STARTHIEF

A couple of weeks ago I recorded a piece I called “the between.” It was between album projects, and between setups. There was interaction between elements of the patch. And I know it’s sort of a cliche, but I was thinking of liminality: a not-place, not-time between other places and times.

My first recording on the new rig was titled “No Place” — thinking of a specific not-place I visited in spiritual/imaginary travels. A sort of stopover on the way elsewhere. I can’t tell its story in words, but I can paint a picture in music. I’m sure what other people see when they hear this song is different, and I like that idea. It’s communion rather than communication.

Oh hey. Album theme. Scenes that aren’t places. Okay.

The third song refers to a story I wrote for a school assignment ages ago. I remember nothing about it other than the setting, described tersely in the first sentence. Even in the context of the story, it was arguably not a real place with a fixed location.

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The Expert Sleepers ES-3/ES-6 pair is as enabling as I’d hoped. Stereo feedback loops that run through plugins and back into hardware? Check. EQ and compression anywhere in the chain I want it? Check. Using Bitwig’s phase objects for unusual clocks, and switching between quantization scales with a fader? Check and check. So good.

Back home from Knobcon, and back into the real world where I have to work and stuff.

On Sunday morning I dipped back into the exhibition hall and bought the Starling Via Scanner. There’s a lot of potential for reshaping both sound and modulation signals and I look forward to discovering what it can do. Then I mostly waited for Dr. John Chowning’s talk.

Dr. Chowning is 85, and his speaking voice sounds remarkably like Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” cover. Between the keynote speech at the banquet and Sunday’s talk, he described the discovery (not invention, he convinced us) of FM synthesis.

Today it seems as if “discovering” FM would simply be a matter of plugging an oscillator into another oscillator’s pitch input. But at the time, voltage controlled analog synthesizers were new and rare, and Dr. Chowning was working in the digital domain. Not in real time, but with punch cards, no buffers to speak of because memory was shockingly expensive, no digital filters, and even a DAC was an exotic piece of custom equipment.

He was a drummer who read a paper by Max Matthews about the potential of computers to make music, and decided right then that he wanted to make music “from the inside out.” He learned to code, and picked up the engineering and math mostly by osmosis and asking a lot of questions.

He was investigating the perception of sound in space — how we know the difference between a quiet close sound and a loud distant sound, how we identify individual instruments and voices in a group — and started experimenting with vibrato. He found that extreme vibrato rates shifted from a perception of pitch variation to a timbral change instead, and explored how changing only the intensity and relative frequency led to very different spectral results. FM was already in use for radios, at megahertz carrier frequencies rather than audible ones, and he found that some of the mathematical laws applied just the same, with very different implications.

In his talk he frequently showed spectral graphs of the effects of FM. FM creates sidebands around the original frequency, with particular spacing and phase characteristics, which can cancel or enhance each other when they reflect around 0Hz or the Nyquist frequency. (Band limiting in FM is just a matter of reducing the FM index as frequencies increase — something that Yamaha loved about it, because digital filters were really poor at the time.) FM can also be used in formant synthesis, which isn’t a common technique for some reason, and which definitely involves thinking in the frequency domain rather than about waveforms or vague “shaping”. It occurred to me that I almost never use spectral analysis unless working with EQ or a filter, and it’s a tool that could tell me a lot about waveshaping and FM. That was my personal moment of insight from the talk.

The concerns of FM in the purely digital domain are very different from modular. It is, by default, linear TZFM — or perhaps phase modulation as Yamaha implemented it in the famous DX7. Dr. Chowning pointed out that he didn’t work on the DX7 at all, but it was the effort of Yamaha engineers overcoming the technical challenges of the day and pushing the frontiers of digital audio.

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Since I couldn’t get them at Knobcon, this morning I’ve ordered a replacement for my missing power cable as well as an Expert Sleepers ES-3/ES-6 pair. From there I’ll figure out if any other utilities would help or if they can be handed off to Bitwig.

