Koshdukai's Music(al) Reason(ing)

Sometimes, you're working with a stereo audio track and you may need some quick access to one of the L/R channels of an audio track or clip... ...turning it into a true mono source, even showing up in Record's Main Mixer as a mono track. The slower (and destructive) way is to bounce it to disk, turn it into mono with a wave editor, save and re-import the now mono track or clip back into an audio track. There's plenty of ways to do this without any of that trouble, so I'll show one of the simplest, cleanest and quickest way I usually use to quickly choose one of the channels within the Audio Track Device without the need for any extra Track Devices. Simply open the device and at the back and in the Insert FX section, connect the channel you want into the Left channel of the "From Device" inputs and that's it. The audio clip's still a stereo one, but the audio signal path up to the Main Mixer is now a true mono track. To...

Record users may already know this trick for quite some time :) You can record CV data to an audio track through the use of a CV to Audio converter (like the CV2Audio2CV ) to then examine the CV waveform. This is useful when we need to debug or check the CV values being generated by a device. The only problem with this, is that if we're on a long tweaking session, the CV recording (i.e. CV "log") may get pretty big unnecessarily. One solution is to go on a sequence of short recordings, while deleting the resulting Audio Track clips in between those sessions. But now there's Reason 5 and it's new Sampling capabilities that we can use also for CV monitoring. So, now, instead of recording to a track, we can just Sample the CV, again through the use of a CV to Audio conversion (wiring the audio output of Thor to the Sampling input at the back of the rack, making it the sampling source). This allows us to keep an eye on the thumbnail Sampling scope window, while doin...

It's official! (picture taken by yours truly, just minutes ago, at an undisclosed location) I'm now a proud owner of a recently installed copy of Reason 5 & Record 1.5 . Life is good :) EDIT : Why the picture? Well, it's just to show you how official this day is... we're talking about flags'n'all kind'of official here ;) EDIT2 : OH! I almost forgot ...and I'm now also a ReCycle 2.1 owner! :) I've never been a loop-centric type of user. I still struggle with the notion of using "construction-kits" I see being sold in Loop/Sample/Sound Library/ReFill shops. Coming from a composer-type background and not a DJing audio cut'n'paste type of producing music, I like to compose, program and play everything myself, so I usually use REX patterns (i.e. loops) just as test sources, draft vanilla starting points or as subtle added complement layers to my rhythm patterns. I also like the instant rewarding live usage of pre-programmed dynamic...

Imagine you're doing this incredible stereo multi-tap echo combinator patch, where you really need to allow the user to select a list of Left/Right ratio combinations. As an example, let's assume we need a list of ratios like this one here: Left/Right 1/1 4/3 3/4 3/2 2/3 2/1 1/2 3/1 1/3 4/1 1/4 1/OFF OFF/1 hmmm... so, to be able to go through such a list with a combinator rotary, you really need a "device" that enables you to Randomly Access an Array of CV values or states, don't you? Well, thanks to Thor and the way the Step Sequencer has been implemented, we can have such a thing. So... let's build it! Just add to your combinator (the one needing that list of CV values selectable through a rotary) a Thor device and initialize it (this is where my set of "null" patches usually comes in handy, where there's a "null" patch for each device, to quickly start with "everything off" kind'of patch, not quite achiev...

It would be really cool if we could change Thor Buttons state through CV triggering, wouldn't it ? Ya know, if you need to toggle the on/off state of some CV out to be used on, let's say, a bank of 16 devices that react differently to the state of that CV ? We can already toggle the state momentarily through a specified Note or through automation of those 2 buttons in Thor, or the 4 buttons in the Combinator, but a simple scalable solution for CV triggering a CV state would nice. Well, since there's no way in Thor to send "CV in1 -> Button1" so a gate signal in CV 1 input would flip the state of Button 1, we have to come up with the next elegant solution available, using Thor's Step Sequencer :) Fortunately, there's a "Gate In (Trig)" CV input at the back of Thor's Step Sequencer, so here's our CV input that will trigger the CV state toggle. To achieve the toggle action, we need to set the Run mode to Step, so for each CV trigger, we g...

Note: This was going to be a post about the new M-Audio Axiom 2nd Gen controller keyboards ... and, after some sentences, I realized it wasn't going to happen as soon as I first envisioned... oh well, better change the post title and move on... :P ... As you may already know, I've been accidentally collecting more MIDI Keyboard controllers than I ever wished for. Buying new, not selling the old because there's always an excuse use for it. It all started when I bought my (really mine) first "real" (as opposed to my Sinclair ZX Spectrum ) Personal Computer (I had used PCs for a while at this point: 8086, i286, i386sx, i386 based, but none were mine), a brand new D-I-Y i486DX2 @66MHz based PC with (at the time) 4Mb (a few years after, upgraded to 32Mb) of RAM. It had a Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 because I've always hoped to use a PC to generate sound through synthesis using math (i.e. DSP algoritms), besides taking advantage of the digital s...

I just love these behind the scenes video documentaries =) Oh... and I use one those headphones too!!! How funny is that ? :D uh... erm, it surprised me ok ? Just had one of those moments, pointing at the screen "OH!!!" :P oh well... moving on... -.-'