mustakl

Dummy [basement edit]

By Marc Nostromo

Resonating Feedback

By Marc Nostromo

Sometimes you gotta love just staying quiet for a week-end and having your mind on Sunday… Havin been off for any kind of brain damaging party for more than a week, I decided this morning I’d try something that was on my mind for quite a while related to feedback. I love feedback, it’s a really nice way to bring lively timbres in the background or do completely new sounds from scratch.

Being fed with Rock when I was kid, one sound that I really find magical is the tuned larsen guitarist do by putting their guitars close to their amps. It starts with a full heavy chord and then goes slowly to a pure chords, an effect actually not too different from the deep note effect.

The idea of today was to recreate this effect using a DAW, ableton live in this case and see where it’d lead to.

Let’s go back to the physics for a moment: When a guitarist comes close to his amp, the sound field radiating from the amp puts the strings in vibration and creates a feedback loop. The closer to the amp, the stronger the feedbacks get. Also, since each string of the guitar is vibrating to the note that his held on it, each strings acts as a tuned resonator providing the “chord” effect.

Since Ableton has the possibility to both do feedback loops and has a resonator plugin, it needed to be tried. Let’s go through the steps to reproduce the basic physical system:

Setting up feedback:

To reproduce the basic feedback in Ableton, we’ll need 3 tracks:

The first one is going to be our source. It could be either some internal clip playing or picking up sound from the external input. Instead of sending it directly to the master, we’ll feed another track first (track 3 -mix). That allows us to use track 2 (feedback) to pick up the output of the mix track and feed it back with the feedback processing. Since the feedback and mix track work on their inputs rather than track audio, we need to toggle the monitor on In for both of them. Before doing that, you might want to pull the volume of the feedback to zero, otherwise you won’t have any ears left.

Taming the beast

Since digital feedback has no kind of loss nor attenuation, you will need to be able to control the feedback level to a reasonable level otherwise it’ll go out of hand and clip everything. A good way to do that is to use a compressor at the input. It will ensure that as the sound level creeps up, the compressor lowers its and the result will end up oscillate to some level, depending on the attack, release and treshold values of the compressor. I also like to put an utility upfront to have some kind of control on the general feedback level, pretty much mimicking the distance between the player and it’s amp. So right now, our feedback track looks like this:

Emulating the strings

Now we are going to emulate the resonant filter done by the strings. In Ableton, it dead easy since we have a resonator plug-in that does exacly what we need. It’s very flexible and we’ll be able to tune our feedback to whatever chords we’ll want. Let’s add the resonator plug-in and turn the dry/wet all the way to wet:

Giving it a life

At this point, you can already pull up the feedback volume, start a sound source and play with the feedback chord and compressor settings. You will however most likely find that the result is a bit dull. This is because the wonderful digital processing works all too perfectly and each cycle is pretty much the same as the previous one.

A good way to breathe some life in a feeback loop is to add a reverb in it. It’s decay being way longer than the feedback itself, it will bring tiny oscillations and ambiances changes that will make everything sound a lot more organic. As per usual, I used Audio Damage’s eos because it sounds wonderful and is a modulated reverb so I can use a slow lfo to make it even more organic.

Re-strumming

Whenever a guitarist strums his guitar, the vibration he induces is way stronger than the vibration from the amp feedback. This is why the sound goes from the original timbre to a raising feedback chord. To emulate that, we need to pull down the feedback level whenever the original sound is strong and let it raise as the source’s sound level go down.

The perfect way to simulate this is to use a compressor with side chaining, using the original source as compressing signal. Live 8’s compressor has this feature, so it’s pretty easy to setup if you got it (I used the demo version) but there are free side-chain compressor available out there

In this case, the attack will determine how fast the feedback dies each time you produce a new note while the release will control how fast the feedback will raise as the source sound level goes down.

