Sigh

Not a great start, Pat locks herself out of the house, has mislaid my spare car key and has no recollection where the spare back door key went either. Sadly I may have to start being the grown up here soon. Will do my best to enjoy this break, just wish it were somewhere more interesting... suspect I'll be knee-deep in cauliflower heads.

Ah well, got review in. I'd have liked a little more mulling but there you go. A cool device has come in that I've been waiting for too, will have to wait. Hey ho, only two weeks, might not be as dull as I expect...

Got review almost done today, should get it completed tomorrow. Nice afternoon with Bammy yesterday, must get that Logic multi-channel recording working again though.

This evening I think I'll get the review finished maybe with time to spare. Stuff sorted for hols, shouldn't need to take laptop after all. What a hero I am!

OK, good day. I now have a draft review, one of my fastest ever. Relatively easy though cos I knew the synth already. Might get the vast bulk done Sunday/Monday night and not need to take on hols. I already said what I want to, just need to refine it.

Have drunk a lot of cheap champagne.

OK, one review done another to start. Not sure how far I'll get before going off on hols but theoretically nothing to hold me back - I understand it already and have just to write my notes about it. Surprised my demo file for Paul has been listened to many times, T must have passed on the link. Not really ideal, don't like to publicly imply conclusions before review out! Hopefully it doesn't but a bit annoying, may pull it from Soundcloud.

Also samples review to look at. Another short one, should I maybe polish that off first?

Began writing a beginner's guide to modulars, mostly to help Paul out but it strikes me it could be publishable in some form. Keeping it simple and practical rather than too wibbly, although bound to stray into that.

This evening I'll complete the review I hope.

Yep, think it's OK. Didn't do much else but that's fine.

Darn, looks like I may have missed some aurora last night...

More work

Yep, Saturday evening and I worked on a review. Didn't even drink cos I gave Dawn a lift into town and am gonna get her later. Am almost done though I think, should complete it tomorrow.

Broke something on Octatrack today, tweaked a pattern but stupidly it was the wrong pattern. So a song got its samples fecked - dunno what I had previously. As it was the last one I'd worked on it wasn't included in the last card sync so basically it's gone. That thing is still way too easy to break stuff on.

Darn you to Heck, Hotpoint!

Thieving bastards want over £100 just to come look at their "designed to fail" fridge freezer. Bought a new one, the Disposable Age rolls on.

Now back to my usual Friday afternoon frolicks - but without cold beer. OK, gonna leave it out in the rain...

Oops, made the mistake of checking the weather in Malta. Would dearly love to either not be going anywhere right now or at least to be going somewhere sunny. Jeez I'm a moaning old git!

Cirklon tips (simple accumulator)

Apologies to those who've heard such things before but I was just messing with my Eventide Space and thought Cirklon newcomers might appreciate this simple idea.

In the case of the Eventide stomp boxes they have a brilliant MIDI spec so I'd advise defining them as instruments then defining their MIDI CCs as Track values for sequencing use.

Next create a simple P3 pattern. Don't bother with any notes but set Aux A to "offset aux D rel". Give the first step a smallish value to start with, +3 maybe, meaning that each time that step is played the accumulator adds 3. Now set Aux D to a MIDI CC you'd like to sequence - a parameter you want to change. If you defined these as track values you'll see the names helpfully in the list so it's easy to try them out and see which sounds coolest. Why not set a couple of steps in your sequence with values in them? I'm currently sequencing the Space's Size parameter - so it pops up in the display as each value is sent, which is a very handy thing in understanding what the accumulator is doing.

When you've sussed what's happening, try changing the accumulator behaviour - Menu then accum conf. By default aux D goes all the way (my kinda gal) but you can restrict the limit if necessary; maybe it's your first date. I quite like setting rvtz - so it reverses to zero and adding wrap is good cos the values don't necessarily repeat predictably then. Anyway, experiment.

It's brill for any type of CC but when used on effects gives a new level of weirdness I'm sure we're all looking for. With a separate track sequencing the synth that's connected to the effects unit you're really away - and that's before you start accumulating the Eventide's clever stuff such as the footpedal, morphing and changing multiple parameters at once.

Also - one way to make the accumulation far less predictable is to use a pattern direction like random, brownian or eitherway. And with 32 tracks to play with you can afford to use a few doing stuff to the same instrument or effects unit, with different lengths and speeds.

Simple pleasures on this rainy Thursday...

More decorating, then stroke club, this evening I'm doing a little unsupervised decorating (uh oh!) and also uploading my ancient world wavs. Cheque received for Fantom which gives me some more spending power I'll exercise when back from Malta.

