The answer is two hours, I could do two hours of the Big Room performances even sitting through most of it. There were 6 performers on the slate, and two hours was half of them. I’m sad to have missed POB’s set especially, but yesterday was intense and I have a long drive today.
Space Racer was good, modular techno. She kept things varied, she had a bit of structure to it — I think there was actually a lot of improv going but it all worked. One continuous rhythmic flow, with different parts joining in and always keeping it fresh, and an interesting variety of timbres. I fully enjoyed her set and it felt short to me — she successfully left her audience wanting more.
Next up was Dub Station Zero. Obviously had a strong dub influence. Good transitions, solid and occasionally very funky rhythms, fun basslines with occasionally wild buzzing timbres. He has mastered his craft for sure. His set was longer but it felt 100% right. Good stuff. It sounded like I was listening to an album, not someone who just brought a drum machine and small Eurorack case to a hotel. I would buy that album.
And then, Vamp Acid. The dark side — driving rhythms and more than a little industrial and gothic flavor, I was totally on board with it. When it’s almost 10 o’clock and I’m that tired it takes something special to make me want to get up and dance. (I don’t dance.) She seemed to have specific songs she was doing, though not without improvisation too. Changed the tempo up a few times, including some fakeouts and surprises which worked super well. She sang, and my only complaint is that her vocals could have been louder in the mix (not that this isn’t common with goth acts). My favorite of a very good three, and I’m happy to learn she does have an album out too.
This morning I’ll go eat breakfast, check out of my room, see about that Dreadbox Hypnosis and head for home. I didn’t take a day off work tomorrow for recovery and I hope I don’t regret that. 🙂
Today was the “real” Knobcon, when the exhibit hall (and supplementary rooms) opened and some of the workshops and afternoon performances and jam sessions.
I like watching people perform weird music on synths (and other things as described below) but the stuff is kind of the main attraction. I tried many of them! In approximate ascending order of how interested I would potentially be in actually owning one:
an actual Fairlight CMI, dating to somewhere in the 1979 to 1985 range depending on the version. It does not sound either impressive or deliciously retro today, just kind of cheap — which is ironic given that they originally cost somewhere around ₤18,000 to ₤60,000. It seemed to have plenty of sample rate but very little memory for sample length, and monophonic.
Motor Synth mk2 (generating sound with optical sensors looking at stripes spun by motors at different speeds). Clever design, not all that exciting in practice, and since it takes time for motors to change speed, not super nimble.
Sequential Take 5 and Trigon 6. I didn’t love either of them to be honest, they’re just not in my area of synth interest particularly.
this is NOISE tiny Bluetooth controllers. Fun little toys, but Windows support for Bluetooth MIDI is somewhere between nonexistent and abysmal so I’m not really in the market.
Tidbit Audio’s new overdrive gizmo. They make tiny, cheap passive circuits; I have their Wobblebox and it’s pretty fun. It sounded OK, not amazing and I have distortion pretty well handled.
Earthquaker Devices’ new oscillator (not announced anywhere that I could find), The Wave Transformer. It seems pretty standard but with a bit of waveshaping, and maybe it’s based on the newish SSI2130, I’m not really sure.
Intellijel Cascadia but MIDI-controlled by an Elektron box. I couldn’t really figure out much with it, but I don’t regret not having a Cascadia and will remain in love with my Strega/Minibrute 2S combo.
Infrasonic Audio Warp Core. I’ve enjoyed the VCV Rack version of this for a while and thought it should be a real hardware oscillator, and apparently enough other people including the designer did too. It’s been expanded to 8 phase distortion algorithms, and has a nice detuned stereo image. To me it’s like a more focused Plaits. I could do good things with this oscillator, but I can’t own all the oscillators so I am passing on it.
Moog Grandmother through a whole bunch of different Earthquaker pedals. The synth is lovely, but I knew that from the previous Knobcon — thus its relatively high ranking here. I didn’t feel like any of the pedals were a must-have, though I had a good groove with the tremolo.
