well it’s been a while since I last wrote an update and as normal things have been very busy!!!

I’ve started work on the Karhide album again and things are progressing well I’ve been editing “Ride” and “Water” adding in the new synth parts and changing the structure a little. There’s 6 more to do after that and then I’ll be ready to mix with the Moot Group in June/July.

If you’re on the look out for some new plugins I’ve been having lots of fun with these:

BigSeq2

BigSeq2 is a massive extension to the feature set of our popular BigSeq gate effect. With twelve sequencers controlling ten effects in six blocks, BigSeq2 is capable of everything from short staccato gate sequences to long, evolving filter sweeps and frequency shifts, and everything in between.

The six effect “Blocks” contain ten effects in total, and these Blocks can be re-arranged simply by dragging them, giving you full control over the routing of the effects. Each effect Block has a gate sequencer and a modulation sequencer. The gate sequencer turns that effect on and off (or in the case of the delay Block, activates the “send” control), while the modulation sequencer can affect any and all parameters in that block.

Rough Rider Pro

What do you get when you add an isolator section to a stack of three Rough Rider compressors? Rough Rider Pro! While most multi-band compressors are designed to do gentle dynamics control (and to be fair, Rough Rider Pro can do that sort of thing if you want) we added the Nuclear Option to this compressor. 1000:1 ratio? Check! Series mode for ludicrous squishing? Check! Full isolator for extreme tone carving? Check!

In short, Rough Rider Pro is for those times when you want to know your signal is compressed. Other compressors are kittens, rainbows, and gumdrops. This one is a 40-foot-tall fire-breathing lizard.

Hello!This is just a quick update because it’s been a long time!Things have been moving ahead with the recording of the album and it should be finished by the end of of Feb.Next weekend I will be in Oxford recording From Light To Sound. It’s a new project that features members of Sunnyvale, The Evenings and Workhouse and from the practice room recordings it’s going to be ace!Other recording news is that I might also be recording the rather ace Diet Pills.More news soon.

This is a plugin I’ve been watching with interest and it was released today so I had to buy it!

Here’s what the guys at Audio Damage have to say about it:

Automaton is a unique look at buffer effects, allowing you to experiment with artificial life within your DAW. With four separate effects (Stutter, Modulate, Bitcrush, and Replicate) driven by a cellular automata sequencer, Automaton is capable of adding subtle seemingly random fills and “humanizing” effects, but if you like, you can crank the sequencer up to eleven, and watch as your DAW becomes a petri dish while Automaton makes complete hay of the track you’ve inserted it to.

These looks ace but I’m not going to be able to try them until next week!

Rocket

The Rocket is a character audio compressor, singular in its extraordinary speed, responding in mere microseconds to variations in program level. Being in the order of several thousand times faster than most ordinary compressors, we respectfully submit that The Rocket kicks like a mf.

Violation of the laws of physics and digital signal processing remain beyond us at this time, and a single sample at 44.1kHz has a span of 22.6 microseconds. The Rocket’s attack time can be below this level, for absolute certainty that even the very first sample understands that you are its master. Placed on the master bus, The Rocket will effortlessly tame transients almost in the manner of a brickwall limiter.

Discussions of Science and Art are played out within The Rocket ’s ‘Impetus’ circuits, where warmth and aggression exist as DSP, able to take the delicate, musical gain reduction to the extremes of dirty, heavy and slamming rock’n’roll misbehaviour. Aw hell, The Rocket can rock so crank it up!

http://www.stillwellaudio.com/?page_id=68

Tinman

TinMan is an auto-peaking resonant filter with multiple pitch detection and individually triggered attack/decay envelopes. In other words, it listens to your audio and makes matching spooky wooo-eeee-oooo effects. TinMan uses a new polyphonic pitch detection algorithm to isolate and rank the strongest pitches in the input audio. For each detected pitch, a separate resonant filter, or resonator, is peak-matched to that exact pitch (even if it’s off-key), and an attack envelope is triggered. If a pitch slides, the resonator’s resonant peak will continue to track it. If a pitch ends, the resonator will release until fully quiet.

At light settings, TinMan works on just about any dull audio part to add some life and interest.

http://www.stillwellaudio.com/?page_id=48

While I was in Poland I listened loads to the old Half Seas Over tracks and you can listen to the old EP hear:

http://www.myspace.com/halfseasover

I really want one of these:

(Borrowed from Create Digital Music)

Ever dreamed of being able to program your own DSP hardware as easily as you can connect custom effects on your computer? Earlier this summer, we saw the open source OpenStomp effects pedal. Then, information was scant and we hadn’t seen an actual unit. Now, the box is going into production for North America at US$349, available for purchase right now.

The magic inside is Parallax’s Propeller CPU core. If anything kick starts a DIY revolution for DSP hardware, this could be it. The software is Windows-only, but Mac users, could be a good reason to install Windows dual-boot; there’s a graphical interface for programming custom effects, vocoders, or whatever you like.

Effects so far, which come GPL3-licensed as open source patches:

• Tremolo
• Chorus
• Distortion
• Delay
• Tunstuff (Layered repeat loop)
• Test Tone
• Pong w/source

And it gets better: because of its use of the Propeller, video features are possible, too. (Yep, this could be a video stompbox — I’ll have to unleash our Create Digital Motion readers on that.)

I hope to have a chat with the creators so we can cover this in more detail; if you have questions you’d want answered, leave them in comments and stay tuned for a full-blown CDM feature.

OpenStomp Project Page + Details
Online Store

I’ve spent the day playing with DrumReaplacer which is a JS script written by Jonas for Reaper and it’s really good.  I’ve even started to make up some samples based on the single hits recorded at the moot group with Scott a few weeks ago.

Here’s the details from the Jonas:

Features:
- Velocity sensitive drum replacer
- Force variation-slider to avoid the machine gun-effect in for example snare fills (works beyond layers)
- built-in sampler that supports any samplerate
- Dynamics-slider to control how hard the drummer beats those things
- Easy to use

More info and download here: http://www.cockos.com/forum/showpost…3&postcount=22

DrumReaplacer is a free alternative to for example Drumagog, and in some way works better than its commercial competitors.

It’s still in alpha stage but the real deal will be done shortly.

Happy drum replacing! Regards,

Just to let you know that I’ve uploaded a rough version of ‘Stab’ to the Karhide Myspace site. It was recorded a few weeks ago at the Moot Group with Scott and I’ve only had time to do a rough mix but I think it sounds good.

http://www.myspace.com/karhide

Let me know what you think?

After reading about what Tascam have done to GigaStudio alot of people are talking about LinuxSampler and after reading up I’ve decided to give it a go this weekend because there’s what looks like a nice piano libarary which will be cool for a couple of Karhide ideas I have. I’ll let you know how it goes…

http://www.linuxsampler.org

UPDATE:

I didn’t have as long as I’d hoped to have a play with this and after an hour it was not working on my laptop so I’ve uninstalled for the time being.  I think I’ll give it a go when I have more time.