So, a we bit ago.. I was.. well doing my blog entry.. Part 1 of programming Native Instruments Massive Synthesizer.. And it was after publishing that that a fair reader made a suggestion to me… that I do a screen cast… that this kind of information would be better communicated via a screen cast.. and so I set about doing such a thing.

Thanks to Mac Heist.. I now own Snapz Pro.. which is a pretty groovy screen capture program, or so I’m told.. But then Mr. Greg Bond, of Consumer2Business.com, suggested I try a program called Screenflow. And while screen flow looked super awesome.. particularly for what I is up to.. As I explained to Mr. Bond, I indeed am a very cheap person and.. well long story short I haven’t gotten a chance to check out Screenflow.. in terms of actually using it.. but clearly it’s feature set is..  kinda, probably, better for what I is trying to do.. not that I’ve used Snapz enough to have a clue.

I want to say it was Steve Albanese of Tutorial Depot whom turned me on to Snapz.. Tutorial Depot, at least at the moment, focuses in on creating video cast tutorials for various music technology stuff.. I was going to do stuff with Steve on Reason.. till I fell horribly off the… dependability wagon.. which wasn’t helped by my mom’s passing.. 

 A few latter (after doing some grocery shopping):

In any event.. I’ve wanted to do screen casting / make tutorials for.. well probably for more then a decade…  And so this project represents my first experimental swing in that direction.

Unreliable Narration 

If I were to start a company to do this.. it would probably be called something, something, something, unreliable narrations. There’s a few reasons for this:

I value the art more then the technical… consequently the.. lets call it the creative / aesthetic / philosophical / whatever.. part of my work is uber advanced.. where as the technical is.. Well its not even that my work isn’t technically sophisticated.. err, this is probably complex to try and explain but.. well the evolution of my technical sophistication is subordinated to the creative / aesthetic / philosophical.. meaning it drives it.. the “shape” of the technical evolution, in terms of the lines that articulate where we find sophistication versus where we don’t.. is driven by this.. which is different then approaching a tool and seeking a technical mastery as your primary objective?

This gets into a very complex idea in my philosophical system… which I used to call “the order of revelation,” which is an expressive of.. your particular moral order.. in the Nietzschian sense.. Which is to say a kind of hierarchy of wills.. expresses an influence over where our attention is directed.. this has to do with.. the limits of the human mind.. in essence we could say the “order of revelation” is defined by the underlying questions that are driving us.. to put it a certain way.. that is our awareness is driven by these questions.. consciously or not.

The order of revelation is what constructs our awareness of reality.. our framework for understanding reality.. for interacting with reality.. It has lots of psycho-social dynamic implications.. has a huge influence over social hierarchies..

That’s a kind of quick overview of the subject.. what this means in terms of how I approach art making.. and a host of other things is.. the lines that articulate what I view as “the area of stuff I must master” is very individualistic to me… and radically so. So radical that.. from conventional view points.. you could say I’m “ass backwards.” So, if I do a tutorial on sound synthesis with Massive..

Latter that day:

On the Subject of Experimentation

Experimentation is a good way to explore stuff.. It’s often a matter of.. we are more interested in developing our ability to do something, then in making that something great. It’s not quite a total madness of experimentation, it’s experimentation subordinated to goals:

I have a primary goal of.. what sorta screen casts I might like to make.. Here are some basic things:

• Good production values: Screen casts, even by great folks, are sorta notorious for not having groovy production values.. Now just what constitutes “groovy production values” in an interesting subject.. and around this subject I want to experiment.
• Personality: So often screen cast tutorials are.. without personality..  ”You aren’t excited to be here, are you?” you want to say the the person doing it.. Even if there personality is.. if not great, at least not boring you to death… there’s the question of “would I want to be like the person giving the tutorial? I think this is a key nexus point between personal branding and.. well the tutorial.. I mean.. wouldn’t you like to learn from someone who’s coming from some place interesting? Wouldn’t you like to learn X, Y, or Z from someone who’s brilliant on the subject? 

Unreliable Narration revisited

Ok.. allow me to kinda break this up here… Didn’t Matt just say, only a few paragraphs back.. well he was talking about this notion of the “unreliable narrator,” right? A premise of the tutorial I’m doing is “I don’t actually know what I’m doing, and yet I’m making a tutorial on it.” Why in hell would you want to learn from someone who doesn’t know what your teaching? This is not someone who is brilliant at X, Y, and Z!!! Or is he?

