Take Beyonce. Take Sinatra. Take whomever you love and set them on fire. They call it a "Pyro Board," and it plays music by pulsing the beats in flame. When the singer hits a high note — stand back.
Cross-posting that to /r/lewronggeneration, so wrong on so many levels That beat was dirty as hell, though, damn.too bad they are playing dubstep, and the audio is poor in the video and the hosts are taking up way too much time. You guys just needed to get to the point, show the thing in action right away, play some real music created by musicians not a computer.
Their holes are too big. It's mostly just leaking. They're also demonstrating the nodes of the box, which dominate a lot more than they do in a tube. The fundamentals of a tube are related to length and width; the fundamentals of a box are related to length, width, depth, angles in between, etc.
I think there's a reason every college science recruitment team has a Rubens tube but nobody has a "Rubens box" - to get uniform-enough distribution combined with a cavity whose effects don't dominate is a bitch. Rubens tubes, on the other hand:
You're right, the box leaves too much to chaos. I wish we could engineer a Rubens tube to act as a spectrograph...
Guess I'll have to make do with Ableton's orange spectrum analyzer...
If I'm serious about it I'll build a set around Ozone Advanced. It's handy in that it allows you to insert "meter taps" anywhere you want and then assign those meter taps different colors in the spectrum. When I'm really up against the wall I'll give dialog one color, music another, beds another, effects another and then let the fucker play. It's CPU-intensive but it does more than you'll ever need. At least until you get into surround, and then you need to whip out Insight.
I've got that, but I try to minimize how many plug-ins I've got going at one time, because... laptop CPU. :( Love Ozone's Maximizer, my drum samples are stupid powerful. Their Exciter is also great for warming things up. I love Sonnox Elite's Limiter, it's the last thing on my master track. Sometimes I'll piddle around with their Reverb too. Got any plug-in suggestions? Much respect for what you do, I'm just an amateur.
Sonnox has never been worth the money to me, but I mostly do audio post. I use Avid's Pro Compressor and Pro Limiter because they're transparent as fuck and will do surround. I use Eventide like a rented mule. I had an H3000 D/SE up until October and once it went AAX I had little reason to keep it. They're also coming out with a bunch of the old goodies. My creative process isn't really complete without Speakerphone and Altiverb. But then, I do other things. The best, cheapest convolution reverb I know is Liquidsonics Reverberate. It's a peach. I tend to use plugins I beta-test for because, in many ways, their implementation reflects my needs. But you weren't asking about software synths. Honestly? Lots of Izotope. Trash and Iris are really creative. And I've done some seriously cool shit with Stutter Edit:
Thanks for the response, much appreciated. If you have time, I'd talk software synths. I've got Massive (sometimes I'll throw in a dubstep-ish synth, haters welcome) and Omnisphere by Spectrasonics. Massive is pretty stellar for what it can do, but I was disappointed with Omnisphere... it's mostly just pads, with a few decent instruments. I'm thinking about dropping the money to get Native Instruments's Komplete, I'm really hurting for new sounds. I'll check out your suggestions, but I just dropped $500 on a carbon-fiber skimboard, so I'm sore on cash. sigh Someday I'll have a real fucking studio, and not just a corner of an apartment bedroom (shared).
