It’s time to try what we learned regarding the ARP 2600 V.

Arturia V- Collection - ARP 2600 V (the theory)

The ARP 2600V is the second “giant monster” made by Arturia, which recreates the feeling of the glorious ARP 2600 “semi modular” synthesizer.

Arturia V- Collection - Moog Modular V (the practice)

It’s time to apply what we learned in the first article regarding the Moog Modular V2.

Arturia V- Collection - Moog Modular V (the theory)

Hi folks and welcome to the first appointment of this series of articles on the Arturia V Collection. The first virtual synth we will talk about is perhaps also the first product launched on the market by Arturia: the Moog Modular V.

Antonio leads us to a journey through the VST V-collection by Arturia. This is the introductory paper.

Roland legends for Novation Mininova and Ultranova

50 timbres inspired to five of the most famous vintage analog synthesizers from Roland deeply programmed for the Novation Mininova and Ultranova.

Live! is a digital audio workstation made by Ableton that changed the life of a lot of musicians with its unique workflow. Compared to other software as Logic, Cubase, Sonar, Audition or whatever you use, Live! offers to its users, in addition to the classic workflow, the capability to organize the song as a “sequence of scenes”.

Each scene is made by one ore more clips, for a maximum of one clip for each track that composes the song. Each clip is a small fragment of audio data or midi data. You can play, record, stop or reverse each clip “on the fly” or choose to act on an entire scene, that is the sum of the clips in all the tracks at a given point in time.

The picture above shows the view of Ableton Live! featuring this approach and that’s the one on which we want to focus our attention: the session view. As you can see, the tracks flow from left to right and each one of them is organized in a series of clips, from top to bottom. Each row of clips is a scene.
This view is particularly suitable for live shows, because a musician could pre-record some clips and launch them in real time during his gig, as he likes.
Launching one or more clips or one or more scene is nothing more than what a disk jockey usually does when he uses this software for his live shows… and it’s fun, OK… BUT… it’s not what we call a live jam.
Why? Simply because live jamming (or live looping), from our point of view, requires the ability to capture clips on the fly, launch them and jam with them, combining what a DJ usually does with what a musician usually performs.
In this article I would like to discuss with you about this technique and give you a series of “tips and tricks” to start live jamming with your equipment and this beautiful piece of software. Since there are a lot of things to say and a lot to take a look at, let’s proceed step by step.
First of all, the most important thing to consider when performing a live jam is the tempo of the song. You’re in a live situation and:

1. Setting the tempo is the crucial part of your live show: each clip runs in sync with the tempo of the live set;
2. You don’t have time to operate in front of your PC with the mouse or the keyboard;
3. You can’t set the metronome and play it. People who are listening to you won’t be happy, do you agree?

So how can we, from scratch, start jamming at a given tempo? Looper is the answer to our pains.

It’s a component, embedded inside Ableton Live!, that you can add as an FX plugin to each track you have in your song. It performs the following:

1. Captures an audio clip and plays it in loop;
2. Offers the possibility to overdub;
3. Sets the tempo of the song according to the “start recording” and to the “stop recording” commands;

It has a lot of features in addiction to those mentioned above but, for now, let’s focus on this few ones. I suggest taking a look at the manual of Live! or, if you prefer, to this tutorial for more details about Looper.

After you have set the tempo and started our song with the first loop launched, you can then capture directly the clips of your tracks and jam with them. It seems simple, but the whole process requires some practice before being able to create an entire song that could be defined “music”, especially if you suffer of the “rec enabled syndrome”, eh eh eh. But let me give you some other “tips & tricks” in order to rapidly improve your skill and choose the “right way”.

ORGANIZE THE LIVESET(S) YOU WANT TO USE

I said that in a live jam nothing should be pre recorded. OK, but you have to configure at least one base live set in order to start capturing and playing as soon as the “concert” begins, do you agree? In your liveset you have to choose:

1. The tracks you want to control and capture (only audio or both midi and audio?)
2. The instruments (virtual, physical, both?)
3. The effects... yes you may also control them in real time during your show
4. Which track or tracks you want to use to start the live jam: these tracks will contain Looper, one instance per track.

