The Monologue Refill is a monophonic analogue synthesizer library for the Reason 4.0 NN-XT sampler. The sets include the standard sawtooth, square, triangle waves. Also included are a fixed rate pulse width modulation set, and hard sync sawtooth set. Other sources include, detuned pulses, frequency modulated oscillators, tuned oscillator layers, white noise, and sine wave samples from a self-oscillating resonant filter.

Each category of oscillator waveform is multisampled and looped (some more carefully than others). The NN-XT patches are expanded in dozens of combinator patches (Record and/or Reason 4.0 only) which cover classic bass tones, mono leads, sound effects, arpeggiated and sequenced patches, and a set of analog drum sounds. Also, a pseudo voice set was created using a hard sync sawtooth modulating the filter frequency. This was particularly challenging as each sample zone required careful tweaking.

The raw waveform samples were recorded with the monosynth filter wide open. The synthesizer was connected through an active tube D.I. box, modified with a NOS Telefunken 12AX7. The D.I. was amplified through a Neve 1095 Mic Pre/EQ, and the signal was digitized through a Universal Audio 2192 AD/DA converter. As I previously posted, the samples were tracked in Propellerhead Record where no processing was applied - EQ was applied using the Neve. The audio clips were bounced out and further edited using Redmatica KeyMap Pro for mapping and looping the instrument samples.

Record & Reason 4.0 required to fully use all combinator patches. Included in the archive are a few .record session files and a Reason song file which demonstrate using the drum combis. There are several dozen combinator patches which take advantage of the Thor Low Pass Filter to shape the raw oscillator sets. The combis include several mono bass and mono lead instruments, synthesized drum patches, sound effects, arpeggiated and sequence driven patches, and polyphonic instruments. The Systems directory contains some of the basic architectures for these patches which allow you experiment and create your own variations of the patches.

Download Peff 034 - Monologue.rfl 164MB zip archive.

It’s been a long time since I put out a refill; almost 20 months, I believe! I’m way behind on everything, but this particular project has been sitting on my hard drive for about 1 year now. I really want to get it finished and move on to other things like finishing the book…

The new refill is an monophonic analogue synthesizer sample library that I tracked into Propellerhead Record. It originally started off as a test project, but the results came out so amazing that I decided to push ahead. This experiment with Propellerhead Record turned out pretty well, and I’m happy to say that the end is near on the 034 - Monologue.rfl project.

I sent out a page update on facebook to try out test version of the file, so please check your inboxes there. Any feedback or bugs should be posted on my facebook wall.

Happy Holidays, everyone! Rick Silvestri (blacktiger) and I decided to do a bit of holiday music last week. We figured we would try to keep up with the old Propellerhead holiday tradition of sharing Reason Christmas songs, but try something with Record and Reason this year. Rick suggested we work on the xmas classic, What Child is This, aka Greensleeves. Actually Rick suggested a few other things first, but I said that we should play it safe and do something that’s in the public domain.

Rick brought his double bass and a few guitars over and we sat down and worked on a rough arrangement. Since i don’t play guitar, this is the first time I had a chance to try out my little Bryce tube amp head which has a great tone for tracking.

Since my limited system only has two (really good) channels of audio input, I used two mics on each take. In most cases, the Wunder CM7 worked out well, but a few tracks, we ended up selecting the SM58 off axis on the cabinet. The upright bass was also off the CM7 and a direct from the pickup. I was really pleased with the not only the bottom end, but the depth and articulation in room came across nicely as well.

Record worked as well as it possibly could! It is so easy to quickly add and edit tracks on the fly. We used the comping feature for a few things, but “one-take” Rick, charged right through. I ended up applying post processing through some of hardware devices by routing a FX send to an audio output, and then re-recording the affected signal. This included reamp-ing tracks through a moog delay line, some outboard tube compression, and an H3000.