Hopefully.. you’d dig me as a sound artist.. you listen to my music..  and you’re like “holy shit, this is amazing.” Even if you don’t actually think my music is amazing.. if you at least respect it enough to go “yeah, that dude is the real thing” then.. I’m not in the category of “those who can’t: teach.” This onto its self puts me on another level. 

What you’re getting in the tutorial is.. “how that crazy guy makes that music.” A part of what you learn from the tutorial is “It’s ok to not know what the hell you’re doing,” and “not knowing what you’re doing does not necessarily have to keep you from making great work.” All of which brings us to a complicated series of philosophical points that.. we wont talk about here today.

Beyond this.. as much as I say “I don’t know what I’m doing” there is, I hope, a sense that you’re still dealing with a heavy weight. The guy doing the tutorial.. he’s like.. an interesting cat..  and though he doesn’t know what he’s doing in the sense that.. the particular technical issues of whatever it is that he’s doing is a mystery to him.. he does know what he’s doing on a number of other levels.. and even if he’s a total… and even if he’s tell you “how to do it the wrong way” we find that this somehow is an adventure worth doing.

Ok, so on with our Goals of experimentation:

• There is the basic question of “how do we make a great screen cast.” I mean what constitutes one? What are the craft issues I need to develop? I have a certain idea about these sorts of things.. but those ideas versus.. what’s it take for me to achieve it.. is another matter.. 
• I want to create something where.. we get both the creative and the technical together.. because this just doesn’t happen enough…   

Next Morning Sometime

Ok, lets end on this:

Business Cases and Potential Implications

As I sit here typing this out I’m hyped on this project. I’m very smart on this social media stuff, and yet at least up until this current moment, haven’t really felt like I’ve quite done anything that would show this…  The screen cast project is text book social media strategy stuff..  I wont go far into this but.. A typical value of creating a blog or a podcast, for the creator, is that it helps establish the creator as an expert. One route to the monetization of social media has to do with leveraging the value of expert status. So if I go out and create a lot of screen casts tutorials.. I could develop a reputation along these lines.

An odd thing about my screen casts is that.. they are all about Matt doing things “his way.” In a certain essential kind of way.. These screen casts a part of showing you how I work.. how I make the stuff I make. In this sense they have a public relations kinda value.. They are all about my work, after all.. and by going through them you’d gain a special appreciation for my work. These screen casts are a kind of advertisement for my work: People will very often go to some place like Youtube to learn how to do X. If I make content that’s valuable to a person wanting to know how to do X.. They then, kinda sorta, meet me and my personal brand. This person is a person who’s perhaps more likely to appreciate my work since they are.. at least in some sense.. a kind of peer in the field.. they are kinda close to a target demographic.. This person, as a part of learning whatever.. learns how I do it.. and about what I do.. and my work.. 

Why I’m feeling excited 

I’ve really only started what’s likely to be a long process of producing my first screen cast.. but already there are a few things becoming obvious to me.

1. I’m very good at teaching.. I’m very good at breaking down complex ideas into simple ideas.. helping you digest stuff.
2. I’m really passionate about what I do.
3. I really want to empower my audience to greatness.. 
4. There is some sense that.. as crazy as I may or may not be.. and as much as I might not even know what I’m doing.. there really is a kind of weight to these presentations.. something you feel.. something kinda brilliant
5. The casts are very much off the cuff.. kinda stream of consciousness stuff.. so there’s a real realness to them.. an energy.. a humanity.. 
6. A lot of the stuff you find for music production.. the screen casts are like “look how cool I am.” They seem, at least to me, to be arrogant dicks.. and you’re like “dude, you’re really not that great, you just understand a particular basic thing.” The casts I make are humble and without pretensions.. they are all about wanting to empower you.. and share passion with you.. They want to show you amazing things.. 
7. In the end, assuming I actually follow through on this project, the casts will cover a lot of territory.. everything from music production to video to animation to interactive to social media to whatever.. Err, I’ll have to dig deeper into this one..