Regarding the design process of your liveset, I suggest you to start with few tracks and to carefully decide WHAT to control. Remember, the more tracks and effects you have, the less your attention will be focused on playing music. You’re a musician, you have to create music not to play buttons and move knobs... and the time you have isn’t your best friend in a live jam contest.

Furthermore, you can choose to have an unique liveset that accompanies you during your entire show or to break your performance in different livesets. The first choice leads without any doubt to a more complex liveset, the second one has the drawback of closing and opening different projects on Live!. It’s up to you... you have to decide based on your specific situation.

CHOOSE THE RIGHT CONTROLLER FOR YOUR LIVESET(S)

Choosing the right controller is crucial for your success! Remember, the more you are able to don’t care of the controller and the setup, the more you focus your attention on the music you’re composing and to what you want to say to people who listen to you.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, according to different point of views) you have a lot of choices...you only have to know them, try them (if it’s possible) and then make your decision.

From our point of view, the optimum would be a list of devices that lets you easily:

1. Control the operations on the clips (record, launch, stop, erase etc.);
2. Control the operations on the looper instances;
3. Control volumes, effects and other devices.

Regarding clips and scenes you have two main choices: hardware solutions vs software ones. Regarding hardware solutions, you have at least three control surfaces that are widely used and that we suggest taking a look at:

Launchpad from Novation

Maybe the most widely used surface. Available in three versions: Mini, S and Pro. You can find here all the information you need.

APC series from AKAI professional

 Five products from AKAI that meeting different requirements. You can find more information here.

PUSH by Ableton

The most complete and complex controller on the market, made by Ableton itself. Take a look at this URL.

If you have an iPad, there are a lot of apps that let you perform the same tasks you can perform using a hardware controller, but at a lower price. It’s only a matter of how you feel with the touch screen of a tablet.

Each app requires a software daemon running on your pc and some configurations on your copy of Live!

Here are some solutions you could consider.

Conductr

The simplest one...and it’s free. You could start practicing with this. Here you can find more details.

Livecontrol 2

A control surface written for Liine Lemur. It can control almost everything of Live! but it requires you to buy Lemur app (24$) and, furthermore, that you install and tune a small software daemon on your PC.

Touch-able 3

Another classic, in my opinion the most stable and complete control surface for the iPad, made by Zerodebug. It costs the same price of Lemur but offers more features, even if by buying Lemur, you could design whatever control surface you want... so check what you need. Here you can find more information.

All these control surfaces, both hardware and software based, have a common issue: they don’t allow the musician to control Looper, because Ableton chose an API (Application Programming Interface) for interacting with this plugin that does not permit all the tasks. The main problem with it is controlling its multi state button that starts the capture, the play and the overdub phases. But... oh my God... it’s the most important thing that we need to do in order to perform live jams, so what? There are multiple approaches to solve this issue, from the simplest one to the most complex one. Again, it’s up to you to make your choice, considering what you really need and how you feel with a particular solution. All the approaches share a common task to complete: the MIDI mapping of the buttons of Looper. In order to perform this, you have to click on the “midi” button on the top-right corner of Live!, click on the button to map and press the key you want to assign to that button. Yes, but WHAT to assign to the buttons of Looper? The simplest solution is to assign a key of your keyboard and choose a particular layout of keys based on the number of loopers instances you have in your liveset. Another approach is to use a pedal connected to the midi controller you want to use to make your music. In this case you have to choose a switch pedal, of course.

Growing in complexity, again, if you have an iPad you could choose to design your own control surfaces using a programmable controller. Lemur and TouchOSC are two programmable controllers that allow the user to design his own control surfaces. Also Touch-able 3 features a customizable section in which one can put his own buttons and sliders, nevertheless if it offers less possibilities than a fully programmable controller.

Once you have designed your control surface you can assign each button or slider or cursor inside it to the components of Looper or of Live! you want to control, in a very straightforward way.

You can find some examples of control surfaces on my personal website. One of them is for TouchOSC:

The other one is a custom version of the very good control surface “Rheyne jammer”, for Lemur, that you can find on this section of the Liine website.

