Massive X is a great synth

NI’s new flagship VST, the Massive X, was surrounded by controversy and buzz months before launch. Some claim it was a dissapointment, but I gave it a chance and it surpassed my expectations. As a matter of fact, Massive X might be my new favourite 🙂

Massive X is the holy grail combining ease of use, quick operation and vast possibilities. Beyond standard envelopes and LFOs there are also numerous handy features and options, such as “switcher LFO” or modulation bar next to every control, even synced delay times. An unbelievably flexible “performer” sequencer is accompanied by note-dependent, velocity and random modulators – all of them immediately available for quick use. No modulation matrix and no menu diving whatsoever.
In terms of synthesis options, everything is here – phase modulation / FM, sync and even wavefolders – till now rarely found in virtual synths, especially not all at once. Massive X also offers great sound quality for moderate CPU usage thanks to (brave) implementation of AVX instructions. These are commonplace in every CPU released since 2011, though many people already complained their machine is even older and thus completely incompatible with new synth. But hey, I’m up for latest tech advances!

0-Coast wavetable pack update

New update of Make Noise 0-Coast Wavetable Pack for Serum is here! All links updated, in case anybody asks.

Thanks to latest Serum feature I was able to align the phases of all waveforms in a wavetable. This allows them to be modulated smoothly without artifacts, despite aperiodic form and general weirdness of some waveforms recorded. Individual waveforms may no longer be exactly the same as you could see on the oscilloscope, but nonetheless they sound the same and resemble the feel of original semi-modular synth.

Make Noise 0-Coast Wavetable Pack for Serum

What can one do with this semi-modular contraption? Nah, not the music. Sample the hell out of it!

This new wavetable pack explores a variety of controls and timbres 0-Coast has to offer. Some of them are simple knob sweeps of high quality, others feature aperiodic and overall bizarre shapes and sets. These are simple .wav files, so should work in other synths and programs, but were made using Serum. Enjoy!

Download (Google Drive, 56 MB, .zip)

Feel free to share the link as long as you feature me in the credits. This took quite a while to make, you know.

And yes, I’m going to make a track with all these sometime this year.

Make Noise 0-Coast

So I finally  decided to buy my first hardware synth (or any hardware device that doesn’t just serve as an interface for PC) – 0-Coast by Make Noise. Why this one?

I always wanted to have a hardware synth (or a dozen, you know this feeling), but realistically they are very expensive compared to functionality they offer. A cheap hardware synth is still 3 times more expensive than the best VST, such as Serum – and offers a fraction of its possibilities on paper. The hardware, however, has the advantage of fast work and also is great for learning and experimenting with hands-on experience. There are no presets in this curious box, so every time I need to make a patch from scratch. Also, it encourages experimenting and improvising.

There are a plenty of synths I considered, but they all miss something. Some have keys, some have polyphony, some have sequencers, others have eurorack connectivity – but in general their feature list is always limited. There is no one box to rule them all, and they are expensive.

However, I never gave up 0-Coast – simply because it has no replacements. It’s a truly weird eurorack-style synth using unconventional modules arranged as a traditional monosynth. Make Noise are the leaders in eurorack and develop modules which do not resemble traditional synths at all, yet still allow to build incredible musical contraptions. Evolving and self-generating, aperiodic and atonal sounds are something that not many people deal with, and something that I’ve been missing in my setup. So here it is.

Mind this is not a magic box that makes music on its own – early I encountered shortage of supplied cables. Also menu diving is abysmal, and number of signals is limited. Still, I plan to make extensive use of it. It’s great for plucks, basses, agressive synth sounds for psy-tech, but also a source of samples and wavetables for further use. Certainly there’s a lot to discover. However, I have the skills to make use of it all, and will explore 0-Coast to the max.

2016 Roundup

Ending year 2016 was quite interesting, full of ups and downs. For sure it was busy.

First and most important, I got my first track released – it’s remix of Ruska – Saimaa made for a contest. I was hoping now releases will be flying every month or so.

However, since then it was a downfall. Even though I feel I improve the quality of every new track, none of them was accepted. Some remixes were not good enough, others seemingly were off the style.

It took me a while to understand what is still wrong with the tracks and why people don’t enjoy them as much as commercial releases. And eventually I figured it out. Check the improved remix of Impellent:

The stats… we live in the world where no one cares who you are and what you do, but only how popular you are. I’m not very popular at all (especially compared to 2008), but the blog stats keep growing this year:

This is with lowest post count ever. Most of visits hit Chaotic Wavetable Pack for Serum, which turned out very interesting for users even though it was made over one day and in fact is nothing extraordinary. Personally I never used it yet :P.

Growing stats may also come from the fact that I no longer post about “work in progress”, but simply finish tracks and post worthy pieces of music. Certainly it would help if I posted some tutorials and started video blog, but there are other things I need to deal with first. Neverthless, I gave some lectures on production this year so it’s not far from here. Especially earlier show on FM synthesis turned out great.

I only mixed like 9 DJ sets this year… unfortunatelly it takes a lot of time. Even though, these few sets get great number of plays, so once I get back to it someday, things should be running well.

The studio… I got quite some gear and a number of synths this year. Acually it’s more than I was able to use so far. Which doesn’t mean I don’t try to – the quest for ultimate studio drives me both creatively and at regular work. I not only need money for better place, but also need to actually make use of all the synths (yet alone gear) I gathered so far. Now the only thing that limits me is the time. Which leads to one last point…

The workflow. Earlier this year I decided to learn how to use Push for real. And I did, it just works so well. Now I’m working in Session mode, creating clips and layers one by one. Then switch to Arrangement View, create whole arrangement in one go and… voila! Track is finished. Let’s do another one. Making tracks, even very diverse, is quite repeatable process – one I know how to. And creating better track doesn’t neccessarily mean spending more time on it. It’s all about the skills and just know-how.

The future. The future is now, 2017 will be a breakthrough. Just at the end on the year I have all the pieces I need to produce great music. Just have to sort out earlier unfinished projects before getting new PC and moving on to future productions. All I need now is time – and to make good use of it. The same is true for DJ sets. These should come back in a month or two.

Happy new year 2017!

Chaotic Wavetable Pack for Serum

Chaos and fractals were always attracting me (pun intended) and I wanted to give them a try in audio synthesis. Here’s the first try: wavetable pack for Serum made from chaotic oscillators.

Pick them from new blog page Samples & Wavetables. These are ordinary .wav files and should work with any wavetable synth or sample player. 37 different wavetables should keep you busy for a while. Some of them are evolving textures, some of them are simple but unusual like no one would ever craft by hand.

Rendering chaotic oscillators was the easy part. The difficulty was to actually make them musically usable. Some were picked directly, others were creatively processed. Chaotic attractors tend to generate subharmonic content and successive “periods” are very different from each other. It is opposite to wavetable where every frame is similiar to previous one.

Serum has a number of different import options, but they were not able to deal effectively with aperiodic waveforms. Many of them were picked and edited manually to be musically useful. This is only first attempt, I’m hoping to automate the process and create bigger, high-fidelity wavetables with minimal processing.

Also I have distant plans of creating actual synths and other utlities which will allow to use chaotic oscillators directly. There are dozens of known attractors and probably infinite number of new ones to discover. Surely there will be more depending on your interest.