Therevox Ondes VCO, and the Therevox ET-5 (kind of a successor to the Ondes Martenot, controlled by a ring with a string and pulley system to set the pitch and big chonky pressure keys to control volume). The VCO, on its own, has a couple of lovely tones and some ugly ones, and a weird not super flexible design. The full instrument sounds fantastic and plays great — and has a 24 month waiting list and a hefty pricetag and I don’t know where I would put one.
Mystic Circuits Ana 2 — not so much tried, as asked about. It expands on the original Ana (which I have and like a lot) by adding bipolar VCA inputs, a mix output, and a couple of more exotic outputs. It’s likely to be ready for sale by the end of the year, and I may go for the upgrade.
Pet Rock. It’s described as a “roguelike rhythm generator” and “the Wordle of Eurorack modules” — every day it generates a new rhythmic pattern, and it has no controls. Everyone gets the same rhythm that day. They cost less than this morning’s hotel breakfast and the manual is lovely and amusing, and it’s just a fun concept. So when I say I “tried” it, I put on headphones, observed that it was playing a rhythm, and took the headphones off and nodded sagely, like you do. First run is sold out, but I may have to consider one just for giggles.
PWM Malevolent synth through a Dreadbox Hypnosis. The synth didn’t thrill me, the effect though is awesome. It combines a BBD chorus/flanger with a digital delay and a spring reverb — so, analog, digital and physical all in one box — and has a funky synthwave vibe and TONS of character. I want one! I may have to go back and see if Synth City has them discounted like some of the other Dreadbox gear.
NSI Harmonic Shift Oscillator. I have been looking for an oscillator 14HP or below that gets to at least 50KHz, to clock Drezno and other things at 2x audio rate, as a possible replacement for Synchrodyne — but it also has to do something fun and not just that one utility. HSO sounds gorgeous, with a not-FM technique of generating harmonic or inharmonic sidebands above, but (unlike FM) not below the fundamental, and it is just super smooth and creamy but can also get growly and mean. I wound up circling back around and buying it.
For the Abstract Afternoon performances, my timing wasn’t great and I missed most of Cory Flanigan’s piece, which is a shame — he was playing a gong that was resonating a 6-foot long “beam” monochord he built, minimally processed by electronics, and it was awesome. It sounded entirely electronic and otherworldly.
Daniel Anez played a Therevox, along with… somebody whose name I didn’t catch on a Buchla system with the new Kilpatrick Audio Sextuple Quadraphonic Spatial Director. It was a fantastic piece, varied and constantly moving (and I don’t just mean quadrophonic sound sweeps) and full of fire and beauty. I’d have been happy to hear them keep going for another hour.
Sine Mountain was next. He had some lovely timbres, combined with a pretty gimmicky slow spin around the room. (I feel like that’s the main thing quad sound is good for; I don’t even like autopanning that much in stereo if it’s not subtle.) His piece was nice but it did maybe go on a little too long. Still, this format I think worked better than last night’s.
And now I’m about to go downstairs to see how much of the Big Room performances I can take in. I am rested, fed and feel ready.
So, a fire alarm went off last night in the Knobcon hotel just after midnight. SUPER LOUD and startling, as I guess it needs to be. I very hastily got dressed, pocketed my phone, wallet and car keys (but not hotel room key!) and for some reason, a pair of socks, and and went down the stairs… for not very long before the FD showed up, checked it out and cleared everyone to go back in.
This morning I have one sock 🙁 I of course didn’t bring another pair with me. They were nice merino wool Icebreaker socks too. It’s probably on the fire stairs or outside or something. Yay.
Unless I get lucky and find it on the stairs on my way down, it looks like I will be heading out of the hotel at some point today to buy socks, unless it’s one of the things in the giant CVS vending machine downstairs (I doubt it).
UPDATE: the sock and I have been reunited. It was at the bottom of the fire stairs. Whew!
