before. If you post a thick thread in GD you get locked. As you can see, this forum is self-moderating... cheers.

Came across this self-playing modular patch just now, Lovely, and brilliant too.

Fishy's right about the baking. If I had an opportunity to experiment with tape recording for cheap, I'd go for it. I've certainly not intended any disregard towards our faithful old medium; I'd love to do a mix on tape sometime, I just haven't wanted to spend the money. cheers.

Recording something onto tape elicits two things: 1) Soft Compression The oxide layer on tape is organic, it doesn't response to dynamic changes quite like digital. You end up with what is roughly a 1.5:1 compression on the recorded material. This is the "saturation" 2) Bass emphasis When the heads on the tape machine aren't perfectly aligned (they often aren't) you get an emphasis in the lower frequencies, a boost around 200hz IIRC. This is the "warmth" Tape has other idiosyncrasies but they are not desirable, e.g. bleed-through. So I'd say the 2 things I mentioned are what your producer friend is swearing by, whether he realizes it or not. And if you're talking about using tape for recording, you're talking about a reel-to-reel tape machine, not something that uses cassettes -- thus making the barrier to entry for this sort of experimentation prohibitively expensive. Well, a cheap Tascam 8-track or similar ilk could work, it just won't yield very good results for a full mix. Running selective tracks thru inexpensive tape would be fun to try, though. cheers.

The similarity is in the sense that on guitar, there are certain chord shapes and scale patterns along the frets that can be moved horizontally and to some extend vertically along the fretboard for transposition. The Axis does the same, but more fluently. If you come up with some ideas, do share them. I've written some software previously along these lines: I got an octave and a half and assign the bottom manual to an arpeggiator and I'm able to perform a simple piano piece. Geeky fun, but not exactly a revolution.

The inventory of the layout, Peter Davies, sells his own version of the controller: http://www.theshapeofmusic.com/ According to the site he's been researching this stuff since the early 80s. You could try emailing him and asking if he's written any research papers relevant to his layout. Though, if you play a bit of piano and guitar I don't think anything needs to be explained. It has the action of a keyboard instrument but with chord shapes and scales like a guitar but using more logical patterns. Any musician can see the layout is clever, at least. Whether it's optimal for composition/performance/etc, again, who can say?