Some examples

Let’s now put this to practice. The first sound byte is trying to reproduce the guitar feedback on a chord coming from the sound input (some littlegptracker quick setup) and there’s a big amp distortion on the master to give it the rock out feeling. By changing the various compressor timing and/or resonator notes, we can get quite a bit of variation and the whole thing is pretty much what we wanted to do:

piggyback.mp3

But this is not the only application of playing with this kind feedback. It works also really well to setup a strange moody ambiance running behind a main sequence. You can for example quite easily reproduce a dark-ish/out of tune background that will spice up a otherwise pretty basic sequence (this one really makes me feel like having an onde martenot to control the filter’s pitch)

plasticseq.mp3

Now time for you to go to the drawing board and make up you own implementation of feedback !

Busybox for standalone musical instrument OS ?

By Marc Nostromo

Since the recent port of LittleGPTracker to the Chinese Dingoo handheld (69 euros boys) and therefore me owning a unit, I keep being blow away by the small boot time of the unit. Here’s a video showing the 5 seconds it takes to go from off state to “ready to make music”:

If it boots that fast on a 360Mhz machine, imaging how fast a small computed could startup, making it a more than perfect host for hardware or dedicated music machine environment. Of course, the dingoo build doesn’t have any kind of real-time kernel settings but it certainly something to look for. Compared to the 2 mins it takes to boot the Windows-based DMS-20, it’s a no brainer.

Arduino Piano Squealer released under GPL V3

By Marc Nostromo

Today I’m releasing the small monosynth, the “Arduino Piano Squealer”, I made for Critters & Guitari’s fantastic pocket piano. Examples and the code, released under GPL V3, are available from the APS’s own page.

Hope you’ll enjoy it. If you got any comments, flames or WOW’s to say, please let me know !

Inside Deep Note…

By Marc Nostromo

We all know THX’s trademark sound called “Deep Note“.

I don’t think there’s any sound obsessed person that hasn’t been fascinated by it.  It’s a classic, mixing the intriguing with the beautiful and I remember I used to look forward going to the movie just so I had a chance to listen to it again.

The music-dsp mailing list got sent a really nice post that tries to recreate the original sound from the various informations available on its creation. It’s clearly documented, with sound samples of each step along the way, and is a pleasure to read. Additionally, it’s done using SuperCollider and is not that complex so if you are looking for a good tutorial on SC, combined with fun stuff go ahead:

Read it

and now try to do it on your own synthesis program !

[ the other, less SFW, take on "deep note" is quite good too BTW ]

The perfect chain

By Marc Nostromo

I’ve been pretty quiet lately, mainly because I’ve been working a lot on my live set and at this point it’s more Housekeeping than anything, so I didn’t come across anything fabulous worth of being blogged (although, maybe I did).

In the course of setting my set up, I’ve finally mixed a LittleGPTracker called “Dummy” and what I like about the result (beside the fact I love the track) is that it implements the “composition chain” I truely believe in: Write music on small handheld “limited” harware and mix it with the full armada of a daw.

Here’s an excerpt of a conversation I had with Peter Kirn on the topic “less is more”

... I discovered the perfect balance for me was to write on the go using, well of course, lgpt (on PSP currently) and *then* bring it on to the fat computer for mixing in a powerful daw.

It separates the composition phase from the production phase and that works perfectly for me. I like the less is more aspect when it's about creativity, because the flow is not getting 'distracted' by a too wide range of availability. In production, when it's "just" about getting it to sound good, it's only about "doing it" and it's nice to have a wide range of possibility.

With that respect LGPT is great because you can take a project written on PSP and use your PC/Mac to render all 8 tracks separatly, import them in the daw and go to the next level. So you are not stuck in the "small shell" you used to create, which is the drawback of most handheld solution.

I like that flow of event.

To conclude this, here’s the mix of dummy and no matter if you like the style or not, it doesn’t “sound” like it’s been produced on anything particular (least of all a handheld) and I think it’s a great thing.

Electronic acts failure ?

