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quote of the day
May 18, 2013 By 8 Comments
The more experience I’ve gathered the less processors I apply. – bManic
re:publica 2013 – Peter Kirn: How music can predict the human/machine future
May 11, 2013 By Leave a Comment
The talk from Peter Kirn from createdigitalmusic.com held on the recent re:publica event in Berlin:
I addressed the question of how musical inventions can help predict the way we use tools. I started all the way back tens of thousands of years ago with the first known (likely) musical instrument. From there, I looked at how the requirements of musical interfaces – in time and usability – can inform all kinds of design problems.
modeling the distortion in Thrillseeker VBL
May 10, 2013 By 11 Comments
It’s so important to get the non-linear modeling right if we would like to have a sort of analog feel in the digital domain. I can’t stress this ever enough since it still seems to be a common practise in todays audio plug-in design to just throw in a static waveshaper, oversample it and hope this will make everything alright. Not! Even worse, in a recently released plug-in I saw the static waveshapers curve not being continuous again and I’m not going to talk about the sound.
But what should one expect to hear if the analog modeling is just done right? Only by driving the gain of the unit but way before we notice the obvious distortions there appear different by-products caused by circuit side-effects. Depending on the actual device, circuit and components, it might be that the signal starts just getting thicker and more mid-focused, as an example. Or, the signal might appear much deeper and bigger in other cases.
Whatever it might be in particular, I do call this the “Mojo” of the device – it’s not the primary intention of the device but turns out to be a sort of an added sugar. Such effects are highly frequency, transient and gain structure dependent and this is what makes the processed signal to be much more vibrant and alive. Furthermore, the obvious harmonic distortions are not introduced abruptly but they emerge gradually.
re:publica 2013
May 8, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Probably over 5000 geeks, nerds and wannabes attended this years re:publica event to discuss the emergent trends concerning the nets culture and ethics as well as politics and economics. There were lots of sessions and keynotes about the Open Data/Government/Invention/Whatsoever movements but to me the two current hot spots were Intellectual Property Rights and the Net Neutrality discourse. Anyway, I’ve had a great time in Berlin (once again).
new gadget
May 7, 2013 By 3 Comments
I wonder, how my OKM II artifial head mics will team up with this recorder. A report will probably follow next …
announcing Thrillseeker VBL – Vintage Broadcast Limiter
April 26, 2013 By 26 Comments
Bringing mojo back – Thrillseeker VBL is an emulation of a “vintage broadcast limiter” following the classic Variable-Mu design principles from the early 1950′s. They were used to prevent audio overshoots by managing sudden signals changes. From today’s perspective, and compared to brickwall limiters, they are rather slow and should be seen as more of a gain structure leveler, but they still are shining when it comes to perform gain riding in a very musical fashion – they have warmth and mojo written all over.
Thrillseeker VBL is a “modded” version, which not only has the classic gain reduction controls but also grants detailed access to the amount and appearance of harmonic tube amplifier distortion occurring in the analog tube circuit. Applied in subtle doses, this dials in that analog magic we often miss when working in the digital domain, but you can also overdrive the circuit to have more obvious but still musical sounding harmonic distortion (and according side-effects) for use as a creative effect.
On top, Thrillseeker VBL offers an incredibly authentic audio transformer simulation which not only models the typical low-end harmonic distortion but also all the frequency and load dependent subtleties occurring in a transformer coupled tube circuit, and which add up to that typical mojo we know from the analog classics. This would not have been possible with plain waveshaping techniques but has been realized with my innovative Stateful Saturation approach, making it possible to model circuits having a (short) sort of memory.
Release date is not yet confirmed but most probably will be in May this year.
freeware tip: TDR Feedback Compressor II
April 26, 2013 By 18 Comments
If you did not tried this one out yet but are looking for an absolutely clean and transparent compressor then do check this one out!
The TDR Feedback Compressor II is a major design update of its critically acclaimed predecessor. The compressor is dedicated to the highest fidelity stereo program (2-buss) compression, but shines equally in classic mixing tasks. – Fabien from TDR
It features detailed control of compression behaviour, extremely low distortion and it’s compression is almost “invisible”. Download the freeware over there at tokyodawn.net.
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