The first evening of Knobcon, there are always a bunch of performers in a pavillion outside the hotel. Also on the first evening of Knobcon, I tend to be tired after having made the 5-6 hour drive and I might not be able to hang around for the whole thing.
Eric aka Suit & Tie Guy (whose business is now muSonics rather than STG Sound Labs) is the founder/main runner of Knobcon, and usually performs Friday nights. Apparently he is going through some difficult family stuff and had to beg off tonight’s performance. But also, one of the duos that was going to perform was late getting in and didn’t even start setting up until the second performer was almost done. So it was pretty chaotic, the order was rearranged and I mostly don’t know who did what in what order.
Before fatigue set in, I only heard three performers, each with a continuous 30-40 minute long set. And I think given the constraints they were working with, that was too long for each of them. This is a common criticism I have of many musicians: it is better to leave your audience wanting more, than getting bored in the middle. I know when improvising, especially with a limited portable set of gear, it can be difficult to have enough different stuff to do to keep it varied.
I don’t want to sound too negative — I enjoyed each of these, even though they did lose me a bit after a while. And I recognized the artistry and mastery. And… I don’t do this stuff live, I cheat by recording it, and sometimes editing my takes down.
The first performer had a Buchla Easel with a couple of extra modules, a looper and a violin. He set up some nice sequences with a deep, full but simple bass part acting in almost a melodic way, and then would pick up the violin and play along with it — sometimes matching the rhythms and patterns of the sequence, sometimes playing a kind of counterpoint to them. I liked his synth work and he was quite a good violinist, but again, I think it would have made a great 15-minute piece and then move on to something else.
The second performer had a Serge system along with an OP-1, a Jomox T-Resonator and some other bits. Interesting combination of gear. His set was a sort of abstract, rumbling, shuffling, gurgling thing that broke out into shattered drum sounds, evolved a solid if simple rhythm, and then fell back into chaos… which mostly worked well I thought, but given the length I think I’d rather it moved forward rather than back, taking us somewhere else. I felt like the modular and T-Resonator were highly chaotic, and there might not have been much potential to get more order out of it than he did without repatching. But the funny thing is it didn’t seem like people even noticed he was playing at first, it kind of snuck up on them. He had a look of concentration and small movements while playing, which made me think of the word “strategy”.
The third performer was TamiX. I know that because she was the only woman performing that night, and I’ve seen her on social media before. She is also an “idol” and has this anime schoolgirl style that is really not my thing — but she has talent for sure. The Buchla system she was performing with is roughly the size of my modular at home, was absolutely covered in a rat’s nest of patch cables, but with a Buchla Thunder and a couple of other controllers I couldn’t identify, she seemed to have mastery over it. It was crowd-pleasing, angry robot techno that sometimes felt right on the edge of going completely berzerk. Not really knowing her style and listening to more dark Berlin stuff myself, I kept expecting her to really dial it back into something strict and industrial, but there was always at least a bit of chaos; she controlled the key it was in but parts would just sort of go into flourishes and little micro-solos and brief octave jumps and piercing riffs seemingly on their own. At times it was like there was a mob of 5 or 6 voices improvising on a theme while she directed them, and they were alternate staying with or trying to push or pull the insistent kick drum. What kind of magical sequencers do they have in Buchla 200e setups anyway?
It was really joyful and wild, and it felt like she had developed the whole thing perfectly, and as the kick drum and all but two voices faded away it seemed was bringing it to a very satisfying conclusion, but… it just kept on. She’d bring a bit in and then pull it back out again. It felt lost for almost ten minutes, before she brought the drums back up, pumped up the energy again and then ended it in an okay, but not mind-blowing way. I think if I had recorded that, I would have edited it heavily and shortened it quite a bit. (And I’ve done that sometimes… of course you don’t have that luxury when live, and if you’re supposed to perform for 40 minutes, you perform for 40 minutes even if you came to a very natural end point after 25.)
I didn’t have enough energy to stay for the other three performers, and I think unless they were going to do something really ambient and soothing very much in contrast to that, she’d have been a tough act to follow anyway.