By Marc Nostromo

This morning, my good friend and co-worker Gorgull (and maker of Protein[ds]) asked me to put on some music that was “quiet but wouldn’t put him to sleep”. Always up for a challenge, I dug through my music collection and pull-out one of my favorite chilled album of all time: Ricochet by Tangerine Dream.

This record is pretty outstanding in the sense that it’s not too new-agish BS (ok, the video doesn’t help) , it’s beautiful melodically and most of all: it’s a live recording. Two 20 tracks evolving very nicely, a masterpiece to me.

As I was listening to the album, I couldn’t help than thinking of the difference between their frame of mind and the average electronic performer of these times. Because, if you step back and forget about the long hairs and candle, these guys ARE electronic musicians: half of their music is sequenced, half is played but it’s all electronic.

With respect to current possibilities, the only difference with current electronic musicians is that they had to carry shitloads of gear to achieve their sound while now anybody now needs to pack a laptop and a couple of lightweight controller to achieve the same thing… so what is wrong with today ?

I’m not trying to do a passeist entry, stating everything was better back then, proof is this, last week end, was one of the awesomest party I’ve been to and wouldn’t have happened back then. But when supposed master of electronics, like Alva Noto, give us a performance like this:

I can’t help wondering what is the performance aspect of it… doesn’t he get bored doing this ?

I say we need Nu-Post new-age drug synth band tapping in today’s resources.

Just in case you lived in a cave for the last hour

By Marc Nostromo

or if you don’t read CDMu (which you should)…

Novation’s Launchpad is HOT AS ICE (as brit would say)

I’m sooo combining this with my nanoKontrol for ultimate live flexibility !! (unless a better one come out before )

Major stems !

By Marc Nostromo

If you followed me on FB, you most probably know I’ve been a lot into Major Lazer lately. Yesterday, following a link from Goto80’s excellent Chipflip, I noticed diplo had a banner up his myspace that said “remix major lazer” and indeed, there’s 3 tracks for grabs:

Now, you may not care about M.L. or even hate the stupid vocal hook of “pon de floor“, but getting individual stems is always a good thing to listen two, especially when they come from uprising producers. It lets you analyse production tricks, rythm grooves and let’s face it: there’s nothing like a bit of schooling given by the best.

On top of that, I needed fanfare style snare drums, I got them now.

Getting a live Pt.4 – Ctrl+E is a winner !

By Marc Nostromo

A while ago, a thread called “Stuff in Live you wish you figured out a long time ago” was started on the Ableton forum collecting tricks/shortcuts for Live . My take on this is “Ctrl+E”.

When earlier I wrote a post on mixing tracks of different tempos in session view, one of the main hurdle I had to face was that I couldn’t trigger the scene setting the tempo for the next song on the row that started the song but on the previous row. Ending with something like this to achieve the transition:

This had to do with that bloody square on the first track that would stop the ending tail of the previous song if I triggered the tempo setting on scene 8 . Since I wanted smooth crossfading between the two song, that was a nono, ending up with a scheme that worked but had one major drawback: since the tempo information of the “next” song was located in the “previous” song, it made re-organsing the set (either upfront or on the fly) a PITA to deal with.

Now a funny thing happened the other day. I was preparing my set for Saturday and started renaming a whole bunch of clip. Since I’m running Live 4 on my “live” machine, the shortcut for rename is Ctrl+E (it’s Ctrl+R now). Going a little too fast, I accidently did Ctrl+E on an empty slot and… saw the Stop button disapear !

This was like heaven sent, although it’s been right in front of my eyes all the time: there IS a way to trigger a scene and not change the state of clips running in other sections: just remove the stop button on those you don’t want to influence.

So now, I can update my “track switching technique” by setting the tempo on the scene that kicks the new song, simply by removing the stop button in the other track so that it keeps playing whatever it was doing when the switch happens.

This make it a LOT easier since every track data is contained in it own zone. I can now re-organise my set really easily and decide to mess up the order of the songs even during performance !

Wished I knew that from the start.