Reminding Myself How Alchemy Works – Week 10

Alchemy is one of those synths that for some reason I just don’t use that often, but I know from past experience that it’s very powerful and very effective at creating interesting new sounds that can often be quite unexpected, given the source material.

So I’m taking this time to remind myself in a more structured way what it can do and why it might be useful to me.

Be warned, dear reader, I was pre-menstrual at the time so my outlook maybe a little bleaker than at other times of the month. Still. It was another useful deep dive and I do think it’ll see me return to Alchemy more often in future.


Journal

21/2/22

Bought an ‘Advanced’ Tutorial from the app store in hopes it would show me some cool stuff to do with Alchemy.

I’ve already a decent understanding of it thanks to a more basic tutorial video series from the same author, and this sequel hasn’t let me down. Lots of interesting ways to make interesting sounds and (unlike Absynth) really intuitive. Also, not a single controller is unassignable. You can modulate everything in multiple ways, and even the modulation parameters are modulatable.

IKR. The potential and the possibilities!


22/2/22 (!)

The tutorial is great and watching a well-made video suits my pre-menstrual brain mode at the mo.

Continuing through this tutorial series, and thinking forward to after the next week or two when I’m going into full composer mode rather than education mode. I’m weirdly wary (perhaps hormones again) about how to structure it and how prescriptive I ought to be without an external brief. I’ve also budgeted for 4 recording sessions with any instrumentalist I fancy and wondering what instruments to go with and how to structure the recordings – do I ask for single notes or structures that are useful for making sample libraries (probably from at least one), and do I ask for melody fragments or motifs (like in a lot of the really useful but very recognisable East West libraries)?

Or do I write, say, a quartet or some sort of chordal progression set, that I then take to pieces without having planned it in advance to see what’s possible there? 

ANYWAY – Alchemy is very set up for formant analysis (harmonic overtones that make vowel sounds) and so getting some vocal vowelly stuff seems like it’s a no brainer for at least one of the recording sessions. Also while I’m at it some vocal fragments or motifs for Kontakt sampling and high pitched stuff to have some fun with in Reaktor Form…

Soooo a soprano, and maybe a higher-pitched male voice for variety.

Something suitable for melodic stuff.

Made some delightful morphing pads with some really basic audio. Alchemy is such a joy to use – really powerful, loads of options, pretty complex and deep featured but with a really logical UI and every parameter is modulatable (including modulators!).


23/2/22

Finished the advanced tutorial thingy. Mostly interesting and the chap presenting had a very calm and easy way about how he presented all the information.  Good overview of more of the capabilities of this beast of a synth/sampler/sound mangler. Recommended.

I’m going to poke around in the presets to see how it’s done now.

Oh heck, I don’t know how to save stuff to individual blocks on the transform pad section. That might be useful. Looking up…Easy done. Control-click on the relevant block (called a ‘snapshot’ – helloooo Native Instruments Reaktor and Kontakt days) and select whatever option looks best on the dropdown box.

Ooh, there’s a ‘Randomize Snapshots’ option. I do like the surprise of a sound resulting from randomisation options and morphing. I think it ticks that slot machine dopamine release intermittent reinforcement system in my brain.

Not sure I’m in the right headspace for experimentation. Can’t seem to get anything I like out of Alchemy just by messing about with it. Going to keep it on the back burner and come back to it in a couple of weeks, maybe. Sometimes you need to sleep on it/forget about it/go do something else. Perhaps my expectations for Alchemy were a bit too high – it promises a lot but I don’t really have a sound in mind when I’m working with it, so I don’t think I’m getting the best out of it. I’ll come back to it when I have a purpose or a particular angle I want to work.

I can see Alchemy being good for its morphing capabilities though. 

This is a nice overview video

  • Alchemy as a plain old sampler with some funky effects using MIDI FX in the Logic channel strip. It also reads… 
  • EXS sampler files, that can be imported
  • Exporting an audio file automatically into an exs file with all the transients split up across the keyboard for you (that you can then import into Alchemy in sampler mode)
  • (also some stuff about autosampler in Mainstage that would be useful to know if I had any outboard midi/audio synths or instruments or whatever but I don’t so I’m not going to learn it. Just filing it away if anyone asks about it. You know, professional dinner conversation etc etc 🤷🏻‍♀️)