The next performer (who had just barely started when I left) had a small 5U case of muSonics modules and some drum machines. Another setup seemed to be (mostly Roland) drum machines, grooveboxes and pedals, and the late arrivals seemed to have all keyboards. Aside from the video rig manned by a couple of guys providing visuals on a big screen for all the performers, there was no Eurorack in the room at all. Seems a bit odd, when it seems 2/3 of the exhibition hall is usually Eurorack.
But I know that all 6 of the listed performers for the “Big Room” tomorrow night use Eurorack. I hope I have the energy for that because I’d really like to hear Vamp Acid, Space Racer and POB…
The theme of Knobcon 11 — which has previously been such things as “Jack to the Future”, “Number Six” (The Prisoner), and “Knobtoberfest”, was utterly inevitable:
Tired from the drive and a little overwhelmed by the ridiculously noisy lobby (it has the worst acoustics ever, so it sounded like a World Cup match even though there was plenty of space and I maintained about 60 feet of social distancing until I actually checked in), I waited until about 4:30 to go down and do the con registration. There was quite a line. Maybe 1 in 5 people wearing a mask, which is more than average in the general public I think. I’m definitely going to stick with that in any crowded area given that Covid is on the rise again and the new booster won’t be available for another couple of weeks.
Gotta go back tomorrow to pick up my t-shirt, but I got my badge and bag o’ tchotchkes. This time there was no 9-pound dead tree Sweetwater catalog, thank goodness, and only a handful of cards and stickers and paper-thin fridge magnets I tossed out. Here’s the better and/or more bizarre stuff:
An actual, quality wooden coaster from Oberheim. Nice!
A decent, longish patch cable from SynthCube.
A pin, sticker, and 15% discount card for online orders from SSF.
I kept the EQD sticker because they have one of the best logos in the business. 🙂
Perfect Circuit’s thingy includes a little screwdriver. I probably already have one, and I’ve probably lost another one somewhere. But hey.
A squishy stress ball from Rogan. (It is not representative of the rubber they use for their soft-touch knobs.) I am amused that an actual knob company is sponsoring Knobcon now. But they do make my favorite knobs (as found on Make Noise, IME/The Harvestman, and Mutable Instruments by default, and I’ve put them on several other modules too).
A PCB (circuit board / non-metallic panel) business card from Infinite Machinery, with what appears to be a surface-mount 0-ohm resistor on it. (If it actually is a zero ohm resistor, it’s time to alert the press that they’ve invented room temperature superconductors…) Maybe I can tape it over the very poorly located power switch on my computer that dogs have been known to turn off with their noses or butts.
An aluminum circle from MetalPhoto. I don’t know what I’m going to do with an aluminum circle. Last time it was a ruler, which is a lot more practical.
In about an hour and a half, the festivities (live music) start up. Right now I’m just chilling in my hotel room and thinking about getting into my snack stash rather than bothering with real dinner.
Yesterday during my work hours, we had an internet outage. When it became apparent it was going to be down for a while, I signed into Teams on my phone’s slow and unreliable 4G connection just in case, and fired up the synths. I believe now I just have one, maybe two more tracks to record to round out the album.
Entonal Studio’s MIDI support works with Univer Inter, so I was able to play Strega in a subset of 18edo from the Seaboard. There was a little bit of wobbling at the attacks of some notes, but I lived with it for the purposes of that one track as it gave some additional character. This is masked when you’re using pressure control rather than an envelope with a relatively fast attack — but since my internet was down I was stuck with the settings I’d last uploaded to the Uni.
Pitch being slower than gates is a thing that happens with Eurorack sequencing at times, which can be solved with a very short gate delay. With MIDI normally you get the pitch and gate in a single combined message — but Entonal Studio is also sending pitch bend messages to adjust the tuning, so between it and the MIDI-to-CV conversion there’s an opportunity for things to get weird. But I can fix it easily enough with short gate delays using Stages or Teletype, no problemo.
So obviously, this is The Season That I Got Into Microtonal Stuff (STIGIMS).
