I have had this lingering cold on and off this week. Today (Friday) it really hit. Lemsip is my saviour. Also it’s Xmas Eve so happy festive wishings to all readers (whatever time of year you’re here). 🎄🥳
Reaktor 6 has been quite a lot of fun this week. I got the hang of wiring up simple modules to create bespoke effects, and explored in-depth a number of Reaktor’s more developed ‘blocks’.
It occurs to me that this experimentation and creation of raw material (that I would then ‘strip for parts’) is the way I always used to start any composition process a very long time ago (2000-2010) (Ok it’s not that long ago).
As virtual instrument software has become better and more convincing, and synth patches more accessible and playable, I think I’ve left this experimentation behind and, instead, nowadays I delve straight into melodic and harmonic composition made out of the usual classical, recognisable structures; so what I’m making is obviously music rather than some sort of musical sound design soundscape-y hybrid. I do visit this hybrid composition process occasionally, but it’s no longer the place to start for me. I use the more experimental sound design for specific moments in media composition that require a more ambient, atmospheric, trippy, dreamy, weird or somesuch alien vibe.
Whilst composing for myself, perhaps I can consider starting always with sound design experimentation and raw material creation rather than it being a nice aside for the weird moments dictated by an external brief.
Journal
20/12/21
Really pleased with that sound effect/track I made on Wednesday. Nothing else I’ve made today has come close though. I worry I’ve peaked, in the 2nd week of a 6 month period. Ruh-roh. Or rather I’ll probably feel like not making any progress for another 2 and half days and somehow at the end of Wednesday all the info will have coalesced into something useful in my subconscious and will bring forth some awesome, magnificent sound like last week.
That would be nice.
I’m not banking on it though, haha! I do keep needed to remind myself this is the learning phase. I’m so impatient though – I want to learn it all fast, and for all the interfaces to be intuitively designed! I’ve always had massive respect for skilled UI and UX design, but especially so last week and this.
Poked around at Reaktor-as-an-effect rather than a synth a lot today. ‘Grainstates’ mainly, a ‘block’, again with the infinitesimally small text, but surprisingly straightforward once I found what each knob, fader and XY pad’s labels meant (they aren’t obvious) (well, not to me anyway).
It was fun to play with but didn’t produce anything of note.
Tomorrow I think I’ll look at (at least) Prism as both a synth and an effect as it comes in both flavours. It claims to synthetically generate more natural or acoustic sounds rather than that electronic synthy feel. I think the effect version will be intriguing put over the violin and other recorded sounds I already have.
21/12/21 Happy Solstice
Linkedin Learning’s advanced instruments and effects course seems really to the point.
I get why the manual goes into all the detail about saving now.
Snapshots are saved with the ensemble, but presets are a separate file – useful when sharing. I don’t think I want to share (hah!) but I get the logic behind it now.
The Linkedin course also has a TRANSCRIPT yay
The Linkedin course guy just said the snapshot system (saving settings within an ensemble) is ‘clunky’. Verbatim. I FEEL VALIDATED. It’s not just me that thinks the system isn’t the most straightforward.
I had a sneaking suspicion about this but my first instinct is always that I’ve missed something – I’ve not clicked a button or installed something correctly. However… my version of ‘Prism’ (which I was very intrigued by) seems to be the basic free ‘mikro’ version, even though I’ve bought the full version. There are definitely some skewiffy settings somewhere but for the life of me I can’t work out where. Even all-knowledgeable google is no help.
Ticket sent to support. I’m not holding my breath to get this sorted within the week. Onto something else.*
Investigated more blocks and effects. More and more I feel disinterested in oscillators and really want to put recorded audio through effects and maths and processing and be surprised by what comes out. Hopefully pleasantly.
Granulation, looping and delays are definitely drawing my attention.
I think I was somewhat disingenuous about NI’s documentation. Their smaller manuals for various Block effects are pretty straightforward and quite useful. I keep coming back to this ‘just in time’ learning idea. I pull up a block or a synth or an ensemble or whatever, get completely perplexed by the labelling and layout, try out a few snapshots that come with the thing, get a rough idea of whether it’s going to make sounds that I might find interesting, then, if so, I head to the manual.
Then, learning is guided by curiosity and intrigue, rather than wading through from beginning to end simply because that’s how education is supposed to happen. It doesn’t work for me though (and I wonder if I’m not alone). I need to have my interest piqued before I get lost down the rabbit hole of investigating the intricacies of an instrument (or whatever). It’s as if there needs to be some proof that it’s worth my time; that I’ll learn something in order that I will be able to make something fascinating. Not learning for the sake of it. It needs to be empirically applicable.
*NI got back to me on the Prism issue. It was a really simple setting. NOWHERE IN THE MANUAL DID IT SHOW ME THIS WAS A THING. Ugh. (Or maybe I did and it was hidden away in some lengthy paragraph about snapshots or whatever.)
Though, in other news, I’ve totally got the hang of blocks and the signal path/cabling.
22/12/21
Prism as an effect is nice, but the audio acts only as if it were a midi signal: if the audio is very dynamic (lots of variation in loud and quiet), a gate acts to make an attack. The sound quality of the original audio has little bearing on the ensuing effect though.
For the afternoon, I’m going back to Form. Hello, my old friend 🙂
Form was an absolute delight. Very easy to get some lovely sounds out of… though I keep gravitating towards this ambient eerie stuff. Is it a one trick pony? Will I get bored of it? I still think it’s useful though and I could get a lot of mileage out of it. By treating it like and instrument rather than a playable ‘patch’, I can record a performance where I tweak various parameters manually, then pick out the best bits to use as raw material for further composition and processing. Sometimes it’s even quite lovely when a random melody fragment floats up out of the ambience unexpectedly. The melody itself, rather than the audio file, could then become a starting point for composition.