If I get chance I'll write an angry (but ultimately pointless) letter to the council about the cutting down of trees in the nature reserve.

Being a grown up

Yes, today I did stuff that grownups do. Decorating. OK, Pat was directing but I was able to do stuff like fill a hole with plasterboard, saw some wood, paste the wallpaper. To the untrained eye it might have looked like I was a fully participating member of the decorating duo.

This evening I worked on the latest review. Heard that a piece of gear I've waited ages for is finally on the way. Hope it arrives before I go on hols but isn't urgent! Poor timing on my part going to fecking Malta anyway. Pressing on with current review, fortunately short and nothing major to say about it one way or the other.

Am locked into a contract with BT for a year for my broadband. Similar price to what Virgin would have done me for a much faster, unlimited service. I really must pay more attention. Yeah, like that's gonna happen.

Odd day. Sister's dog fell in the canal. She was seriously going in after it too but fortunately it swam back and I plucked it out by its coat. Freezing though and it's ancient. So walk ended. Then odd words with mum about my hair (again). She wants things to be tidy, her definition of tidy and not interested in my point of view. Poor old thing, her world getting very small. At least she resisted giving me a Malta weather report even though she was dying to.

Evening spent tweaking tiny DIP switches, mastered and sent off "made to move totally nonvox" and wrote a few words, did some more MIDI stuff and probably have more than enough to write review now. Worked on song and spotted odd pattern naming behaviour in cirklon.

Let the Cirklon song run for a while unattended.

http://soundcloud.com/smokyfrog/reminders-sequencer-only

A cold, frosty morning

Hmm late night last night, got to bed around tooth hurty this morning. Had a very pleasant chat.

Lovely frosty morning, some jobs to do including more vocal pruning on one of the house tracks, today's challenge being that the vocal in question is part of the drum loop, so I'm gonna have to work a little to remove it.

Glorious sunshine now, but I've more sequency things to do, anyway the lovely Cirklon manual arrived and a damn decent job it is too. I think I might look at doing some kind of alternate view user guide written in my own inimitable style, but still too many things need doing in the OS IMHO before I do that.

right, lampshade to take down. What larks!

Phew, fixing the track Made To Move was easy - bar 4 had the offending sample so I replaced it with bar 2 of the loop, also took the top end off the whisper sound but kept it cos it's good and I don't think they were worried about that.

I also did this: http://soundcloud.com/smokyfrog/remember

Waiting for radiator man, ordered some Tim Story CDs from Amazon, listening to Redshift on Spotify and tinkering with my review a little. What the afternoon will bring, indulgence I think. I rather fancy working on some of my weirder and more experimental electronic stuff, I feel it's time for time out of the box...

Later.

Well, the radiator man arrived followed by his pal in another van. Both wandered around puzzled for a while then one of them left to get the "right stuff". There's much drilling going on. It's far from my ideal Friday, it has to be said. I'm going to play pinball on my iPad.

For no very good reason, here's a picture of what gypsy types like to see in graveyards.

Still waiting for email response from lib company so mastered all tracks hoping there are no tweaks left. Played a little more with review gear, think there's not much else to discover so I'll start writing this weekend. Not a long one methinks.

Not a very productive day though, feel I'm treading water to an extent. Gonna have to approach a few more lib companies and spread myself about a bit. Have to make some cash!

Gig confirmed for July, aim to get together in June, sweet!

Excellent, good old Amazon. Spotted book on Roedelius and promptly snapped it up!

most excellent - was about to descend into noodlemania again when a late delivery brought me some new review gear. So I connected it up and that's my evening.... :)

Life is good.

Today I refined the three african tracks a little, think they are better now.

The sequence I just made uses four synths, sh101, mb33 (glad I got that going again), jv2080 and lancet. Using aux events to vary the simple 101 pattern and the new thing to process the 101, using note% on Cirklon to make my dull JV chords sound quite unusual. Almost Sorcerer-like, all from simple Gm progression.

Amazingly, realised no Gm pieces in the sequencer. Did one last night (160BPM) and one this evening at a more sedate 92BPM. Most excellent, no Octatrack component yet but will probably record bits of the current loops as audio, the 101 and jv certainly.

http://soundcloud.com/smokyfrog/bipor

Ahem

Good day. Finishing off the ancient worlds stuff, making tweaks to tracks and enjoying it. A zen-like feeling of cutting out notes and honing. Few drinks, some smokes, working and grinning. Can't be bad. Have done a totally new version of one song too.