I’ll end on this:

I never know how to describe what I do.. because I do so many different things.. and that’s probably what’s most impressive about me. What I seek to do is to empower you to do something remarkable… which has to do with how I’m re-conceptualizing the future of the arts and media.. business wise. This is the organizing principle, or a significant one.. behind my skill sets.. and what I could likely teach.. if I do so.. it could be revolutionary as a program.. I may blog more on this latter… 

Latter that night 

Im tired… must sleep, will post this as is… not sure how I feel about it, but what the hell

I’ve spoken about the subject of sound software running on your computer versus on accelerator cards else where in this blog.. and my general view about the subject… and the faster computers have gotten, the less the value of the accelerator cards.

A few years back, when Universal Audio first came out with there UAD cards.. there cards where many times more powerful then the computers you’d put them in.. This allowed for effects plugs, and what not, to be of a substantially higher quality then what you could other wise get.. thus rise of UAD… but now our computers are many times more powerful then the cards…  

So.. finally.. Universal Audio releases the UAD 2 cards… which makes the cards now a whole lot more powerful.. which is nice…. they have a trailer that explains the cards here. So this is kind of big news…  

Matt’s Reservations

Theoretically one ought to buy a new computer every 2 years or so.. and when you do this.. software that runs off that computer gets an upgrade every two years.. I think the sort of person who’s attracted to UAD cards.. is often the sort of person who upgrades there computer less frequently…. you see this among a lot of music production folks.. people running Protools rigs and what not.. but for me.. I have a lot of other things that I do on my computer that demand power, out side of music production.. so at least for me I think it makes less sense.

Software that runs on a UAD.. the development cost associated with this, versus running of your computer.. makes UAD type software more expensive.

If you buy a UAD.. the software needs that UAD card to run.. so.. if you have both a desktop and a laptop… wherever you might use the laptop.. for me as a part of an out bound type studio.. well you loose much of your studio.

I’m not sure of this, but it seems like there might be some latency issues relative to UAD. 

UAD 2 cards are now  runing anywhere between $500 and $2000…  You can get a UAD  card.. for $700.. that comes with the Neve console sound, so to speak, of which you can run 32 instances off the card.. This and it comes with what we might call the UAD bread and butter stuff.

I think if you look at the market in general, this is actually a quite reasonable price.. particularly as you get a voucher towards more effects..

I already have good emulations of the Neve compressors and EQs.. via liquid mix.. although I could benefit from more instances.. If I were to invest in more EQs and compressors.. I tend to want to make sure they could run on my out board studio… and I’d very much like to not have the problem limited instances.

So.. I mean if I where to drop $700 on something like UAD2 Nirvana 32… what I really want is to come out the other end with a well rounded studio..  

So… for anyone whom works in some sorta studio.. and perhaps particularly for the electronic sound artist, planning out your studio is a pretty important thing.. and has a huge effect on what sorta work you produce.. and for this reason, perhaps among others, I find myself forever obsessing over this sorta thing….

The latest refinements to my thoughts on the studio thing is..   well complicated, but I don’t want to get into that complexity here.. To sorta keep it simple: I’m now thinking short and long term. The short term is.. within the next 2 years, the long term is 2 or more years out.. These time frames are subject to change.. and kinda sorta represent a way of thinking about both my economic and creative situation.. and kinda sorta.. where I think I ought to be going.

As regular readers would know.. I’ve been thinking of investing a good deal of money into sound studio tools.. I’m not sure what the last figures I was thinking of… where they stood..  but it was fairly substantial…  now I’ve decided to limit myself to two programs… and anything beyond that is like… well if I discover I need to go that route…  

The Tools in Question

Breverb

There’s a reasonably good review on the online edition of EQ magazine..  of Breverb that you can find here. 

Breverb is an algorithmic reverb plug in.. The advantage of algorithmic reverbs, relative to convolution reverbs, mainly comes down to tweak ability… Algorithmic reverb is to convolution reverb what a synthesizer is to a sampler.. 

Reverb effects are super important to me in the style of music I find myself trying to invent: They are important in creating a sense of space inside of which sounds inhabit.. Space, in my work, is something that dynamically evolves as the sounds move through space.. and algorithmic reverb’s “tweak ability” has important advantages over convolution for this kind of thing…

The final note is that Breverb is, as these sorts of things go, not all that expensive at around $370 

Cantor

Here we is talking about a vocal synthesizer… I’ve talked about both Breverb and Cantor in previous entries.. Cantor in the larger subject of bringing vocals / words to my projects.. The approach of using a vocal synth.. has certain drawbacks relative to using an actual human.. but.. to really get the actual singing.. particularly if I’m doing the singing.. and of course I can’t sing.. requires a pretty substantial investment in software and hardware.. 