I wound up grabbing Entonal Studio, a plugin that manages microtuning. I really wish I’d picked it up earlier — it’s what I should have been using all along.
Bitwig Micro-Pitch has two modes:
12-Note mode, where you can tune each keyboard key and resize the octave. All units are in 12TET semitones, aka “dollars” (100 cents) with no conversion from ratios, EDO etc. If you want a scale with less than 12 notes you’ll need to copy and paste values; if you want one with more than 12, too bad.
EDO mode, where you set just the interval size and number of divisions. You can’t skip divisions, so if you want a nice diatonic scale with 19edo tuning, you’ll have to work out the conversion elsewhere (e.g. Scale Workshop) and enter it into 12-Note mode instead.
Both of them give you control over the root note and fine tuning. There’s also an intriguing “wet/dry mix” that interpolates between 12TET and your specified tuning. (And yes, that is extremely weird with EDO mode.)
There’s a decent set of useful presets.
It works via MPE, effectively sending pitch bend messages for each note. It works poorly with non-MPE synths.
So, while you can do some cool things with it, it’s got its limits.
Entonal Studio’s radial graph, with harmonics enabled
And then there’s Entonal Studio. You can have any number of notes in your scale, and you can specify each one by ratios, cents, divisions, etc. You can just drag pitches around the circle to adjust them if you like, and optionally snap to ratios or equal divisions. There are very handy visualization tools, which help not just in constructing a scale but when playing it. You can edit the mapping any way you want. You can see a table of MIDI note numbers to names, Hertz, cents, the expression that created it, and its ratio relative to a root frequency. There’s also a Lattice view, which gets into aspects of theory that I skimmed over in the Gann book.
It supports not just MPE, but monophonic MIDI (using pitch bend), multichannel MIDI, and MTS-ESP (a new quasi-standard not yet widely supported, but Plogue OPS7 can use it). It can host a plugin within itself (which tends to work better for non-MPE synths). It can import and export Scala and XML tuning files.
What’s it missing? Hmm…
The ability to compare two scales. It’d be nice to see how they align with each other, whether you’re checking for general consonance or because you want to play different scales simultaneously. (Comparing to 12TET isn’t hard if you just look at the cents values, but seeing it visually would still be nice.) I’ll probably write to the developer to ask about this!
A tool for approximating by ratios or divisions, like Scale Workshop does. But you can sort of do this interactively with the snap feature, and you can always export a Scala file, mess around in SW and re-import, which gets you a lot of other nerdy stuff.
This is more of a pie in the sky thing, but after reading up on dissonance curves in the Sethares book, I kind of want that integrated into scale creation software. It’d be very cool to enter a few partials and their amplitudes (or even take an FFT of a sound for you), and have it generate a dissonance curve and have it fit possible ratios or EDO scales. This would be major new feature territory or even a separate addon or product, but I might ask about it too.
Having finished one book on tuning systems, I am now on Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale by William Sethares. Overall, it explains how consonance and dissonance work, and how if you’re interested in consonance, you have to match your tuning/scale to your timbre or vice versa.
The quick version:
Most instruments in Western music have a mostly harmonic spectrum, because of the physics. Strings are held in place at both ends and can’t vibrate, so any waves must be exactly that strength length or must divide the length equally (so 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 etc.) Air columns in a wind/brass instrument, organ pipes or the human voice behave similarly. With any acoustic instrument there is generally some additional mechanical noise, and factors like string tension which can warp things a bit, but overall it’s pretty close.
The harmonic spectrum is why small ratios for intervals work so well — going up to 2/1 or 3/2 or 4/3 or 5/4 etc., you’ve got partials that match up with the root’s partials. The higher the ratios, the higher up the spectrum (and thus weaker) those matches are — and more importantly, some of the non-matching partials wind up in a zone where they clash with each other.