If you don’t have Record and Reason, you can listen to the MP3 Stream here:

For Record and Reason users, we are making the Session file available through the holidays. You can download the file here:

greensleeves_ricksilvestri.record.zip - hosted on dropbox

try speeding up the track. I think it sounds good at 131-135 bpm

A little video preview of my presentation Saturday at the ProCon LA. It needs a little tweaking… and a lot more rehearsal so that I can keep it under 50 minutes :-/

Yes this conference will focus on Record, but it doesn’t mean that Reason will be overlooked. I will try to fit in a section on how Reason Devices can be used for insert and send effects.

The Producers Conference LA page

My friends in the band Scrabbel were on tour with 旺福 WonFu, one of the biggest indy/pop bands in Taiwan. Contracted by the Taiwanese Embassy and organized by Dan Lee of Scrabbel, the tour went around to various locations up and down the west coast.

As it turns out, XiaoMin, singer/guitarist and the groups producer, Eric, are not only fellow gear addicts, but they’re also huge fans of Reason. They especially like the Reason Pianos ReFill and claimed that it’s their ‘go to’ piano sound on their productions. Despite the language barrier, we could still talk about different sounds and patches - like hardcore Reason-geeks.

Anyways, it’s one of the moments in life where this shrinking world just got even smaller

The Producers Conference is coming back to LA on Saturday November 14, 2009. We will be back at King King in Hollywood again. The topics will be Record-centric, so it’s a new set of presentations.

Hopefully we wont have the issues with video quality as we did last time!

theproducersconference.com

Advance Ticket Purchase is recommended. Hope to see you there!

If you haven’t seen them yet, I’ve been working on some combinator programming tutorials which will be available on the Line6 website. Combi programming concepts are important for both Reason and Record users, so i’ve decided to focus my efforts in explaining some of the basics.

So follow this link and sign in to your Line6 account. If you’re not a returning user and need a code, click on the link that says: “Where can I find an access code?” a popup window will appear, and you just select one of the items like “Friend” or “Other”. A code will appear in the popup window and you can proceed to viewing the videos.

Combinator: programming on Line6

As of 9:09 am this morning CET, Propellerhead Software has officially released their new product, Record! I’m hoping that Record will be a huge success. Congratulations to everyone at the Props HQ for the years of hard work that went into development!

The Propellerhead Software Record Beta is now available for users to download and try! Visit, RecordYou.com for more details on how to participate! This is a fully operational trial version that will expire on 09-09-09. If you’re even remotely interested in using Record, either on it’s own or Record with Reason 4.0, you should participate to see how it performs on your rig.

On a side note - if you have both Reason 4.0 working with the Record Beta (and a MOTU 896HD), you can try all of the CV/Gate to Analog hardware example files from this site, and track the audio back into Record! The RPG-8 to analog CV/Gate, MIDI to analog CV/Gate, and the DIN Sync Generator Combi. Batteries not included.

In this continuing quest to interface analog hardware to Reason 4.0, It’s become very apparent that only a few brands on hardware interfaces feature DC coupled outputs which will enable direct routing of control voltage signals (CV) from software applications to analog devices. Since the release of MOTU Volta, people have been trying to determine if their interface will function as CV converter and many have discovered that their brand of interface is unsupported. From the Volta Blog, i found a discussion where people are reporting back on their findings on the Muffwiggler Forum

I am using a MOTU 896HD to interface Reason to Analog CV/Gates, and the files I am posting are subsequently calibrated for 6.15V / 12.3V range on outputs 1 through 8. The voltage range varies on the Main Outs and Headphone Outs, so the processing will behave differently if you are using an 896HD with these connections. The results will also be different if you use a different MOTU interface like an Ultralite Mk3 which has a range of 3.5V / 7.0V on the outputs. Again, the MOTU 896HD is proving to be well suited for this application - not be confused with the 896mk3 which is not compatible.

The bottom line is this: if an interface is deemed compatible with Volta, the interface will also probably work with these Reason patches.

Naturally the progression of this study has brought me to point of creating a combinator patch that generates Roland DIN Sync signals in order to slave Roland units such as the TB-303, MC-202, TR-606, TR-808, TR-909, etc. Roland DIN Sync requires two control voltages, a 24 pulse per quarter note (PPQ) clock, and a dual state (on/off) voltage to trigger start/stop on the transport.