Hey, man, I've got an apartment bedroom. Have had for years. Billed over $50k in work in it last year. Don't knock bedrooms. You get to deduct them from your taxes. So a little synth history: In the beginning, there was analog and it was good. It was not all good - a lot of it was shit. My first real synth (other than the CZ-101 that my parents bought my sister, for some reason) was a Roland string machine, which is basically all those knobs and stuff you see replaced by resistors so that you've got very little creative possibility. Still, it was dope, and I learned to play Skinny Puppy's assimilate on it. Analog gave way - SLOWLY - to digital in the form of the Yamaha DX-7, PPG Wave and Synclavier: FM, wavetable lookup and digital emulation/PWM/sampling respectively. From there, sample playback in the form of the M1 took over for a long time. Sample playback slowly gave way to physical modeling (VL-1, Z1, Prophecy) while a few weird standouts (K5000S, Andromeda) pursued other technologies - but the writing was on the wall. Physical modeling is better done by a computer. As a result, every software synth you've ever seen is a physical modeler. This brief and questionably utile discussion serves to make a point: most people who didn't grow up with keyboards and rack mixers don't really think about what kind of synthesizer they're buying. It matters, though. They're all physical modelers, but the question is: what are they modeling? Massive models analog synthesis. Omnisphere models sample playback. Komplete is a sampler (kontakt) and, basically, eleven iterations of Reaktor, which is NI's only real product. Pretty much every synth NI has ever come out with is like the string machine I grew up with - it's an entirely open-ended physical modeler tweaked to be an FM synth (FM8) or an analog synth (Massive) or a wavetable synth (Absynth) or a sample player (kontakt) or an analog vocoder (Razor). Here's the trick, though - Reaktor is a complicated beast. Few people know how to make it do what they want, and fewer can come up with an idea and go "I'm going to build a synth that sounds like this." That's what Reaktor does - it turns ideas into reality through a coarse Teutonic visual language. And the problem with complicated beasts is that in pursuit of getting them to make sounds, you forget they're supposed to make music. Here's the Kyma users' group on Soundcloud. Note that they've left musicality somewhere far, far away. I've got a Kyma but I use it sparingly - not just because opening the hood on a "Sound" (how's that for a description for "preset") is a lot like opening a rift in the time-space continuum but because when your basic starting point is so radically divorced from what most people consider "music" you have a hard time getting back to the world. So. The question is what you want to do, and what you want to do with it. For analog, the Arturia V-Collection is unsurpassed. Their CS-80 is a CS-80. Their Minimoog is a Minimoog. Their Prophet VS is a Prophet VS. And they've got an all-in-one (Analog Lab) that's basically their version of Kore, which was pretty much the best idea Native Instruments ever had. For breadth with character, Korg's Legacy Collection is a beautiful thing. I've owned 2 M1s and five Wavestations and not having a WS in my arsenal at the moment is deeply annoying. However, with Korg being owned by Steinberg, there will never be an AAX version of any of the Korg shit, which means I need to go through a wrapper, and I'm not quite there yet. That said, buy a Korg Microkey from Amazon and they'll give you the Legacy collection for free, so you end up paying half what you would if you up and bought it. I own Komplete 7. I regularly use Absynth, Massive and Reaktor. Razor is, in all honesty, one of the most musically useful products they've ever come out with. I also bought Kinetic Metal and it's damn musical. It's musical for limited stuff, though. The number of synths you can get for Reaktor is pretty intimidating; I use several of them. Keep in mind, though - I'm mostly scoring Youtube videos and making weird noises for sound design. Standalone stuff? I own Chipsounds by Plogue, but that's 'cuz I work on several projects where I need to rip off video game sounds from the '80s and Chipsounds is a video game emulator. I also own Izotope's Iris, which is basically a musical version of RX. Iris is essentially the logical conclusion of wavetable synthesis, where the wavetables are whatever audio files you have lying around, at whatever speed and through whatever spectral map you choose to use. However, it lends itself to a very specific type of music. I'd probably own Alchemy if I didn't own a Kyma. But again - you're in that "dangerously non-musical" territory.
Right now, I'm laughing at how I felt some futile need to inform you who makes Komplete. Anyway, I've saved this post in the hopes of blowing future paychecks on aforementioned gear. What an expensive little hobby this is. Check me out, if you'd like, and tear me a new one, because that's the only way I'm gonna progress. If you're really in a rush, just cue it up around 0:50 to hear the chorus. P.S. currently working on vox for upcoming tracks, they are a BITCH.
It's the internet. You never know where you're gonna end up. No worries. As far as expense, you ain't lived until you've started pricing HDX. That's actually a great little track. Plenty to be proud of. Something most musicians forget is that they are much more sophisticated listeners than they are composers and it takes a long, hard slog before the stuff they produce will match what they expect. Me? I'm the most musically constipated man on earth... but little ditties I threw up because I was under a deadline have millions of views on Youtube, so there you go. Keep at it. Lemme know if you want something mixed. I ain't bad.
Thanks, kleinbl00, I appreciate your time and the kind words. :) I'd love to know your real name so that I might marvel at your accomplishments, but nay... I have seen the dox'ing attempt(s?) that you've endured. Searching your moniker on YouTube yields this, a solid tribute. LOL! Might take you up on that mixing offer someday, you never know...
That is a really neat idea, It appears that the box is running out of gas though. It is also too bad that no fire marshal anywhere would give this thing a pass for indoor use, so it is unlikely that we will see this in the wild unless someone with a legal team builds it.