There’s a phase of experimentation and learning to go through with this new setup, but I am thinking about the next album. Running through my head are some of the ideas presented in Music Beyond Airports: Appraising Ambient Music and the realization that my music is often about scenes. Places real, imagined, dreamed or remembered, their weather and activity at that particular moment, and the feelings associated with it. Sometimes the music creates the scenes, but sometimes I draw them from experiences. I have a few such experiences I’ve never made music for, and others that I could reinterpret. As an album theme goes, this is a little bit loose — it’s just doing what I do anyway — but the conscious awareness and intent might be enough of a guiding factor.

I’m taking some time to chill out from Knobcon and let my brain catch up and feet rest (I should have worn the walking boots which are much better for standing around for long periods than my Chucks).

I’ve written this up partially on my Instagram and partially on MW, but in a nutshell:

The goody bag was middling. Stickers and postcards and flyers; a hefty Sweetwater catalog which I dumped because it’s heavy and pointless; a bag of middle-tier candy; an issue of Sound On Sound; a purple frisbee; a 2hp blank panel; a Velcro cable tie.

This year’s theme is Knobtoberfest, which was reflected in the performances at the reception being German themed “kosmiche musik” which was not only highly influential to both popular and esoteric forms of electronic music, but to pop as well. A tribute to NEU! (which I sometimes enjoyed and sometimes felt I was too sober to get it), a tribute to Kraftwerk (which was highly enjoyable), and a Berlin School duo.

A couple of years ago when I was newer, I felt like I absorbed a lot about playing modular synths by watching the performances. This year not so much, but I mostly learned that rough spots — technical issues, missed notes and cues and changes, brain farts — don’t really matter too much if you handle them well. The audience — at least an audience of musicians — accepts them as an inevitable part of being human, and gets on with enjoying the good parts.

But I also learned a little extra preparation in terms of physical setup is important. You need a big enough table, solid places so your gear doesn’t threaten to fall off and cables aren’t in your way, and if you need written notes they need to have their own space to live in instead of getting tucked under and resting on top of your instruments.

Also, sudden transitions rarely work, especially if you’re going to switch tempo. It’s like trying to change gears on a stick shift car without the clutch. An audience that’s grooving along will suddenly be thrown off.

Also, sample players are really good things to have for live playing, for many reasons.

Also if you’re a hotel sound guy, make sure the PA actually works before you tell the performers they can start whenever. You had one job…

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Today was gear stuff. Workshops too, but I didn’t go to any — maybe tomorrow. The exhibition hall isn’t arena-sized but it’s still pretty large, and includes bigger companies like Hammond, Yamaha, Korg, Roland, Moog etc.; lots and lots of Eurorack manufacturers (but missing a few key ones), a few software companies, a couple of local synth-oriented music stores, and some miscellaneous weird shit. I actually did buy some Real Fake Knobs. Unfortunately our small dog guest is not ferrous, so the volume knob won’t work on him.

I won’t go through the full list of all the gear I tried. Nothing really grabbed me the way Natural Gate did a couple of years ago, but I did play some very fun things in the “I don’t need this but I kind of love it” category. The Hydrasynth has the most beautifully designed interface of any electronic instrument I have tried, in both look and feel. The Moog Grandmother was a joy to play and sounded full and gorgeous, but its price and size make it unlikely for me. I had a blast (and also created a powerful sonic blast) with the Curious Sound Objects Bitty toys.

Synth Tech’s prototype of their new effects module is 10-day-old hardware running code that was rushed in a week, so it’s got some rough edges (!) but I think it holds promise. Once the biggest bugs are worked out and the algorithms have had a couple of rounds of polish I think it will be a winner. I hope to be a beta tester for it as I was on the E352 and E370.

Make Noise Mimeophon was mimeo-fun, despite a less than stellar demo setup (note to exhibitors: we want headphones, especially to demo stereo gear!) and I went ahead and bought one instead of ordering online.

The JAMMspace room was a bust this year. Two years ago, it was a quiet, uncrowded space where every piece of gear or small modular setup had headphones, so you could really concentrate on trying the gear. This year it was set up late, most things ran through a big mixer into a loud chaotic mess through a loud PA system, and they left the outside doors open where people were taking smoke breaks (of course the smoke went directly into the room).

The Cruise-In wasn’t too successful either. Apparently nobody bought any of the gear on display. I recognized a lot of it as stuff that’s been for sale on MW. I didn’t bother to haul my 3 modules down there to try, because there’s not really a good way for potential buyers to demo them anyway. It was a nice idea, though.