Beyond the tool investment issue with real human vocals, we have the issue of work flow.. with respect to composition and production… and with this various other issues and challenges. While these are all things I’m excited to take on.. there is a feeling that.. there is probably an optimal challenge level to be taken on at anyone point: If you do the same old same old too much.. it’s boring.. and if you push the challenges too hard.. things get frustrating.. so you want to find the sweet spot.. and given all I’m trying to do right now.. I think it makes sense to not go too far out there.. at least in the short term.

So that’s about it…   

So like.. I don’t want to creep you out or anything.. but you might want to take a look at these videos… 

Sarah Plain Church Video Fun

Can you dig that?

Ok, how about one more.. .   .    .

 So, ok.. if you’re… hmm….

Ok, dig this right…  archetypes, which we could speak of as being the basic building blocks of religion.. or religion is like a system for relating to archetypal forces… they are basically the expression of biology onto consciousness.. to explain all this would take a long time.. point is, if we view this stuff from that perspective.. you find that its not really all that crazy…  or, some of what looks crazy on the surface might not be as crazy as it appears.. Indeed, its kinda interesting…

Still.. there’s a certain cultural force to this kind of religious thang that, umm..  can be a little creepy.. In large measure.. well we see this in cultural conservatives that fail to see moral / ethical spirit which.. say.. moved the cultural revolution surrounding hippie-dom..  

Archetypal psychology speaking.. when ever you focus on a morality sorta thing that is.. sorta narrow in its allowances.. that part of your totality that looses a chance to grow up as a result… becomes your shadow.. then what happens is it gets projected on those folks whom live outside of said restrictive moral order.. so we find our selves the darkness of our own shadow in said people..  and thus the creepiness of the religious culture we find Miss Palin living in…  

For more on this here archetypal psych shtick.. check out this entry / documentary.

So..  how about a little of Matt’s religion.. in my religion we rock out.. with a dyionesian spirit.. to break out of the inherited value system.. so that we might get a direct experience of said archetypal forces…

We’re just a little more hungry for God, I guess.. then they are up in Alaska, ha? 

[Editors Note: This would seem to be the first part in a two part series on sound synthesis with Massive and Kore… here we go over some of the 101s of sound synthesis, and what’s up with Massive and Kore 2. ] 

I think I talked about this just recently, didn’t I?: The subject of the feeling like I want to make electronic music that’s expressive in new ways…. or in different ways then my music is often expressive…  and to start the process of exploring the possibilities.. and sorta like.. creating the stuff..  I’ve started programming with Native Instruments Massive and Kore 2. Kore 2 gives you a hardware interface into your software…  You get 4 rotary controls you can use to control whatever parameters of the sound / patch program you’re creating you like…

To give you an overview.. wish it was a bit quicker.. here’s a Native Instruments infomercial for Kore 2.. I don’t want to get too bogged down with this stuff.. and if you’re not familiar with this kind of technology.. this maybe way over your head.. don’t worry.. This isn’t what this entry is to be about…

[editor’s note: oh no?] 

 So.. the point is.. you can control all kinds of aspects of your sound via the controller.. all of which is automobile… which is the strategy for getting to that expressivity I was talking about..

I thought I might as well… well through another infomercial at you that might go into massive a bit.. but then I found this infomercial with the keyboard player from Korn talking about it.. and figured that would be pretty groovy…  

Ok.. so that’s a good little overview of something or other, right? Ok, enough of this foolishness.. onto the adventures.

Sound Synthesis in Massive

I’m no sound synthesis master.. I’m more of a.. fumble around.. finding things I like.. and hopefully something interesting happens. My knowledge of how to program synths / there architecture.. what the elements of any given sound synthesis engine are.. these kinds of core concepts..  I’m not totally ignorant in these areas.. I mean I have been working on learning this stuff for years.. but… I do tend to feel fairly clueless..

Given my clue impoverishment, one of the things that’s been impressing me about Massive is how approachable and user friendly the experience of learning it has proven to be..  which is particularly nice given how piss poor Native Instruments manuals tend to be..  

A Massive Basic Overview  

With Massive you basically have 3 main oscillators, a noise generator, a modulation oscillator.. we have 4 LFOs, 4 envelops, a couple of filters, 2 insert effects slots.. with a number of effects choices.. 2 sorta global effects.. plus EQ, the ability to control routing.. and a few other odds and ends.