I'm realising the Octatrack is my missing link. Been doing some groovy stuff this evening capturing loops from the hardware and shunting them around. Grabbing freaky stuff that Cirklon creates on all the synths it's connected to (I got everything connected and sequencing this evening from the Synthi to the Digisound, the MB33, all except the Monowave which played up a bit. will look tomorrow at that). Defined track values for all new instruments including JV, MB and more for the Prodyssey to add to the very useful delay parms. All in all, Octatrack keeps inspiring me. It'd be a lot more difficult if it weren't for Cirklon selecting the right tempo, patterns and scenes though.

Ate too much curry. Something may have split inside. Note to self: stop doing this!

Cirklon tips

Gang, I'm talking weird chords. Frank Zappa eat your heart out. Plus no need to practice 'em in advance.

Give it a whirl...
Record a nice long wonky chord progression into a Cirklon pattern of maybe 8 or 16 bars. The sickliest pad you like combined with the sloppiest note play, make up chords that sound terrible if you like, doesn't matter.

Then if you haven't created track valuess for note% and noteC yet, I heartily recommend it. Then listen to your hamfisted chords, already fixed by FTS if you used it, and tweak the noteC and note% values until your chord progression becomes an otherworldly miracle.

Remember other good track values too, all can throw up better stuff than you originally played, with a bit of tweaking and a bag of weed. I especially like length% and quant% - that percent quantize is really cool...

----------------------------------------------

Another one, simpler one but something you'll enjoy if you didn't try it aleady. FTS is a great way of creating almost Wagnerian levels of tension. Even with a dullish aeolian mode, try a few semitones of transpose at scene level.

Spot the difference between the off and on settings too - this is whether FTS is applied before or after the shift and off can work really well for some odder, tenser scenes. Make a couple of copies of the same scene then try out different transpositions, scales and toggle the on/off setting. It helps give a bit of extra flavour, like some musical spice you bought off the shelf rather than grew yourself...

Force to scale is great and don't forget you can create your own scales. Keep scrolling down the list of scales and you reach the user ones select one. Then with shift and enter you can edit it. This is bound to be in the manual but the notes are lit like filters. Want only the root, select step 1. You can do this interactively as it plays BTW. Add a fifth, more, bring a whole scene from one note to many... you get the idea I'm sure. The note name appears just under the word FTS in scale edit too BTW.

More than just vanilla I say.

-----

I have been looping the same sequence without wanting to tweak it in any way for perhaps an hour now.
That is what is technically referred to as "a Good Sign". Or at least a sign of something...

Someone once asked me if I meditate. I believe the modern expression is something like "Durh!"

LOL, another great quote. I must start collecting them. When asked how a mate was doing:

"Shit - bad night, got over it with morphine and your music!"

Posted Mo-FX, had a lovely walk in the sunshine. Now contemplating another indulgent afternoon in the studio doing my own stuff. Even though there's no point to that, I may as well enjoy myself while I wait for feedback on last library tracks.

Will also drop a few lines to a couple of companies I've been meaning to approach. Of course instead of noting that down in a blog I could actually do it.... :)

I love Fridays!!!

Idled the afternoon away with the sequencer and Octatrack again. Now all the prepared tracks are in I'm finding it more fun to play with combining live stuff with Octatrack's mashed sequences. I definitely need more snatches of classical though, notes and short bursts seem to work best. Such fun to warp them into something new and unrecognisable but suitable for whatever track I'm working on. Also good I can get a bit of consistency now I'm selecting my scenes and patterns from Cirklon. Win win!

All future tracks I'll tackle like the last few, which is to prepare sections of them rather than the whole thing. Taking ambient sections is proving wonderful too as I can use those in all manner of circumstances.

Wow, yesterday's blog brought me a pleasant surprise - an Emu Vintage Pro ROM. Yay!!!!

Didn't do a lot today. Looks like this week a write-off workwise. Good comment for new album:

I think 'Twiglet' is the better name - cos it's a bit nobbly in places and very tasty - definitely a morish album

Made aware of Hitch Hikers series that I missed (from the books not that awful thing written by someone else). Must order. Hey my text has gone weird.

today's blog back to its usual bland, pointless gibberish. And I'm not even busy so no excuse...

Thought for the day: was I too hard on my neighbour? He's completely redoing the fence now and I feel guilty. Nah, pretty sure I wasn't.

A little about my approach to live, stubornly sans laptop but now with theoretically less chaos...