You can download them for free, if you own Lemur or TouchOSC of course. Let me say something more about this last solution: Rheyne is a very capable live looper, one of the best in my opinion. He lives in Orlando and his name is Jon Barbieri. I suggest you to take a look at his Youtube channel, in which he loaded more of one hundred live loops made with his setup and following the approach I described in this article. You have to take a look at these videos if you want to fully comprehend “how it works”. 

I suggest taking a deeper look at the video number 72, in which Rheyne explains his setup and his tips’n tricks.

Let me give you the last suggestion: start easy and grow step by step. Don’t add hundreds of tracks and components to control. Start with two or three tracks and practice in sending them in sync and jamming with them. 

And have fun, this the most important thing!!!

Ciao!!!

Hi guys and welcome to the last episode of the mini-serie dedicated to “making sounds” using the synthesis engine of the Novation Mininova. In the first episode we talked about making a synth lead similar to the ones used by the famous greek composer Vangelis, while in the second episode we tried to program a punchy synth bass.

Now, it’s time to “close the circle” trying to program a pad timbre that leverages on the vocoder of the Mininova, one of the features of this small synth, in my opinion, that is worth its price.

First of all, let’s make a small review on what a vocoder is... I think it’s necessary to fully analize and understand how the patch is built.

A vocoder is an electronic circuit (or a software) that combines two signals, a carrier and a modulator in such a way that the signal produced has got the harmonic content of the modulator and the tuning and the timbral characteristics of the carrier.

In other words and from a more detailed point of view, the modulator signal is filtered from n band pass filters and the result of each filter is sent in input to an envelope follower, a circuit that is able to produce a control signal from and audio one. This phase is named the analisys phase of the vocoder.

The control signals produced by the n envelope followers are used to control the output volume of n band pass filters that filter the carrier signal. Take a look at the following scheme.

The modulator and the carrier could be whatever signals we like, even if usually the modulator is the voice of the musician captured using a microphone and the carrier is a synthesized timbre (for example a synth lead or a synth bass or a lush pad… ).

The higher is n, the more accurate is the vocoder in reconstructing the modulator signal, but a musician may not be interested in reconstructing his voice, but in producing musical timbres in a more creative way.

The vocoder on the Mininova offers 12 bands for the analysis phase and 12 bands for the synthesis phase. For further details about how the Mininova vocoder works please refer to the manual of the instrument. 

If you would like to hear something, take a look at this video, in which Teddy Riley (Michael Jackson) shows what using a Vocoder means.

Let’s talk about our patch: the Mininova offers two kind of modulators to control the vocoding process: a signal that comes from the microphone (for example the gooseneck microphone bundled with the instrument) and a signal that comes from the EXT INPUT on the rear panel of the synth.

What we want to do is to create a lush pad using the waveforms, the filters, the modulations and the effects on the Mininova and to modulate it using an audio signal coming from the EXT INPUT, in order to try to produce a complex and evolving timbre.

Let’s start describing how the carrier patch is built, taking a look at the AU Mininova editor.

OSCILLATORS

What we wanted was a warm and lush pad evolving over the time, so we chose rich waveforms for all the oscillators. In detail:

1. Oscillator 1 is set to produce a SAW wave;
2. Oscillator 2 is set to produce a WAVETABLE waveform (we chose the wavetable 4... it’s a matter of taste);
3. Oscillator 3 is set to a PWM waveform.

As you can imagine, we chose these waveforms in order to modulate some of their features, but let’s proceed step by step.

Regarding the amplitude envelope, we adopted the settings that are typically used when creating a pad sound: slow attack, slow release and maximum sustain.

No portamento, no velocity for now (for simplicity), poly mode.

FILTERS

Again it’s a matter of taste and it also depends of what kind of timbre you want to reach. Generally, when programming a pad a good choice is 12db/oct filters in order to process the signal more gently. In this case we chose two filters in serie, a LP 12db and a HP 12 db, this last one to smooth the lower frequencies a bit.