It’s hard to talk about this process without explaining what all that means.. and I’m not sure how far I’ll go into this but…

Oscillators and Sound Sources 

You’re 3 main oscillators… well.. an oscillator is a sound source.. it creates the sound.. and other stuff modifies the sound.. anyway.. In massive.. these 3 main oscillators are “wavetable oscillators.” 

Wavetables are.. well it’s like you have an audio file.. and you have a parameter by which you can sweep through different locations in that audio file.. or perhaps table..  So when programming a wave table synthesizer, modulating the oscillator’s wavetable position.. is pretty standard stuff.

Now the next sound source we have is a noise generator.. Noise generators are.. I want to say something you tend to use creatively… Or I do anyway. These are often used for programming percussive sound.. your average synthesized snare sound.. starts with a noise generator.

The only parameter our noise generator has, outside of amp or volume, is color..  which, as you might imagine “colors the noise” it generates.. basically.

Filters In Massive

In Massive we have 2 filter slots.. for each we have a choice of 12 filter types. Basically a filter… well it filters the sound.. it modifies it.. taking out various frequencies.. perhaps amplifies some frequencies.. 

Modulation Fun

Modulation is really the heart of our programming adventures. We basically have 2 ways of modulating stuff..  via LFOs and envelops.. beyond this.. we can use key velocity.. or how hard we hit the keyboard.. and.. we have “macro control” which.. is sorta an obvious thing to control via your Kore controller.. via turning the knobs on your Kore controller.. and that’s really the heart of what I’m doing…

LFO

An LFO is a low frequency oscillator.. not really a sound source so much as a modulation source.. think of it as the second hand on a clock.. it oscillates around the clock face slowly.. . We can control our LFO’s rate of oscillation.. The LFO modulates / controls other parameters..  like say how much of a filter is going..  making them change slowly over time.. or at whatever rate you set the LFO rate to.

To make things more interesting.. you have different wave form options.. which is like turning your circular clock into a triangle.. or any other shape you would like..

Envelops

I haven’t bothered to dig into the Massive manual.. which isn’t terribly massive.. but my understanding is that you have.. what do you call them, multi state envelopes? Native instruments pioneered this idea with Absynth..  which is one of my favorite synths ever to program.. 

Ok, we’re getting ahead of our selves here. You want to know what an envelope is, don’t cha? Imagine, if you will, a grid. On our grid, our horizontal line represents time and hour vertical line represents….  lets say amplitude. Basically.. you could say an envelop is like.. a little drawing you make that represents the volume of your sound over time… kinda sorta.

Vanilla, in the world of envelopes and sound synthesis, is the ADSR envelope. ADSR = Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release. Attack is the time.. between when you pluck a string on your guitar, and reaches its maximum amplitude / volume.. Attack is also “well just how how loud are we talking anyway? Or.. what’s the path of the.. lets call it “amplitude acceleration” (don’t you love how I invent new terminology just to complexify a subject we are barley following in the first place? Well I suppose, if you know what I’m talking about, you’re entertained by my fumbling attempts at articulation but..) that the amplitude of your sound follows from being no sound at all.. to its maximum level. You follow?

Ok.. groovy..  So decay is both our volume path.. and the time.. between that maximum level and.. a sustain level..  

Ok.. so Sustain..  you hit a key on your keyboard..  a sound goes through the attack and decay envelope stages.. and then reaches the sustain level..  this is the level… or perhaps the place.. that the volume will stay at for as long as you’re holding down that key… 

Release is.. the path the sound takes from letting go that key, and the volume finally reaching zero.

So that should give you a basic understanding of the adsr envelope.. it’s one of the most important synth program building blocks going.. Now in a modular synthesizer architecture… an envelope, be it of an adsr, or a less vanilla variety, can be used to modulate other parameters then just volume.

Is your brain bleeding yet? That’s the problem.. I’m not really looking to teach you this stuff here.. just to give you a basic framework for understanding this stuff… enough so that I can explain what I’m doing.. such are the challenges of my life… I probably need to build a wiki for my site.. or something, so that I can just link to the terms.. but oh well.. 

So.. for our next entry…   the fun with modulation madness… coming soon to this here RSS feed.

And so, here’s an note to leave you on: