I decided it was time to try my hand at an indulgent, some would say wanky, prog rock synth solo. This is the result.

Loneliness (working title) – the Obligatory Prog Synth Solo by Darren Landrum

On the whole, it didn’t come out too badly. Really, I think it succeeds largely because it fails. I’ll leave the meaning of that sentence up to you.

I recently posted a bit of a teaser excerpt of my latest song on Soundcloud.

Loneliness (working title) – Excerpt by Darren Landrum

This one is coming together better than I could have hoped. I have the entire foundation for this 12-and-a-half minute epic laid out. Now it’s just a matter of filling in the blanks. And writing lyrics. And singing them.

Most of the sounds you’re hearing are either from my organ, or are found sounds in some fashion. The ride cymbal is an actual ride I have in my possession, but that’s about it. The snare sound has changed from the one you hear here since I posted this, though. It’s now a real snare, again one I have in my possession. Sometimes, only the real thing will do, although that doesn’t mean I’m opposed to swapping it out for something more interesting if it comes along.

“Loneliness” is only a working title, since that’s kinda the feeling it evokes in me. Once I write some lyrics, I’m sure a snappier title will present itself.

And so it goes.

I was originally attempting to make some simple electronic bed music for the video podcast I keep threatening to do. Just simple, repetitive stuff designed to make the long talking portions of the video more watchable. I decided to go the all soft-synth route to make it easy, and I edited all the MIDI on the piano roll in REAPER. Pretty straightforward, right?

This is where I ended up.

Wonders of the Universe by Darren Landrum

Not only is it too busy for bed music, I think it’s a little… I don’t know… too good? I hope that doesn’t sound like I’m being conceited.

As I listened to this a few times, I saw in my mind the idea of this used for a fan video of Brian Cox, even to the point of hearing him talking during the drum and bass breaks. So I decided to name it tangentially in his honor, after his new show.

Being all software and MIDI, this falls pretty far outside of the way I normally produce, so it will remain a one-off, more or less as-is, though I might tweak the melody and effects some more. I’d be happy to offer up a final version for a download, if people would like it. Please let me know.

And the bed music? Well, I have since composed one that I think will work just fine for it’s intended purpose.

Ladies and Gentleman, we now bring you a song by the one and only Genuine Bluesman Big Fat Jimmy Jammer McJammerson. This is a ditty he calls “The Maker Faire Blues.” Enjoy!

Well, my studio is now successfully re-set up following my two days of showing off at Maker Faire Detroit. I didn’t take a camera because I figured I wouldn’t have any opportunity to take any pictures. Turns out I was right. So here’s a picture of a cat pushing a watermelon out of a lake.

Sisypuss

This is about how I felt on Friday as I was packing up the car. I was carrying a heavy box with my studio speakers and computer monitor and misjudged the location of the first step of the front porch. I took a dive down the stairs, my cargo took a severe beating, and my face smacked firmly into the lawn. The equipment turned out to be okay, but my lower jaw immediately swelled up and turned a darker shade of black.

Thankfully, nothing was broken, but for the rest of the day, I had three chins.

Eventually, I made it down there to get set up. To be honest, I really was not in a good mood, given my mishap. So by 6PM or so, I’m finally set up and was sitting outside watching everyone else eat while I starve, not having eating since early morning and having very limited funds for food for the next two days. It was about a half-hour later that someone finally mentioned to me that this was a complimentary dinner for the makers.

That lifted my spirits right up.

After that, I met a nice lady who had flown in from Seattle (!) to show off her leatherworking skills. We ended up going to the kickoff party at a local hackerspace where I got to meet and chat with Matt Richardson and Becky Stern of Make Magazine. By this time, I was finally in a much better mood. My chin still hurt, though.

With that story out of the way, here are the highlights of the Faire itself:

• I had brought a lot more to talk to people about than I thought I had. I had material ready about sound design, about my homemade instruments (especially the lap steel), about my music… the list goes on. There was no way I could talk to everyone about everything. But really, that was a good thing, because it meant that I could show different things to different people based upon what they were most interested in.
• The big seventies “string machine” sound I made from a field recording of orbital sanders was a hit with a lot of folks. I’m going to make a short video about it soon.
• The lap steel was also a big hit. Many were amazed that it could sound so good for so cheap. I even inspired one person to go home and try making one for himself. I gave him some tips on how I would improve my design given the chance.
• A K-6 music teacher really liked my electric kalimba design. I suggested it as a potential project for his older students. He seemed to like the idea.
• One family stuck around long enough to listen to one of my (mostly) finished songs. I was really heartened by their reaction to it.
• I got an Editor’s Choice ribbon from Matt Richardson of Make Magazine. Cool, right?!
• I briefly saw Hackett from the Science Channel’s “Stuck with Hackett” TV show.
• I only had one thing I could play on the lap steel, which was a simple I-IV-V blues riff. I’m sure all of the surrounding exhibitors were sick of that riff by Sunday evening.

Here’s a list of what I would do differently for next year, should I be accepted to exhibit again:

• First off, I’m just going to get in on the hotel deal that Maker Faire works out. Yes, I saved some money finding my own hotel, but I’m not sure it was worth the hassle. Or maybe I can couch surf next year. That would be nice.
• I really should have taken my cooler and packed some food. I skipped lunch on both days, and even skipped breakfast on Saturday. I had had zero food all day Saturday until about 9PM. Don’t do that.
• I also let myself get dehydrated. Don’t do that, either.
• I’m going to make up some business cards with my web site, Soundcloud address, Twitter account, and Youtube account.

All that aside, the one thing I really want to do differently next year is to not only exhibit my projects, but to put on a real scheduled show. I could perform some live(looped) music, show people how I’m doing everything, answer some questions, tell some jokes, and put it all together into a set, and perhaps even design a costume or two for it.

As soon as I’m finished pushing this watermelon.

I’ve been busy making videos and getting ready for Maker Faire, so I’ve unfortunately been neglecting my blog a little. I thought I’d start getting back into the groove with a big Youtube Catchup.

First of all, I followed up on the foil reverb idea with some more experiments:

I’m not sure this is the direction to take this idea. One thing, though, that would really help is a better, more broadband driver. To that end, I took one of the many salvaged speakers in my collection and cut out the cone.

This is a quick experiment with using tensioned springs as part of a musical instrument. I wanted to test whether springs could be tuned by adjusting the tension on them, and it turns out they can, though the tuning range is smaller than one might expect.

Ah, the Delia Oboe, of “Blue Veils and Golden Sands” fame, although I managed to forget the name of the piece while making the video. Here, I try to re-create the lead sound she made famous. I think I got it pretty close.

This also my first experiment with screencasting, and to be honest, I think I prefer just pointing the camera at my monitor.

And finally, the hit of Maker Faire Detroit! I don’t think I really need to add anything to this video.

That’s it for now. My next post will be a thorough write-up about exhibiting at Maker Faire.

Here’s my latest video, complete with bad lighting because I didn’t feel like running upstairs for my lights.

It doesn’t really sound any good, but I think it proves the concept can work. Of course, EMT proved that a long time ago with the 240, but those go for tens of thousands and there are very few left. So where does that leave this project?

Well, to be honest, I’m not in a hurry to have an outboard reverb, even if it’s a really cool one. I’ll probably work on this one incrementally if for no other reason than it’s an interesting problem. Here are the fun bits:

• The tension of the foil clearly has a lot to do with the sound. Well, duh, really, but the interesting question lies in the details of how and why. Sound is going to be travelling through the foil in two ways: transverse waves, which move the foil up and down like a speaker cone, and longitudinal waves, which expand and compress the aluminum atoms through the foil, similarly to how sound travels through air. The tension on the foil is what determines the mixture of these two modes of vibration.
• Aluminum is not as dense as steel. Again, duh, but again, there’s something here that matters. The original EMT 240 used a gold-coated foil. Due to the fact that they chose a magnetic pickup to, well, pick up the sound, I’m guessing the gold was coating steel, with probably a nickel undercoat to help it stick. So the gold probably wasn’t really adding anything useful in the way of mass, but it would provide excellent corrosion protection over time. The takeaway? Aluminum might not work so well for a final device, but for this proof of concept, I think it did well enough. I think it would’ve done better if it had been thicker and larger.
• I don’t think piezoelectric transducers are the way to go here. The original, if I recall correctly, fed energy into the foil with piezo transducers and then picked it up with magnetic pickups, like what electric guitars use. The idea here is that you don’t want anything attached to the foil that will inhibit vibration. I suspect that the taped discs on my foil probably did a lot of damping. Now, it turns out that magnetic pickups can work in reverse just fine, and feed energy into a system. I’m thinking I could do that here: use magnetic induction to both input the signal and get the output. This would mean, though, that the foil would have to be a ferromagnetic material, which means steel, which means solving the corrosion problem somehow.
• Given this kind of system, the output off of the foil could be positively fed back into the input, increasing vibration of the foil sympathetically and in varying amounts. This would not only increase the length of the reverb tails, but would also allow for control of the reverb time and, thus, simulated room size. Filtering can also be used anywhere along the way to shape the final overall sound.

There’s a lot to go yet, and as I said, I’m not in a hurry on this one. But it is quite an interesting problem, I think.

Here’s my latest video, which is really just a quick test of what will be my two sets for future podcasting. I’ll eventually be doing some builds that are related directly to the videos I make, including:

• Some softboxes for lighting.
• Ways to mount those boxes in necessary locations easily.
• Portable background scrims I can use around the house so you don’t have to see my messy kitchen or basement.

I also need to be on the lookout for another tripod, since the one I have is slowly falling to pieces. That’s a great garage sale item, though.

Verb: noun. Any word that conveys a sense of action or-

Oh, wait, that’s not what I need.

Reverb: noun. A room, device, or piece of software that provides reverberation on an input sound or signal.

I didn’t say anything about reverbs in my previous post. Some might think this odd, because reverb is probably the single most important plugin you’ll ever use. So why didn’t I mention anything about it?

Here's a nice reverb for ya! Photo is by David Jones on Flickr. CC-BY licensed.

Well, it’s because the reverb I use isn’t free. Wait, it actually is. Sorta. That’s because I use the M40 reverb plugin that came with my TC Electronic audio interface. Once I got my newest setup running, I tried this new plugin out, and I decided I liked it so much that I may as well use it for everything. And so far, I haven’t had any regrets. Those TC guys know how to code a ‘verb.

But what if you don’t get a nifty algorithmic reverb plugin with an expensive piece of hardware? Well, that’s where convolution reverbs come in. Most DAWs already include a convolution reverb plugin (I know Reaper does, and thanks to Reaper’s amazing routing, it can be made to operate in true stereo, too). From there, the real key is finding good impulse responses.

An impulse response is a system’s response to an input impulse. And now that I’ve got that smart-ass answer out of the way, let me just say that it actually is quite self-explanatory.

Find an acoustically untreated room in your home. That shouldn’t be too hard. Now, while it’s quiet, clap your hands as hard as possible. Did you hear a bit of echo? Your clap was the impulse, and the bit of echo was the room’s impulse response. It turns out you can do this with more than just rooms. You can feed an impulse signal into mixing desks, equalizers, or other bits of analog gear, and what you get out is a profile of their frequency response. Have you ever tapped a piece of solid wood and listened to it vibrate? That’s also an impulse response.

Without getting too technical, a convolution reverb basically takes your signal, let’s say a vocal, and an impulse response, let’s say of the Hall of the Giants in Carlsbad Caverns, and then makes it sound like your vocal is being sung deep underground in New Mexico. Awesome!

So, where can you get some good impulses?

Well, that’s kinda where my house of cards falls down. I don’t use a convolution reverb, so I really don’t know where the good impulses are to be had. Most plugins you can buy, such as Reverberate and it’s variants, come with a variety of responses you can use. Otherwise, a quick Google search for “free impulse responses” turns up all sorts of hits. For those with “true stereo” convolvers, I ran across this library of Bricasti M7 IRs that are free to download. (Actually, I should point out that these IRs can be used even with non-”true stereo” convolution plugins.)