I also chose to modulate the LP filter frequency a little bit with the filter envelope in order to create a small sweep effect: slow attack, medium decay, medium sustain and slow release.

EFFECTS

A classic configuration, nothing more to say: the EQ to add more loudness, the chorus to enrich the sound and the Reverb 1 and Delay 1 (a little bit) to add more spatiality.

VOCODER

The most interesting part and… where the magic happens!

We have to choose a modulator signal remember? Well, for this timbre we chose not to use the microphone and the musician’s voice but a sample loop sent to the EXT IN input of the Mininova. That’s because what we want to do is to have a continuous timbre that leverages on the vocoder to assume a unique and evolving character.

The sample loop used is a one from the Logic pro X library, precisely an african percussion loop named “African Ghana Kit 08”, take a listen to it.

https://soundcloud.com/antonio-antetomaso/africanpercussions

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Yes but how can we send it to the external input of the Mininova?

Elementary, my dear Watson... using the iPad and a software that can play in loop and that can variate the tempo of the loop without altering the pitch. What about Amazing Slow Downer?

What we did is:

Bounce the audio loop from Logic pro X, in order to create a mp3 file (or a wav one as you prefer);

Connect the iPad to the MAC;

Transfer the loop to Amazing Slow Downer via iTunes;

Connect the iPad to the Mininova using a simple audio cable, from the iPad phones to the Mininova EXT IN.

Obviously you may use whatever signal, whatever tool, whatever mechanism you prefer to send your audio signal to the Mininova.

Let’s take a look to the vocoder section of the AU editor, now.

For the pad we’re programming we chose to use this approach:

1. to hear the carrier signal also when the modulator is not present;
2. to not hear the modulator signal;
3. to introduce a little bit of resonance for the band bass filters of the synthesis section;
4. to increase the decay of the closing phase of the filters;

 Again... it’s a matter of taste.

 Oops... I was just forgettin’.....remember to turn the Vocoder ON!!

MODULATION

Last but not least the modulation matrix. We chose to use three LFOs to modulate respectively the pitch of the saw wave a little bit, the index of the wave table of the second oscillator and the pulse width of the third oscillator.

We also chose to modulate the Vocoder shift using the LFO1 and to control the modulation amount with the modulation wheel, and to use the "Animate 1" and "Animate 2" buttons to increase and decrease the spread of the vocoder. "Shift" and "Spread" are clarified in the following schemas:

Can’t wait to hear the result? 

Here is a small demo of the timbre: 

https://soundcloud.com/antonio-antetomaso/vocoderlushpad

As you can see the vocoder is a very powerful "toy"... it’s up to you to not curb your imagination and to explore continuously.

 And, of course, have fun with your music.

 Ciao!

After our first discussion about programming a synth lead on the Novation’s baby, the Mininova, in this brand new appointment we’ll try to program a punchy synth bass taking advantage of the powerful and efficient synthesis engine of this machine.

Programming a synth bass is generally a quite straightforward process because the rules to follow are not too many, but I think one good rule to follow is “simple but with a lot of possibilities under the hood”. What does it mean? Well, it means that, in our opinion, the timbre should be built using a few sound sources but many modulation sources in order to let the musician vary the timbre “on the run” and give his execution much more character and fun.

In other words, a synth bass is quite different from an acoustic bass or electric bass so don’t try to hide the fact that it’s produced by a synthesis engine but use the latter to produce something that would not be possible to produce using a bass with strings. Obviously, don’t forget the kind of timbre you need for the music you’re playing/composing/recording so... always search for the right compromise. 

So let’s start with our programming... DAW opened, Mininova AU editor loaded and we’re ready to go!

Oscillators

For a synth bass it is often enough to use only one oscillator, but you can choose to mix a second one to add more “character” to the timbre in case of need. Furthermore a sine wave or a triangle one is enough to obtain a simple bass timbre. In this example we chose to use two oscillators: the main one with a sawtooth waveform (in order to properly filter it according to the needs of the moment) and the second one at a lower volume with a PWM wave. Again, the sawtooth is a rich waveform and it may be enough to realize our goal all alone... but we’ve choosen to program a “punchy” and “rich” synth bass so that’s why the choice. 