No More Spinning Plates

The following is a quickly-assembled set of notes on how I got myself organised, belatedly, for all type of gigs I'm likely to play. From small ones where you get the same space as a DJ, expandable up to the largest solo or collaboration performances I might do.

At the time of writing I have about 20 songs in the Octatrack/Cirklon that I can play at any time. Blimey! Repeatability at last! Although the Octatrack can be used alone, it's so much easier under Cirklon control so that's how I'm approaching it. This does offer the unusual (for electronic music) possibility of offering a set list in advance and letting the audience choose which tracks they want to hear, not that they'll have heard of most of them but it'd be interesting for me and a challenge too...

Getting started

How I approached it was to first learn what Octatrack could do for me. Having done this (it took a while), I then decided that each bank should be a song, later adjusting this decision so that each Octatrack part was a song. There are 4 parts per bank and each part contains a separate set of track/sample assignments. It's the Elektron way and maybe they'll change it one day. For example, in the 1.1 update they added a great live means of sample triggering that led to me going back and totally changing my sample slot mapping to make playing related samples easier. And prior to that they removed the limitation about 24 bit samples, just after I'd converted most of my library to 16 bit!

Organised at last?

Each song typically has an ambient section and a 'prepared' song (prepared in some way from being just a skeleton to the whole critter). Oh and there's always a section that incorporates my hands-on sequencing and therefore has the potential to grow and become messy. I'm trying to keep the number of Cirklon scenes down to the essentials and name them meaningfully etc.

One decision I had to make early was how to structure the Octatrack's folders. I have a 16Gb Lexar CF card packed with selected samples - drum loops, songs, individual sequences, hits, speech, you name it. I won't bore you with all that here but suffice it to say it was important to group related material together given the Octatrack's small screen.

Octatrack doesn't give you a useage count for each sample in a project plus long sample names aren't shown in slot lists too well. Early on I began naming all my songs with the key and tempo then using this info in each part name as a reminder. Octatrack doesn't always get the tempo right for imported samples so you want to make it easy for yourself and naming does it for me.

Using Cirklon I can swap songs without stopping - generally without glitches or problems too, which is a nice surprise. Those ambient bridges help, of course. :) At some point Cirklon should gain features like gradually changing tempo, morphing patterns etc. but for now I get by. Wouldn't want to trim all the rough edges, right?

Octatrack Parts/Banks/Patterns

It took a bit of work to get all my Octatrack parts and patterns correctly assigned. There's no Bank copy feature so I spent a while setting up bank A's tracks and scenes then copied the files offline on my laptop to every other bank. This gave me a common track/sample starting point of:

Track1: Static	Main Tune
Track 2: Flex	Loop
Track 3: Flex	Various
Track 4: Flex	Various
Track 5: Rec5	Live sampling
Track 6: Rec6	Live Sampling
Track 7: Rec7	Live Sampling
Track 8: Static	Ambient Bridge

The patterns used are allocated in groups of 4 for each bank. The first four patterns are linked to part 1, the second four to part 2 and so on. Cirklon selects pattern A01 for song 1, A05 for song 2, A09 for song 3 and A13 for song 4, B01 for song 5 and so on. I also reserved Radias patches, one for each song. I keep the other patterns for variations I manually select; these tend to exploit Octatrack's cool sample mangling functionality and are treated as volatile, to be messed-with at will.

A Cirklon-driven song

Each Cirklon song consists of at least three separate scenes. The first triggers the ambient bridge using a P3-type pattern that is long enough so it loops the full length of the sample. Could be minutes long. This bridge might be supplemented by a suitable Radias or Proteus patch or other samples on Octatrack. It could last and be developed for ages, inevitably.

Cirklon sets the song's tempo and selects the Octatrack pattern and scene pair (for the optical slider) plus any other remote MIDI stuff required. For example, to get more from the ambient bridge I might set up further Octatrack scenes¹ that are then manually selected that take liberties with its rate, tuning, effects, filtering, modulation etc. etc. Although the bridges are prepared in advance and tailored for each key, they can be totally transformed and reused by all manner of Octatrack processes, that's even before I let Cirklon do some of its wild aux stuff.

For the "tune" part, I might use a completely prepared track or a skeleton of a track or even just a short loop or two I then have to play/develop. It all depends on the song itself and whether it was recorded on the Mac or was created out of a series of improvised loops on my hardware gear - or any work I happen to have lying around that has some appeal. The important thing is that selecting the Cirklon scene kicks off the tune reliably and that other loops or Cirklon sequences sync up as and when required. It means that during performance I can eliminate the tune completely, break it, twist it or merge it with something else as the mood takes me. Or I can play it in its pure form - e.g. if playing a DJ set I can go for less interaction, play the same tune in a totally live set and I can break it into its component parts, slice it, whatever.

