Sorting Out

Had a clean up the other day - I'm a bit of a hoarder and keep all my music magazines and I found my old stash of Synth leaflets.

Ah, fond memories, dreaming of owning the gear in these leaflets... Never got the Jupe 8, but certainly got a bunch of the others..

Click on the pages to view the large versions

Kontakt Scripting

By day I'm a web and multimedia developer, so naturally I'm going to be drawn to any musical instrument that uses coding or programming in some way, so recently I've been getting more and more into Kontakt scripting, being inspired by the wonderful instruments created by Hollow Sun (Cognosphere and Triosc too mention a couple). For something so deep you'd think there would be a wealth of guides and tips on the web, but there isn't, for me, I managed to find a very useful resource book - "KSP Scripting 1" by Mike Navy which provides some great tips and ideas for building your own Kontakt instruments.

Taking the bull by the horns I decided my first project would be my own Kontakt drum machine using samples from my Boss DR-110. Here's the finished project.

Ok, not the most exciting looking instrument but it works and sounds good. Each sound has it's own volume and panning, single hits are colour-coded blue on the keyboard while pre-programmed 'beats' are in red. I took the logo and texture from a picture of my drum machine - cleaned it up in Photoshop and saved as a .tga file (you can use .png as well).

Here's the 'guts' of the project...

That's just a small amount of the code, take a look at the scroll bar on the right to see how far down the code goes! This is just a small project too...

My next project is scaling up -I've taken a load of multi samples from my lovely Kawai K5m using 'AutoSampler' ( no longer available, unfortunately ) and I'm planning to make a lovely Kontakt instrument with it - might even try selling it for a few quid too just like HollowSun - we'll see, otherwise a freebie perhaps?

Here's the progress...

Playing with some new Reason Rack Extensions

Been having fun playing with the new "Glitch" Reason RE from Ochen.K. What's really good about it is that you can add up to 4 separate fx units into it. So I've spent the evening trying it out - bit of an impulse buy as their excellent Probability trigger is really cool too and at 7.50 euros an absolute bargain.

What it could really do with is a wet/dry mix on the output so I put together this concoction to mix up the dry and effected audio