Cabling from the MOTU 896HD is pretty simple, but requires that you create a custom Y-cable that connects two audio outputs to a 5 Pin DIN connector. On both XLR outputs, Pin 1 and Pin 3 are connected to the DIN Pin 2 (Ground). Only two conductors are used from the XLRs: Pin 1 and Pin 3 are tied to the cable shield. One of the XLR connectors has Pin 2 connected to DIN Pin 1 (Start/Stop); the other XLR connector has Pin 2 connected to DIN Pin 3 (Clock).

In Reason, a Thor Polysonic synthesizer Step Sequencer generates the 0 to +5V clock pulse. The sequencer resolution is set to 16T, and the step duration is set to 1/4. This generates 24PPQ. The Gate signal is routed to an audio output, and with the sequencer in repeat mode (on one step), the opening and closing gate acts as a pulse clock. For my patches, a Matrix Pattern Sequencer Curve CV controls the start/stop signal. The Matrix Curve CV is routed through the Thor Synth and converted to a DC Audio signal that triggers the transport on the Roland device.

See the demonstration videos:

TB-303 & Reason 4.0
MC-202 & Reason 4.0
TR-808 & Reason 4.0

Download the Reason DIN Sync Generator combis:
Peff-ReasonDINSync.zip

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to visit the Sweetwater Campus in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The company is celebrating their 30th year in the music business, making this years Gearfest a special occasion. The facility is quite impressive and has several recording studios and an auditorium. Naturally, these rooms are fully outfitted with just about every piece of contemporary equipment. There’s also a retail store, cafeteria, and balcony where you can stand and look down on the massive warehouse storing all of the equipment in their catalog.

The people in Fort Wayne are really nice. I encountered a few travel snafus, and people went out of their way to help me out. The staff at Sweetwater were equally as hospitable, and did everything possible to make people comfortable in the heat. If you’ve ever dealt with Sweetwater over the phone, you probably know how friendly and helpful, they are. I can confirm that they are no different in person.

Being there in an official capacity representing Propellerheads and Line6, left me with little time to listen to the presentations in the auditorium, but I had the nice chance to visit with neighboring vendors, Mark of the Unicorn and Solid State Logic. I was talking to Dave Roberts from MOTU about Volta and showed him my Reason to CV/Gate patches, and I found out that the 896mk3 does not have DC coupled outputs, so it’s not compatible with volta or my Reason CV/Gate configs. However, the 896HD is compatible. Out of their entire current product line, the Ultralite mk3 with 10 analog outputs seems like the best deal.

I also had the chance to play with audio stems from Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer running through the SSL XLogic workstation. Fadi Hayek was demonstrating their XLogic Alpha-Link MADI interface system with 128 audio channel capacity over fiber optic lines and extremely low latency (32 samples!) Here’s a link to a video on facebook.

Thanks to everyone who came out to see us. It was great meeting fellow Reason users who travelled from all over: Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio, and of course, Indiana.

This video shows how I have the Reason/Thor MIDI to CV conversion process applied to the moogerfoogers. The MF-107 FreqBox oscillator output is connected directly into the MF-101 Low pass filter. Thor’s key note value, mod wheel, pitch bend, aftertouch, LFO, and envelope generators all modulate the two pedals to create a functional monophonic synthesizer.

For more information about how this is configured please see the prior post here:

http://www.peff.com/journal/2009/06/05/reason-cv-to-moogerfoogers/

I’m also posting the the Reason Song file. The CV to Audio cables in the Reason rack are terminated on the Spider Audio splitters in the Combinator. If you plan to make this work, configure your MOTU audio driver, get (make) the right cables with Pin 3 to Ground and Pin 2 Hot. Again, the moogerfoogers have +5dc on the ring contact, so isolate that connection. It probably wont do any damage if the current is going to your audio interface, but the calibration will be wacky. It’s better to be safe than sorry.

The file is available here:

moogerfooger monosynth control.rns