ForrestReverbTest

Spending 2 weeks in a swedish 1860 lodge out in the woods in Småland constantly reminded me of the lack of the background noise of the city. There's quite another kind of ambience in the woods. Each tree and stone scatters sound and creates a dark and atmospheric forest reverb. So with my little H2 handheld recorder and two pieces of wood I recorded a number of forest reverb impulse responses.

Listen to the effect in action (using LAConvolver) below the image. Download the impulse responses (24bit stereo waw-files).

I'm off on holiday, but for those of you still working hard, I made a samples set of my guzheng, played with a bow. Yes, yes... Sonic Couture have already made an excellent Guzheng sample library. In fact Rasmus bought it after he messed about with my Guzheng and has made several nice bits of music with it, which may pop up on this blog sometime in the future... if we all just poke him enough times.

This sample set is kinda different... comprised of short staccato bows with looped layers of gentle mallet playing. Therefore this is of course not a realistic Guzheng sample library (for that, get the Sonic Couture). On the other hand, the samples below have a little more sass and if you have Kontakt, you could always extract whatever samples tickle your funny bones.

Enjoy some samples of a Guzheng played the Atlastop way (right click to download.... warning it's 154mb!)

There's an interesting collective sampling project going on over at the Music of Sound blog. They are crowd sourcing samples of doors.

It's gonna be quite extensive, more than 1000 sample.

So I've signed on, but never quite heard back. However I went ahead and did the recordings, and I figured I could put the samples up here. Download my doors

It's a 160mb file and spectacularly uninteresting to anyone who doesn't do sound editing for film or TV. All part of the service around here

Found this really useful multimonitor utility for Win XP... then I found out that Win7 has all this built in

I really enjoy wacking out beatz on the Akai LPD8... been trying to get instant mapping to work in Ableton using these scripts, but I've not had any success ... yet!

Need that boxy bass sound? What about a complete sample-set of the Bogdon Box Bass that I built a while ago?
The tone is halfway between a contrabass and a bucket bass, which we also sometimes use to record.
Of course this not a pro sample set, it's intentionally 'rustic' in it's vibe.

Download for Kontakt
Download for Ableton Live

As always, this is a CC release. See the sidebar for attributes. Have fun!

The excellent freeware audio editor, Wavosaur, has pretty much replaced Wavelab for my needs. However its manual is a bit lacking (in fact I can only find a quick start guide), so there are a few features and working methods that quite useful.

1. Edit the left-side or the right-side of a stereo file. Right-click on the db scale to the left and choose 'select' or 'deselect' from the context menu. Now any vst processing will apply only to that side. (note- there is also Multi-channel! But it's not that useful)

2. Auto detect regions from impulses and scramble for instant beat mangling. Tools->Slicing/Region->Auto Slice Region and again go to Tools->Slicing/Region-Scramble Region.

3. Batch processor with VST Chain (Wavosaur uses the current VST Chain)

4. Create Marker with 'M'... even while playing. Okay this one is obvious, but still it's a huge boon for quick selection. Especially since you can go to File->Export->Export All Regions

Go get Waveosaur

And finally download the lame_enc, (unzip) and place it in the same folder as Wavosaur and your File->Export->Export As Mp3 menu will work!

The freeware plugin Voxengo MSED is a great way to add audio processing on just to the the sides of a stereo signal, or compress the middle, while leaving the sides untouched.

In the tradition of nearly all freeware, Voxengo MSED is missing a bit of documentation and getting it setup in any meaningful way is a bit tricky. So I've gone ahead and made a Track Template for use in the excellent DAW.... Reaper.

So go ahead and download the Reaper Track Template MidSide Stereo with Voxengo MSED. (to use, right-click in Reapers track pane on the left and select 'Open template')

If you are thinking "Mid-side! Whazz Dat?", then Emusician has a great article on a variety of mid-side techniques.

UPDATE - Since writing this post I've realised that Reaper itself can easily be setup to do mid-side encoding and decoding. In fact I found a Track Template for Mid-side encoding and decoding, simply by searching on the Reaper forums.

I recently found my girlfriends old Game Boy in a box in the basement. It's in great condition despite the fact that it was made 20 years ago. These old 8-bit wonders were really built to last. I bought a rom image of the music making software LSDJ from the developer and then bought a cartridge from Nonfinite Electronics who also flashed it with the software.

LSDJ running on Game Boy

Here is a short disturbing tune I made in the first hour of playing with it. I just made a few patterns and recorded it DI in LSDJ's very nice "Live" mode while tweaking the synths and the noise generator.

FirstLSDJ

This new found couch friendly device is gonna add a nice color to future work. I must say I don't intend to get on the Chip tune train although some of that stuff is very good like this remix from little-scale.

Now off to rest my eyes after peering at a non-backlit screen for to long.

UPDATE: Here is an Ableton Live set containing the loops.

Here's my version of a remix. I simply time-stretched an entire song that Rasmus did a while ago... but using variable time-stretching.

I turned, yet again, to the excellent Paul Stretch, which I just discovered has a drawable envelope that controls the amount of time-stretching over time. What a wonderful tool for massive sound transformation.

My reworked version, turned into a 10min piece, from which I edited together all the bits that scared the bee-jeebus out of me.
arp bad boy remix
I really don't know where all those spooky voices came from. Rasmus?

Got most of the home studio setup again after moving back to Copenhagen from Malmø.

Just did a clean install of Win7 on my PAQ quiet PC... and got most of the gear on the shelves. Still hooking things together. Kyma system is now on a digital send/return from the Konnekt. Borrowed MS-10 hooked up to Moogerfoogers. Kaoss pad3, SP404 and Line6 M13 are ready to sample all the various bits of acoustic gear... Gu Zheng, Harmonium, Xaphoon, Erhu and misc guitars and tiny amps. And to top it off a drumset.

I'm quite pleased with the setup. Desk still needs a rethink. But the acoustics are pretty good thanks to some borrowed sound panels behind the mix position. The Adam A7's and Avantones help a bit too.