The banquet and keynote speech are coming up in roughly an hour. The keynote will, I think, help me decide whether to go to Dr. Chowning’s workshop tomorrow afternoon or head home early. There are also more live performances after dinner, and I don’t know yet how much energy I’ll have for those.

I think I will likely skip Knobcon next year. Overall, I feel like the second time wasn’t as valuable a learning experience as the first. Like I thought last time, if I were more of a social creature I’d probably get more out of it. So for me it’s mostly a matter of indulging curiosity and doing something a little out of the ordinary — a mini vacation for electronic music nerds.

The reinstallation of plugins is complete. While I’ve cut down on the number of plugins considerably, they’re all set up on my categorized quick lists. I will probably weed the lists eventually — leaving access to the less commonly used plugins in the capable hands of Bitwig’s browser/search — but I wanted to put everything there for now so I can:

• get to know all the Bitwig native plugins well.
• revisit old 32-bit stuff that I haven’t been able to run in Maschine for a while, including my own experimental plugins
• be aware of what is and what isn’t installed on my hard drive.

Also, deeper integration between modular and DAW, and Bitwig’s routing and containers, are going to affect my plugin usage.

A lot of stuff didn’t get reinstalled. My Native Instruments installer shows 71 items not installed, and a mere 5 installed. My software archive folder has 41 items, but my “no reinstall” archive has 147. Some of those were sample libraries, non-music utilities or other things, but some “items” are actually multiple plugins so an accurate count is going to take some doing.

Some of that material is free or not-for-resale, but a chunk of it is not. A major post-Knobcon project is going to be identifying what I can resell, the license transfer fee if any, and market prices.

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Speaking of… tomorrow morning I head to Chicagoland. Not much going on the first day of Knobcon, but I do want to beat rush hour traffic. There’s registration and the reception — a live show featuring a half-dozen or so synth performers, which goes on for more hours than my endurance allowed last time. This time I will eat dinner first. Neither rum nor beer count as “dinner.”

Saturday is mostly going to be about the exhibit halls for me; there aren’t any workshops I’m invested in. In the evening there’s the banquet and keynote speech, followed by a choice of Big Room or Chillout Room for live music until whenever. It’s also highly likely I will ditch the crowd and find some quiet time at a few points.

Sunday the exhibit halls reopen, and Dr. John Chowning has a talk on FM at 1:30 I might attend (I can’t tell how “beginner” it might be or if it’ll be fairly comprehensive and give useful insights). But I want to get back home at a reasonable time, so I wouldn’t stay beyond that.

It looks like I may have chosen the right time to step away from Maschine. Credible-ish rumors and Glassdoor posts are saying that Native Instruments has been gradually letting people go for a few months and just a couple of days ago, laid off 100 people (about 50%) from its Berlin office, including the “product owners” of Maschine and Traktor and “almost all hardware teams.” Former employees wrote about management incompetence and lack of direction. Behringer has apparently offered to hire some people.

There’s also a claim that a new standalone Maschine unit was killed off one day before it was scheduled to go into production. That sounds a bit less credible to me, but who knows?

From the outside looking in, it’s felt like NI lost some of their previous vitality, in recent years. To some extent I thought that was just my perspective changing, but there’s more to it than that. Massive X was released in a not-quite-finished state and was a letdown to many people, Maschine Mikro mk3 has some weird omissions in features, and overall their focus has seemed… just not on.

There’s no official confirmation or denial of anything, but it does sound like there’s still a team working on Maschine. For all anyone outside of NI knows it’s a skeleton crew at this point though? And it’s not as if the pace of updates was rapid or the direction was in things that people were asking for.

Update: here’s some official word.

UPDATED STATEMENT: Native Instruments job losses and One Native strategy

Their emphasis on “consuming and accessing creative goods and services” makes me think their primary goal is going to be selling loops and samples, and the means to “consume” them (Traktor, Maschine, Kontakt etc.). A lot of people think it could be a subscription service. Whatever. It signals to me they don’t want to be instrument builders anymore. My method of making music isn’t to “consume and access” other peoples’ sounds.