But percussive instruments are inherently inharmonic. You can carve a wooden arch in the back of a xylophone bar, shave material off a church bell in strategic locations etc. to try to to reduce the dissonance either by weakening some vibration modes or bending them into better frequencies, but you can’t completely fix it. And of course synths can create inharmonic tones using FM, additive synthesis, or a frequency shifter.
The book points out that these nice small ratios, even octaves, can be dissonant when the timbre is inharmonic. But you can find a tuning/scale that fits the spectrum. This is what Java and Bali do with their gamelan scales, tailored to fit the spectra of the individual instruments.
Conversely, you can find spectra that will complement exotic scales such as 10edo, which is kind of a problem for harmonic instruments.
With the majority of my 18edo-based album already recorded, I wonder if I can find a Tension setting for Odessa that results in consonant neutral thirds. Mostly I’ve just played what felt right and interesting, but I do tend toward minimal harmony and not following the theoretical rules about chord progressions, voice leading etc. anyway.
Since I’ve been deep in this 18edo album project, I thought it’d be a good time to learn more about microtonality and tuning systems in general. So I grabbed Kyle Gann’s The Arithmetic of Listening: Tuning Theory and History for the Impractical Musician off my wishlist and dug in.
I love that title BTW. I certainly can be an impractical musician at times. Not quite as deep into that as some of course, but I do feel that the most efficient path from A to B isn’t always the most creatively inspiring one.
The material in this book more or less divides into two main areas. The first is the quest for a perfect tuning system, which is unfortunately not mathematically possible.
The most consonant sounds — the “sweetest”, purest, least clashing — are, as the Mesoptamians and Greeks proved, the ones with the simplest integer ratios. 2:1 (called the octave for dumb historical reasons), 3:2 (the fifth) and 4:3 (the fourth). It’s downhill from there, but it’s the major and minor thirds that make Western chords what they are.
The problem is, if you insist on using 3:2 as a fifth, the “circle of fifths” used to build a scale is really a spiral. 3/2 to the 12th power is 129.746, which is not a power of 2. Over the centuries, various strategies were invented to cope with this dilemma. Every one of them has its problems, from “you cannot play in that key on this instrument” to “G# is not the same as Ab so I need more than 12 keys for my 12-tone scale” to “absolutely none of these intervals is really in tune.”
Meanwhile in the world of fretted stringed instruments, they never had a choice but to use equal temperament. All of the semitones have the same ratio between each other, though it’s not based on “nice” ratios. Historically when you placed frets, you’d measure 1/18th of the length of the string between the previous fret and the bridge. (This number is more accurate but awkward today.) When you got to the 12 fret you’d be very close to an octave. And coincidentally, the fifth and fourth were pretty close to being right too… it’s just that the thirds and sixths are kind of broken. But we got used to it.
Last night, I was playing pure tones using Bitwig Micro-Pitch to try different intonations and temperaments. This is super easy compared to retuning a piano or building a different organ, of course. In a high enough register it’s shockingly easy to hear these conflicts in tuning that we just take for granted. But then, they can be masked by more complex timbres and arrangements, and the way we compose and play music in the first place.
All of that was not the reason I got into this subject though.
The other aspect of tuning theory is: what do you do if you want to break out of that system and make something that sounds more exotic, eerie, unfamiliar?
There’s a lot of fancy theory here too. Some composers have built scales using other ratio theories. But one of the simpler things is to explore is other equal divisions of the octave (edo) besides 12, or even another basis besides the octave (such as the tritave, the 3:2 ratio). Thus my playing around with 7edo at times, and 18edo in this project. And mostly that started out of curiosity, back when I had the ER-301 Sound Computer in my rack.
In some of those macrotonal scales you just don’t get to play “chords” at all and all of the intervals sound odd. And given the kind of music I make, that’s OK. I don’t really think about Western harmony concepts in my music, though they may happen by accident (I hope that pun doesn’t fall flat…)
In my current project I’m not being super strict about this. I have too many different sources, drones tuned by ear, harmonic series that are inherent a part of the timbre, frequency shifting that throws everything off. But the compositional basis of it is still 18edo.