If you don’t want to mess with convolution reverbs or this whole “true stereo” thing is doing your head in like it is mine, Bootsy’s EpicVerb (all the way at the bottom) is an algorithmic reverb plugin that comes recommended from a few people I know in forums.

And that’s why I didn’t include reverbs in my last post.

At this stage in my music career, such as it is, I’m using only free plugins in the course of my productions. Nick Maxwell, aka AbletonTutor on Twitter, recently asked me if I would compile a list of my favorite ones. Not being one to turn down the opportunity for a blog post, I said yes. So without further ado, here is my list in no particular order.

A shot of some of the plugins I like to use. Click to embiggen.

Kjaerhus Audio Classic Series. I decided to start with these, which you’ll notice has no link to the web site where they are obtainable. That’s because Kjaerhus Audio went out of business some time ago, and thanks to a condition that nobody else be allowed to distribute the free plugins on offer, there is nowhere to get them now. I was lucky enough to have downloaded them before things went south.

There are three plugins I really like in this suite: the phaser, the flanger, and the auto-filter. I use those three a lot. The others I rarely if ever use at all.

Of course, if you want to use these and have no way of getting them, well, I don’t know what to say. Maybe someone out there has suggestions on other available plugins for these functions?

Func Shaper. Now on to our first one with a link. Robin Schmidt has made a waveshaper plugin so cool even the math geek in me likes it. This shaper allows you to type in any mathematical function you want, as long as it’s memoryless (which means that the function does not depend on any previous input or output values) and it will process your audio through it with up to 16x oversampling. It also has up to four sliders which can change defined “constants” in your function. It can also offset (or add a DC bias, however you want to think of it) your incoming signal for added effect. The end result: waveshaping nirvana, if you don’t mind math. And even if you do, the default tanh(x) function that it loads automatically is pretty versatile and worth playing around with and, truthfully, is the function I use nearly 100% of the time anyway.

The Optron 3A. This simple and effective opto-style compressor is brought to us by PhoenixInFlight Audio. It sounds good and it does the job. Not much more to say there. One knob for peak reduction, and one for gain makeup. Fnord.

The Variety of Sound Plugins. The “Bootsy” plugins, as they are often known, are very popular among many people I know on forums, even people who own the Waves plugins. Density MkII, a compressor, is the most popular of the bunch, though I have to admit that I use BootEQ MkII the most, at least so far. I plan to give NastyDLA, which is a delay with tape emulation, a good go in the near future as well.

One complaint about these plugins is that having multiple instances of a particular plugin running on a mix can crash the DAW. I haven’t experienced this problem myself, at least not yet, but one of the nice things about Reaper is that I can tell it to run each plugin in its own process, which kills the “always on top” feature of the plugin UI that I like, but I’ll live with that in exchange for a stable session. If your DAW supports a similar feature, you shouldn’t have any issues.

The Ohmforce Frohmage Resonant Filter. Okay, in a way, I did save one of my very favorites for last. I discovered Frohmage by accident one day, and I’m glad I did, because this has fast become my favorite filter plugin of all time. It even features in a sound design video I made a few months ago. I like it that much.

Now, some might recall that I have decided to make my first album only with sounds that I source myself. That means no software synths and no samples recorded by someone else. To be honest, though, the Akai Miniak I like to use has more or less violated that rule anyway, since it’s really just a softsynth disguised as a piece of hardware, and I have some Simmons SDS-5 samples I got from somewhere that I really like. Lately, though, I have found a plugin that might make me violate my rules more outright.

Artifake Labs Redtron SE. I really like the sound of the old Mellotrons. So when I discovered this plugin, I decided I had to give it a go, just to see if it’s any good. And it is. It’s very good. And that Mellotron choir fits so perfectly into one of the song’s I’m working on, it isn’t funny. I may just have to bite the bullet and allow myself a few exceptions to my rules.

So, there you have it. My list of favorite free plugins that I like to use. If you have any favorites, or any alternatives to the ones I posted, tell me in the comments. Thank you!