I very nearly neglected to post yesterday’s sketch, since the timing was rough and the whole thing was musically very simple. Needless to say, I’m glad I did post it now — chalk this up as a win for online collaboration and Creative Commons!

SooperLooper is great for capturing new track ideas, especially for the kind of music I make, which is often driven by repeating patterns. In the past I’ve started with a drum beat and recorded loops on top of that, but this time I went freestyle. The nanoKONTROL is great for controlling it — I was able to add a bunch of empty loops, and map a separate fader and record button to each of them, making it easy to both record your loops and control their playback afterward. Once I had some appropriate loops I just played them all at the same time, using the faders to control their relative volumes while recording the output straight in to JACK Timemachine.

I don’t know if this sketch will go any further than this, but with some glitchy drums, some additional synth parts, and a bit more complexity (like, more than two chords), I think it could work as a track.

The solution had been staring me in the face, but it almost seemed too simple to work, or too cumbersome to be practical: instead of using some kind of drum instrument, just load drum samples in to Ardour directly, and copy and paste the individual drum hits in to place. It sounds like fiddly work, but it’s really not that bad — with Ardour set up to snap regions to its grid, and with the grid set appropriately, it was really quite easy to lay down a simple kick/snare beat, and it was just as easy to copy and paste that beat out over multiple bars.

From there, glitching it up takes a bit more effort, but with such fine control over things you have a lot of scope for creative effects. I tried two main techniques — trimming down individual hits and repeating them very quickly (which required more copying and pasting), and reversing individual hits (using the “Reverse” option from the region’s right-click menu) so that they played backwards, often combined with some fast repetition.

Individual drum hits, sliced and glitched up in Ardour

For the hats, I didn’t want to lay down the individual beats in Ardour, so I created a hat loop in Hydrogen and imported that. In most bars I just let it play as-is, but in some I add some variety by splitting the loop in to beat-length chunks and then manipulating those chunks. I shuffled the chunks around a bit, reversed some of them, repeated some of them, and also shrunk some of them to half their original length (using the Stretch/Shrink Regions tool) and repeated them.

There are tools that can help with this kind of beat-slicing if you don’t want to do it by hand, including Smasher, which works offline but has a lot of different effects on offer, and Tranches, which can slice beats under live MIDI control, but I’ve had trouble fitting these in to my workflow. There’s also Sequent, a commercial plug-in and stand-alone tool, but it’s not super-cheap (though for what it does, I think the price is entirely reasonable). I’m really happy with the results I achieved entirely within Ardour, though, and now that I know how to get these sounds, I think I’ll be making them a lot more often.

nanoloop's 16-step pattern sequencer

nanoloop started life on the original Gameboy, and its heritage still shines through today in its simple pattern-based design, chiptune-style synth sounds, and its clean, minimal interface. Once you find your way around, it’s quite easy to enter in patterns, create some sounds, and then string the patterns together in to simple tracks. The built-in synth is very simple, and while its sounds all sound like the kind of thing you’d expect to hear from a 8-bit console, there’s a surprising amount of variety available.

If the built-in synth doesn’t cut it for you, nanoloop also has a built-in sampler, with a few tracker-style controls for looping and controlling the start position. You can record sounds with your phone’s mic, or load samples from the SD card, which is very handy if you have sample collections from the likes of Electrum installed.

the built-in chip-tune-style synth is simple but effective

nanoloop’s definitely limited, but its limitations are all in the name of simplicity — the UI is pretty quick to learn your way around, and it’s exceptionally clear and responsive — so you soon forget about the limitations and start having fun just messing about. It would be ideal for sketching out ideas or just random experimentation on-the-go, and if you do make something you like, you can export it to Ogg Vorbis format for posterity.

Here’s a little something I whipped up earlier: there’s not much to it, but it was great fun to make.