I’m kind of putting together my thoughts on tuning, scales and quantization options and how to take advantage of them in my hybrid Eurorack/DAW setup. I was planning on writing that up here tonight, but it’s starting to get late and I’m still rearranging the blocks in my head. I’ve tended to do things intuitively without theorizing much, but it’s possible that learning this (and maybe more importantly, finally hearing the differences in different intonations/temperaments) will lead me somewhere. Maybe it’ll just be the occasional dip into a just-intoned triad left bone-dry for the shock factor of zero beating.
Almost half an hour of music already done for the 18EDO album. It varies from percussive gamelan-like stuff to drones, but it all seems to work out pretty well. It’s been fun, but the choice to use that tuning system is kind of a restriction both creative and technical, and it’ll be good to leave it behind again in the future.
Let’s talk about Cherry Audio. They have a lot of cheap software synths, most of which are emulations of classic analog designs, and a few effects. They also have Voltage Modular, which I thought was limited in a lot of ways that “real” modular isn’t when I tried it.
A common position toward any emulation on KvR is that whatever it is, it’s terrible and doesn’t sound like the real thing. You’ll find people saying that about nearly any emulation, and I think there’s a kind of groupthink aspect to it where people will pile on to show that they have discerning ears. I never really take any of that seriously, because — with some exceptions — I’m not familiar enough with the exact piece of gear to really judge and also I usually care more about whether it sounds interesting than if it sounds identical to something. Honestly, my opinion of their stuff is most of it sounds okay (ranging into “cool” in some cases) but not necessarily spectacular.
But one criticism of Cherry Audio that I definitely share is about their UI design.
I don’t care for arguments about skeumorphic vs non-skeumorphic designs… if you want the interface to look like a piece of hardware with knobs, sliders, wooden sides etc. that’s fine, as long as you don’t ask me to imitate rotating the mouse around a knob to turn it. And it makes sense to use that sort of design when emulating a classic piece of gear.
But where it comes to layout… a lot of that gear was 4- or 5-octave full-sized keys, which makes it pretty long, and sometimes the rest of the control panel might have wasted space. That’s not good for putting on a screen, along with several other windows jockeying for position. So a lot of plugin developers take the liberty of rearranging things, while still preserving the visual language and aesthetics of the original gear.
Plus, there’s not really much benefit in drawing a keyboard on the screen when you’re going to be using a real one or a sequencer. Clicking on the keys is of limited musical usefulness, though maybe if you have a touchscreen it’s a little better. Still, most developers either skip the keyboard or let you disable it.
CA cares not about these things. No option to disable the keyboard. No rearranging the controls to fit better. Instead, they have a “Focus” button that lets you zoom in and look at the thing with a magnifying glass. I find this really awkward and a sign of poor design choices.
Okay, but that’s them just being a little overly faithful to the classic synths, right? They wouldn’t do that with their own original synths that only exist as VST plugins, would they?
…they would. Here is Sines:
I wanted to love this one. It’s based on phase modulation and waveshaping! But I just could not with this UI. Look at how busy it is… you HAVE to zoom in to be able to use it. They really should not have tried to force all 4 oscillators as well as 4 LFOs and 4 envelopes and the other stuff and the silly keyboard and the other wasted space into one screen. Tabs are your friend! But also, honestly, the synthesis methods here are something I can and do patch together very readily with Bitwig Grid or with my modular hardware. So I took a pass.
Here’s their latest just released today, Harmonia:
It is a lot less cramped and it’s pretty visually appealing. But still, this is not an ideal layout, especially for a synth that’s a fresh original concept and not an imitation of a piece of hardware. Here’s what I would do:
Eliminate the keyboard and pitch/mod wheels.
Go with a two-row design, oscillators on top and the LFOs, envelopes, mod routing and FX on the bottom row. Overall the aspect ratio would be more square.
Instead of an “Osc Mixer” just put the level/pan controls with their associated oscillators.
