Month in Music Tech, May 2017

01 Jun 2017

Some things that've caught my eye in May:

 

Samples from AdventureKid

 

I got an Atmegatron from Soulsby Synthesizers awhile back and have been having a lot of fun trying out the different audio engines that you can load onto the hardware using an FTDI cable, particularly the Atmegadrum.

While reading about the various synth engines on the Soulsby site I came across a link to the AdventureKid site, which has a bunch of single-cycle waveforms available for download.

You can check them out here and there's also a nice set of waveform visualizations here.

 

Bitwig Modulation Presets and House Project from Tate Morden

Bitwig posted some videos of modulation presets created by users.  They're all available for download so you can try them out on your own.  One of my favorites is the Ultra Chord preset from Polarity, who has a bunch of other nice Bitwig presets that you can check out here.

 

And here's a video by Danny J Lewis, aka Tate Morden, walking through a simple techno track in Bitwig.  The project file is available to download via Blend.io so you can conduct your own experiments.

 

Synth Tips and Tricks

I came across this on Synthtopia.  It has some nice demonstrations of various synth techniques for getting different types of sounds.  The examples are demoed on a MicroBrute but the concepts can be applied to pretty much any synth.

 

Live Coding How-to

From https://toplap.org/about/ comes a nice doc by co34pt (Sean Cotterill) on live coding at https://theseanco.github.io/howto_co34pt_liveCode/.  I've only dabbled with audio programming in Supercollider and Pure Data but would definitely check this out were I to consider trying out live coding.

Neural Synth from Google

I can't remember where I first saw this but it's a project that uses machine learning techniques to analyze data sets and generate samples.  The full details are available in a paper from Cornell Univerity library at https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.01279 and you can check out a project overview and listen to some example sound samples at https://magenta.tensorflow.org/nsynth.  The generated sounds are rough approximations of the originals and aren't especially compelling on first listen but it's fascinating research.