Haven’t made a post in a long time, not that I haven’t been in front of a computer for 16 hours a day, seven days a week. To say work has been busy would be the understatement of the year. Anyway with all this time spent working on a computer, when I do have a few minutes to spare I have been loathe to continue sitting at my desk to do what I really love; make music.

As a result I have been playing guitar and singing more than I have in almost a decade. Writing new stuff too. And I am happy to have my finger tip callouses back; though I have discovered that my computer’s touch-pad is less enthused about them than I am.

But guitar isn’t my only vice. I’m not about to give up synthesis, sampling, sequencing and mixing. So when I recently got a small inheritance I decided it was time to start building a hardware setup; one I could work at standing up. Now I am not swearing off Ableton Live, MaxMSP, soft synths or my Arduinome. Far from it. In fact I look forward to integrating the whole thing eventually but space is a bit of an issue for me at present. And truth be told, sadly so is time…

Anyway, to get me started on building a studio away from the screen I got myself an Akai MPC1000 sampler/sequencer, a Dave Smith Instruments Mopho Keyboard monophonic analog synthesizer and a Soundcraft EPM8 mixer. I’ve had very little time to play with my new setup, and I don’t expect that will change any time soon, but the time I have spent has proven to be very exciting.

MPC1000 running JJOS 2.0

I absolutely love sequencing with the MPC. It only took a few hours for me to know what I was doing and I can feel myself getting insanely addicted to the MPC style of working with music. Once I transfer my sample collection over to the add-on internal hard drive it will be the perfect center for my studio.

BTW I am running JJOS 2.0 which I highly recommend. If you own an MPC and are not running a JJOS of some sort you should really check it out.

Mopho: a modern monophonic analog synthesizer

I have wanted an analog synth for a very long time and when the Mopho Keyboard was revealed this year, and for such an incredible deal, it was a no-brainer. It is a solid piece of gear, with a well thought out layout and powerful architecture. It has two oscillators plus two sub-oscillators, three envelope generators, four LFO’s, a 16×4 step sequencer and a ton of other modulation options. This thing is capable of a huge variety of sound and is just as good at making deep womping bass as tweaky tripped out sequences. The only thing I’m not totally digging is the filter which is a switchable 2- or 4-pole low-pass. Its not that there is anything wrong with it, but to my ear it just doesn’t have the character of some of the filters I am used to using in for example the U-he Zebra soft synth.

Soundcraft EPM8

The EPM8 glues everything together, taking the six channels from the MPC and the two from the Mopho as well as providing me with two effect sends and inserts on all 8 mono channels (there are also two stereo channels). I decided to go with Soundcraft because I would never buy another Berhinger product and I think the Soundcraft mixers sound better than Mackies. I really like the EQ which has a selectable mid.

Though this mixer isn’t the best for studio recording because it has no direct outputs (only a stereo output) and doesn’t have track solos, it is great for my current needs and was in my budget. Eventually I will want something with direct outputs to feed into a multi-channel audio interface, but as I only have an Apogee Duet right now with one stereo input I am very happy with the EPM8.

The tactile nature of music hardware has always appealed to me and so far, as expected, I am really enjoying doing everything with my hands. I expect it will be a while before I have a chance to catch my breath and make a post again, but when I do, hopefully I’ll have some lessons learned to share from my new hardware setup.

OpenAL lets you play multiple sounds at once

This sound engine was written by Alex Restrepo under a creative commons attribution-share alike licence, so you are free to use it so long as you attribute the code to the author and if you change it and share it you must do so under the same license. I have corrected one small mistake (a semi-colon where it should not have been) and also edited the formatting of the code to my personal preference. You can get an Xcode example project that uses the sound engine here. If you just want the sound engine itself you can get it here. If you look at the example project you will see how easy this sound engine is to use. It provides simple methods for playing and managing background music and for playing sound effects on top. These classes use AVFoundation to play the background music and OpenAL to play other sounds on top. I am not informed enough about either of these to know what advantages or disadvantages this may offer but will look into it and possibly do a pure OpenAL version. To add the sound engine to your own project just add the class files included in SoundEngine.zip to your project. Also be sure to add the OpenAL.framework, AVFoundation.framework and the AudioToolbox.framework otherwise you will get a host of strange errors. You have the option of using the CMOpenALSoundManager as a singleton. If you do use it as a singleton (you can do this by setting USE_AS_SINGLETON to 1 at the top of CMOpenALSoundManager.h) you just need to initialize it somewhere in your code with:

[[CMOpenALSoundManager sharedCMOpenALSoundManager] init];

You also need to enumerate the tags for your sounds (ideally somewhere that every class that needs them will have access to them):

enum mySoundIds {
BUTTONSOUND1
        BUTTONSOUND2
        SUCCESSSOUND
        ERRORSOUND
};

You can then add your sound effects by passing an array of sound file names like so:

[CMOpenALSoundManager sharedCMOpenALSoundManager].soundFileNames = mySoundFileNamesArray;

To access your sound manager from anywhere in your project make sure you have included the CMOpenSoundManager header file and then reference the sound manager with:

[CMOpenALSoundManager sharedCMOpenALSoundManager]

Here is an example of playing some background music and then playing a sound effect:

[[CMOpenALSoundManager sharedCMOpenALSoundManager] playBackgroundMusic:@"backgroundLoop.m4a"];
[[CMOpenALSoundManager sharedCMOpenALSoundManager] playSoundWithID:BUTTONSOUND1];

One thing that I am not satisfied about with this system is the need for the enumeration. The reason being that you need to know which order the sounds are going to be loaded so that the correct sounds match the correct enum value. A better way in my opinion would be to use NSString keys, so that when you load a sound, you also pass a key. This is the approach taken in the code on the gethacktes.net blog, which is another great resource for OpenAL on the iPhone. Doing it this way allows you to lazy load sounds in any order. If I make that change I will be sure to post it here.

edison – tonka truck from edison on Vimeo.

edison describes this piece on his Vimeo page as:

“all one shot sounds…
no loops running….
64 buttons
64 noises….
shot on 2 HD cameras, 720p, 1 live take…..
with audio captured right to camera…..”

Rad.

I did not record this myself, I found it shortly after the quake on a scientific site about the earthquake. I recommend you listen to it LOUD. It is truly a humbling sound. Enjoy.

Tsunami Earthquake by musicalgeometry