Category: instruments

Last week, my good friend Kent Kingery blew me away by sending me a Bliptronic 5000, which is an incredibly fun little synthesizer+sequencer. This week’s project is an exploration of this great little box.

For starters, here’s a quick proof-of-concept track I made with the Bliptronic.

42/52: bliptronic 5000 test run by billvanloo

To make this, I ran the Bliptronic into Ableton Live, recorded a loop, and then processed that loop in a couple different ways and added some simple drum programming. For example, the bassy part is actually the same loop sent through one of Michael Norris’s excellent SoundMagic Spectral Plugins.

Here are some photos of the Bliptronic arriving and getting put into action. I was surprised at first by just how small it is – even in its box it was only 8 inches square, and the actual machine is smaller than that – maybe 6 inches square!

I started out by just using the internal speaker (a nice touch – lets you use it anywhere!) and then ended up plugging it straight into the mixer so I could hear it through my studio monitors.

Blinky lights!

Before long, I started itching for ways to process it and expand its tonal capabilities. It has 8 built-in sounds, and lets you sequence 8 notes in the key of C major across 8 steps. The limitations of this are actually quite good in many ways, but I wanted to see what I could do with some processing.

I ended up running it into Ableton Live and building a couple of Effects Racks to process the sound. I recorded the audio output of the Bliptronic into Live, then started playing with ways to filter, delay, and otherwise mangle the sounds. It was great fun!

I have a few things planned for this box already – a video project is in the planning stage, and there are lots of future possibilities, including turning it into a cheap Monome clone, circuit-bending it (as my friend Michael Una has done), and so on.

Thanks again, Kent! This was a great, fun project!

This week’s project has been in the works for quite some time, but is just now being picked up again. It’s a demo of some new sound/preset work I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I’m calling this first set of material chromedecay: field.

One benefit of being a teacher is that I have my summers off, and I spent some time this past summer with my Minidisc recorder, binaural microphones, and other recording gear, capturing sounds in my house and garage.

One of the sets of sounds I recorded was using my bicycle as a percussion instrument, along with some other random sounds from the garage (like dropping and hitting a plastic pop bottle, and so on). I recorded about 30-45 minutes worth of raw sounds, and then recorded them into the computer as several long, continuous audio files.

At that point (late last summer), that’s where I put the project down temporarily. The work I did this week was to start isolating individual hits and loops in order to turn them into usable sounds. Because I’d recorded the long segments off the MiniDisc into Logic, I started there. Also, I much prefer cutting/editing sound files in Logic compared to Live – Logic’s much more of a traditional audio editor, and I find it works great for that kind of work.

Much selecting, trimming, and saving of individual files was done.

You can see some of the list of files here:

After I had saved out many, many individual hits and loops, I started loading things up into Ableton Live, my preferred composition tool. Live is the ultimate destination for this material, as I intend to eventually make these sets of sounds & loops available (though that’s a project for another week!).

Here’s a couple views of what it looks like when brought into Live:

If you go to the full-size version of those photos, you can see that most of these sounds ended up in Live’s Drum Racks, which is a great tool for this kind of thing.

I then spent some time writing a demo track that would give these sounds a chance to shine.

Here’s the final product:

14/52: chromedecay: field – demo 1 by billvanloo

All the sounds you hear in the demo track were produced from the field recordings I did, with the exception of the bassline.

This week, I spent some time setting up a new instrument station in the chromedecay studio.

A few years ago, I replaced my trusty titanium PowerBook with a shiny new Intel MacBook. That brought lots of increased power, but as I mentioned in the post at the time, it meant losing some things I really liked as a result of moving from the PowerPC-based PowerBook to the Intel-based MacBook. My favorite Rhodes electric piano sound came from Logic’s EVP73 plugin, which didn’t run on Intel Macs. One of my other favorite sound sources was Reaktor Session, which I loved for its Vierring ensemble, among others.

This week’s project, then, was getting an old 500MHz iBook set up to restore that lost functionality! I realized that I could install my old Logic Audio 6 on the iBook and set up EVP73 and Reaktor Session running inside it as AudioUnits plugins. I only get a couple instruments at a time, but that’s perfect – I’m still running Live 7 and Logic 7 on my MacBook Pro, and the audio from the iBook just gets routed straight into that.

Getting Logic installed and set up was a breeze – this is one place where having dongle-based copy protection makes this much easier than a networked challenge/response or authorization. I just plugged in my old Logic dongle, installed the program off CD, and I was up and running. Getting Reaktor Session going was a little more work – it uses a network-based authorization scheme, and I had to email Native Instruments support to get it authorized (to their credit, they turned it around in a day or two and it was quite simple after that).

What I now have is an instrument station that consists of the iBook running Logic 6 with EVP73, Reaktor Session, and any other native Logic instruments I care to load up. It’s got a little 2-in/2-out MIDI interface connected over USB (thanks again, Kent!), which lets me connect my 76-key controller keyboard, as well as MIDI clock sync from the MacBook Pro rig. I can sit down at the keyboard, pull up a great Rhodes sound on the EVP73, and just play. That’s what I was really missing – the chance to just play, without having to worry about routing, plugins, compatibility, and so on.

Here’s a quick jam I recorded last night. The electric piano sound comes from EVP73, the synth sounds are from Reaktor Session’s Vierring ensemble, and the drums are being programmed in Live with a Drum Rack I built.

[audio:https://www.chromedecay.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/5_52_-rhodes-+-reaktor-session-jam.mp3|titles=5/52: rhodes + reaktor session jam]
download this audio track: 5/52: rhodes + reaktor session jam

A few detail photos:

Finally, if you’re interested, here’s a setup shot, showing how I took the self-portrait that’s at the top of this post:

The camera for the shot (a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18) is on a microphone boom stand, angled down using a Manfrotto mini ball head. The main light for the portrait is a Vivitar 283 with a 1/2 CTO gel (shown at the right of the photo), also on a microphone boom stand.

Also, you can see that the far end of the studio there is a bit of a mess. That’s another kind of project, though…