The envelopes should be sliders. Sliders are traditional for ADSR envelopes and easy to read, there’s no need to use knobs and graphical envelopes. Minor nitpick because it’d still take a similar amount of space, but it seems inconsistent.
Control range/response for the distortion could use some work I think. With the sort of complex sounds the engine produces, it doesn’t take much distortion to go overboard.
This is less strictly about UI, but I feel like one filter isn’t quite enough, or the osc sections maybe need simple lowpass filters built in.
Another disappointment outside the UI is that it doesn’t support MPE, and you can’t load alternate tuning files (e.g. Scala), and the pitchbend range is limited to 12 so it won’t work well with Bitwig Micro-Pitch — it can kind of do its thing monophonically but the pitch wobbles into place.
But! This is an interesting synth overall. It takes the harmonic oscillator concept but lets you retune each partial to different intervals, with some useful preset options. And instead of sines, you get samples/wavetables to work with. And you can modulate a lot of stuff at audio rate from one of the oscillators. Altogether, this allows for some very busy, very dirty, but controllable sounds and I’m really digging that.
I meant to write more stuff but I’ve just been playing with it for the last hour, so… yeah, gonna grab it despite its flaws.
Pretty sure it was the XBox controller firmware — it hasn’t crashed since I updated that. Whew.
I had a theme in mind for the next album project but I think that’s already been hijacked by another. I’d rather follow the actual inspiration than attempt to plan my inspiration, so that’s fine.
The first recording had this drone loop, and I arbitrarily set a couple of intervals to transpose it… and then later I wanted to match a part to those tunings and found a lucky near-match in 18EDO, so I went with that. I found it was kind of a neat scale to work with and to play on the Seaboard, so I wanted to explore it more and see where I could take that.
So the second track had a part sequenced on 0-Ctrl and quantized to 18EDO by Teletype, as well as another part played on the Seaboard — though I kind of twisted it by frequency-shifting the entire 1KHz-6KHz range and it sounds a bit like inharmonic FM.
After playing a bit with Scale Workshop and the Xenharmonic Wiki page on 18EDO, I had myself a set of Scala files I can use with Aalto (which doesn’t respect the Bitwig Micro-Pitch tunings). I wound up accidentally coming up with a self-playing patch using an 18EDO enneatonic (9-note) scale, which is almost a complete song in itself — I’m thinking of adding a little improvisation on the bass, with a very small selection of notes…
The chromatic 12TET scale has a half step between each note; the usual scale modes alternate in different ways between whole and half steps. 18TET on the other hand consists of third-step intervals. What they have in common is the hexatonic whole-tone scale: C, D, E, F#, G# A#.
But that ennatonic 18EDO scale has intervals either in 4/3 steps or 1/3 steps, and it only shares C, E and G# in common with a 12TET chromatic scale. (An augmented triad, very melodramatic/mysterious…) So if I want to play the bass to fit this scale, that’s what I’ll have to stick to.
There can also be some fun in having clashing scales and tuning systems though, so we’ll see what actually happens.
I could also do this on the fretless bass uke and try to work out where those third-step intervals are rather than using the marked fret locations… that might be a little advanced for me yet though.
So that’s a lot of words about the tuning system, but how about the timbre and overall feel? I’ve found myself accidentally taking some inspiration from the book I’ve just finished, Stephen Baxter’s Proxima. Which I think was a flawed story in several ways, which I don’t want to stay up all night laying out. But it also had some cool stuff going on, some pretty creative alien life, and that sort of mysterious landscape thing is working in my subconscious.
I also just watched the Annihilation movie this evening. It diverges quite a lot from the book (which I do not want to spoil for anyone here, whether you have or haven’t seen the movie) and the weirdness it gets into is completely different from the book’s weirdness, and there’s an obvious guy-in-a-suit special effect that looks more like a cheaply produced early 90s music video than the rest of the psychedelic spectacles we’re treated to, so one might say, it was flawed too. But also tense, and entertaining, and also dealing with mysterious landscape stuff. So that might end up feeding into the same pool of inspiration, we’ll see.