This addresses my age-old problem of playing without a safety net and maybe descending into unwanted chaos that not everybody is caned enough to appreciate. Hey, I can now do what lappies do and sound good if I want to. Well, within the confines of these being my tunes, of course.

Finally there are the sequencer scenes, potentially a fair few of these as a song develops (or gets bloated, sometimes). My Cirklon songs are all "manual", meaning I treat each scene as a complete entity and select them manually when needed. It gives me the flexibility to choose to do a totally ambient gig at the drop of a hat (or other items of clothing) simply by choosing just the ambient sections. If it's more of an electronica-type bash or collaboration, I can summon up a totally live sequencer-type experience just by leaving out the tune scenes, mixing and matching as the mood takes me.

Generally I'll keep the pattern changes to one per Cirklon song since all the necessary Octatrack samples reside in a single part. Actually I do have a song that uses two parts (therefore two patterns) as that proved the easiest way to use alternate mixes of the four main loops used without massively disrupting my standard set of Octatrack tracks (and potentially confusing me in the heat of a live moment). Naturally I do sometimes change the Octatrack track roles on a per pattern basis but that's just cos I never stick to my own rules for long! While working on this song (an old JIC piece actually), I found that Octatrack isn't too keen on having samples overriden unless you're also sending the note trigger from one of its internal patterns. Hence it was easier to just select a different part.

Cirklon kicks off the main Octatrack samples because it's far easier to control them that way, having named scenes, stored tempo, the ability to select paramters on Octatrack via MIDI (Cirklon's Track Values) etc. I typically create a pattern 2 bars long, the second bar looping infinitely, the first triggering note C7 (and resisting any FTS too) to kick off my songs. Unless the song has no end and is intended to loop entirely, in which case I set the pattern to have the right number of bars, for this to happen.

I'm using just 16 tracks of Cirklon right now. When I need more I'll overflow onto Cirklon's second page (17-32) as the songs get more complex and unmanageable. They're set up like this:

Track 1: Octa1	Main Tune
Track 2: Octa2	Various
Track 3: Octa3	Various
Track 4: Octa4	Various
Track 5: Octa5	Various
Track 6: Octa6	Various
Track 7: Octa7	Various
Track 8: Octa8	Ambience
Track 9: Octa#	Octatrack pattern/scene selection
Track 10:	initially unused
Track 11: Radias 1#	Radias track 1 and patch selection
Track 12: Radias 2	Radias track 2
Track 13: Radias 3	Radias track 3
Track 14: Radias 4	Radias track 4
Track 15: Proteus 2000 1#	Proteus patch change and part 1
Track 16: Vermona	Mono Lancet

It's very easy to see what's happening as Cirklon's track buttons light up when active in a scene and have a small green LED below for those tracks containing relevant data I can use if I want - e.g. to add live sequencing to prepared songs.

The hardware

I have a fairly modest set of equipment in this setup. I did try to get it down to one flghtcased box but that proved beyond me if I wanted to keep the ability to be totally spontaneous live. The Octatrack is good - but for my brain only when you have material prepared as a starting point.

The synths I currently use are:

• Korg Radias (4 great-sounding synths with effects)

• Vermona Mono Lancet (I need some analogue! Alas this isn't in a rack so I have it mounted in a sliding rack tray along with an Eventide Timefactor. Would love a 1u version then I could use a smaller flightcase!)

• Emu Proteus 2000 (with 4 ROM cards, sadly not including the vintage pro board that I never managed to find - but at least it does have the world and techno boards that I use a lot)

That's enough, given I can record live into Cirklon or Octatrack any time I want. There's more space in the rack boxes and other gear is in there right now so could get used. But for a change I won't confuse the issue by going on about it. :)

Until next time...

1 It's a case of same terminology, different uses here. Octatrack scenes are definitions for the A/B slider used in perforkance. Cirklon scenes are chunks of music, could be entire songs if you like, imagine them as like a vertical slice of tracks of a DAW if it helps.

Good grief, I can't believe I'm arguing with a neighbour over a fence! Is this a phase everyone eventually passes through? Very windy and the flimsy screws he put in were not the secure bolts he took out and promised to reuse. Can't trust anyone these days.

ah well, off to see les. This afternoon it's back to work proper though, I've had my fun!