This was whipped up on Sunday night mostly in Qtractor, with Hydrogen for the drums, and my Blofeld for all the other sounds. I’d normally record everything in to Ardour and mix it there, but I stayed in Qtractor for this one, and it did a fine job; I had no trouble replicating my usual trick of running the drums on to separate tracks so that I can apply individual effects to each, for instance. The result is a bit trite, but it’s fun, it loops pretty smoothly, and I think it suits the game well.

You could use other sounds, too, but I chose not to — I loaded a chunk of the original sound in to a sampler (Specimen), ran it through some distortion effects, then through PHASEX, where I tweaked away on the filter in real-time using my Korg nanoKONTROL, and finally through some spatial effects. The result was some throbbing, unsettling ambient art-wankery that I call “pulse”.

There’s a highly reverberant stairwell at work, and with no option to bring in specialised equipment to record it, I figured I’d take a stab at it with that I did have at hand. I took my Android phone to the stairs, set TapeMachine recording, and used a clap of my hands as my impulse. The result is surprising — it’s very “coloured”, due to limited frequency coverage of both my mic and my impulse sound, but it’s definitely a reverb, and it might even be one that comes in handy for certain applications. For my testing, I set it up on a bus in Ardour using the excellent Jconvolver and then piped in some drums, setting up sends as I thought appropriate.

The sketch below has three versions of the same drum sequence: the first is dry, the second uses the CALF Reverb plugin, and the third uses my convolution reverb. It’s not subtle (nor should it be, given how strongly reverberant the space I recorded the impulse in was), but I like the sound on the snare — with some work, I think that could sit nicely in the mix on the right track.

The drum machine certainly isn’t as full-featured as Electrum, with a fixed 16-step layout and just a few sets of built-in sounds, and the 303 is similarly simple, with just the classic options you’d expect (three-octave range, no real velocity, etc.). It all works really well, though, and it’s great fun to play around with, especially once you get your fingers on the 303′s real-time controls. That unavoidable Android latency is there, but because everything’s sequenced, it never seems to get in the way.

You can write four patterns for both the 303 and drum machine, which is just enough to scrape out a basic song; here, then, is such a song! There’s nothing here you haven’t heard before — just some simple 303 lines and 909 drums — but it was still fun to make. RD3 has no export facility (you can save your songs, but only in its own format), so i had to use my laptop’s line-in to record it.

RD3 is 3.49€, which is perhaps a little steep for what’s there, but it’s definitely a lot of fun, and with a few additions, such as audio export, more patterns, and some effects, it could be a cracking little app. Check it out!

PSIndustralizer's needlessly-OpenGL-enabled GUI

If you’re going to use PSIndustralizer, you do need to be aware of some issues. The most annoying is that, with settings for “Spring Tension” or “Speed” that are too high — and “too high” is a vague description, because it’s never exactly clear how high you can go before having problems — the render times jump from a second or two up to perhaps a minute or more, and the only way to stop the render is to exit the app. There’s also no JACK support — not a killer, since you render and save the samples rather than using it as a realtime synth — and the exported files sometimes need to be cleaned up manually to remove some nasty DC offsets. Still, I think the sounds hidden in there could well be worth the hassle.

• Slap together a basic four-bar drum pattern in Hydrogen
• Export that pattern as a loop and import it in to SooperLooper as loop 1
• Play a bunch of random crap over the top, and if it sounds okay, grab a loop of it
• Lather, rinse, repeat

I saved those sessions, and had a quick stab at turning one of them in to a proper track, which I call “sl3″, by importing the loops in to Ardour and moving/coping them in to an arrangement. I also threw in some effects for good measure: EQ, a couple of delays (can’t help myself with those!), and an insert out to Rakarrack to add some guts to my fairly limp bass loop. I’m sure I could make it more interesting by re-recording a few parts — replacing the drum loop with a properly programmed part with a bit of variety, for instance — but hey, for an hour-and-a-half’s work, I think it sounds okay!