Another “rule” to consider when programming a synth bass: a sawtooth waveform gives the timbre a “fat” character while a square wave gives the timbre a “rubbery” character. Choosing to add a second oscillator with a sine or a triangle wave one octave below enforces the timbre and adds more presence to it...but it’s not the only way.

Ah… I was forgetting to say that the oscillators need to be tuned two octaves below the “middle C”, because of the size of the keyboard of the Mininova. 

The configuration of the oscillators alone however does not produce a synth bass. What gives the musician the “illusion” to play a bass is the amp envelope. Without doubts: it has got to be SHORT!!

Fastest attack, fast decay, no sustain and fast release, generally equal to the decay but it’s not a rule of thumb (you could need a timbre that behaves differently when playing “legato” and when playing “staccato”, who knows?).

In our example we chose to not use the velocity to control the amplifier, but you could choose to use it in case you need it of course.

Filters

Generally a low pass filter is all we need to build up a synth bass. In our example we choosed a stronger LP24 filter type. The initial timbre is quite open so we needed to give a significative “cut” to the frequencies we let pass. We chose not to add resonance….for now.

Also the filter envelope plays a strong role in our synth bass timbre, because if set to the same curve of the amp envelope (more or less) it can significantly improve the “punch” of the timbre. Obviously don’t forget to increase the “Env amount” knob to the right value.

Our basic timbre is quite ready….but now comes the fun!

Modulations

Now it’s time to make our decision: what of the timbre do we want to control and variate during our executions while playing?

In our case we chose to control:

1)    The filter frequency

2)    The filter resonance

3)    The filter decay

4)    The envelope amount for the filter

For the first three parameters we can use the default knobs on the interface of the instrument, for the last one we choose to assign the Tweak 1 slot to the parameter F1Env2 as shown in the above picture.

In this manner we could decide “at run time” how much the envelope controls the filter frequency and play with the decay of this envelope to make a fatter sound or a thinner and more percussive one.

We don’t use any other “manual” modulation source for our timbre, but there’s still something to say regarding the modulation matrix.

Having adopted a PWM wave for the second oscillator we choosed to introduced a small amount of pulse witdh modulation using the LFO1 in order to make the sound more coloured and fat.

We also chose to modulate a bit the pitch of the oscillators using the amp envelope in order to add more punch to the timbre… it’s a common trick.

Effects

Last but not least, the effects. We inserted an EQ in order to lower the high frequencies a bit and to boost the lower ones. We added the Compressor1 in order - again - to add punch and presence to our timbre ad at least a little bit of ROOM reverb.

Et voilà... shake and serve cold!

Check our audio demo and tell us if you like it.

https://soundcloud.com/antonio-antetomaso/deep-funk-bass

And, of course... stay tuned for the next appointment!

Ciao.

25 timbres deeply programmed for the Novation Mininova/Ultranova synthesizer. 25 sounds inspired to one of the pioneers of the electronic music and synthesizers: the famous greek Composer "Vangelis".

These are the sounds included in the collection: 

V-Alpha Lead.syx

V-Alpha Pizz..syx

V-Alpha Pluck.syx

V-Antarctica.syx

V-B.R.Bass.syx

V-B.R.Blues.syx

V-B.R.Flute.syx

V-BassPedal.syx

V-Blade Runner.syx

V-Bounty Bass.syx

V-Chariots Noise.sy

V-Chariots Seq..syx

V-Dervish D.syx

V-Dervish Lead.syx

V-E.Piano.syx

V-Enfant Pluck.syx

V-Hymn.syx

V-Laser Efx..syx

V-NinaPintaS.M..syx

V-Spiral Lead.syx

V-Spiral Poly.syx

V-Spiral Seq..syx

V-Spiral Seq.2.syx

V-Swoosh Efx..syx

V-VP330 Strings.syx

You can load into the Mininova using the "Mininova Librarian" free tool distributed from global.novationmusic.com. We provide our services of sound creating, o here is the example of video slots with using it (here is the link) with free slot games using our sounds.