I should probably point out that I have no experience with Korg’s previous analogue toy, the Monotron, but from what I can tell it seems completely useless to me, so I’d be the wrong guy to ask anyway.

Initial impressions are both good and eyebrow-cockingly puzzled. The box contents reveal a short manual (uncharacteristically rife with typos and errata), 6 AAA batteries and the unit itself, about the size of a hefty pocket book – By which I mean one of those pocket books no pocket on this planet would hold. I was sort of disappointed no DC9V adapter was included, but I understand, as with most things Monotribe, concessions were made to keep the price in check.

The front panel is chock full of switches, buttons and pots. While there are certain features I’d be desperate for (more on this later), I don’t see where exactly those features would go in terms of physical space. This kind of unit lives and dies on its commitment to simplicity of use, and from past experiences with “groovebox” type devices – lord how that term makes me itch – an excess of features at the expense of live programmability can be a creative death sentence.

Every function on the Monotribe is available with a wonderful immediacy. The pots are smooth with wonderful resistance, the switches are pronounced and chunky, the buttons have a satisfying travel and in general the device is very inviting to touch. There are no menus to navigate. There are a pair of shift-key type interactions though these are both dead simple and never got in my way. Having a setup filled with somewhat esoterically laid out synthesizers, being able to ignore five-deep nested menus and value-skipping digital endless pots and simply tweak the parameters right where you want them is the kind of experience that makes me reevaluate my fetish for deep and abstract patch programmability. I’m looking at you, Blofeld.

Sidenote: While I feel that Roland’s modern lineup is dull as dishwater and hopelessly bound to fashion, their front panel designs have been not much short of stellar. A HOTAS philosophy where you are allowed to build a muscle memory of your instrument is, I feel, a really noble cause, and I’ve even ogled the SH-201 just for the sake of having an R3-like instrument with that programming immediacy. But don’t worry R3. You are the awesomest.

The Monotribe has a signal path so simple it’s practically unique. A single self-tuning(!) voltage-controlled oscillator with saw, triangle and square waveforms is available, which you can mix with a white noise generator and pass through a single 12db voltage controlled resonant low-pass filter. The filter and pitch can be controlled either individually or in unison by a single LFO, running at speeds up to 5khz for some warbly frequency modulation if you’re so inclined. Finally the whole shebang is run through an amp envelope generator.

It’s all fine.

Viewed in isolation, every component of the Monotribe can be described as “fine”, perhaps with the exception of the filter, which is really quite lovely.  There is no pulse width modulation for the square waveform, so beyond tuning the osc there isn’t much in the way of motion. The amp envelope has three preset attack/decay shapes (decay, flat and fade in), but no temporal adjustments beyond that. The filter is probably as dynamic as you are going to get, but with only a single LFO the complexity of motion you are going to get out of a “patch”, if you can call it that, is extremely limited if you intend to do any oscillator frequency modulation. All in all, the synth section is obviously designed to be messed with and tweaked on the fly, not “programmed” and played like a traditional keyboard.

In fact, you might even question the innate musicality of the Monotribe. The ribbon pitch controller is recessed so deeply in the panel my girlfriend couldn’t play it effectively with her long nails, and nailing any pitch across its short width is a real test of patience. There is a range switch for flipping between a wide band and a shorter one-octave band, as well as quantizing to notes, but no matter of practise here makes the ribbon particularly comfortable to use. It feels ironic that the main musical input mechanism of the unit is so woefully inadequate for generating actual musical notes with any precision.

The sequencer part is, in a word, rudimentary. A row of 8 buttons, each with their own LED, makes up the step sequencer shared by both the drum and synth sections, though they operate somewhat differently; The synth sequencer keeps some properties “behind the scenes” to offer more resolution, and also offers some glide between notes, but using these features in any intuitive or precise manner is hit (at best) and miss (for the most part).

The Monotribe incorporates a three-drum analogue rhythm section, offering a kick, a snare and a hi-hat, none of which are user-editable. They all have their own 16-step (double the synth sequencer resolution)  tracks, and they all pass through the same amp circuit, so you have no individual velocity control over drum hits. The best you can do is balance the entire drum section against the synth section. All the drum sounds are “fine”. The kick is nice and deep with a pronounced click, and the hi-hat is a.. hi-hat. If you’ve used the DS-10 or MS-20 for patching drums before, you’ll know what kind of sound to expect here. The snare has too much low and mid for my taste and not enough punch to cut through either the synth or the kick, so I’ve tended to avoid it for the most part.

There is no MIDI, but there is a sync input and output with variable edge triggering for the input, so you could theoretically run a metronome from your DAW through it to sync it up. It seems to me that Korg has envisioned setups of multiple Monotribes daisy chained together for greater ensembles, but I haven’t tested this functionality nor do I have any interest in it, so I can’t rightly comment. The flashing tempo knob and tapping to set bpm on other devices is working fine for me.

What..? Why?

Some bits of the Monotribe seem utterly bonkers from a design point of view. The Monotron was apparently known for letting you pipe in external audio and use its filter as a signal processor; A great way to get a cheap analog 12db lowpass. The Monotribe offers this as well, but doesn’t disable the gate when the feature is engaged, meaning you must play a synth key to be able to hear the external audio through the filter. Why this seemed like a good idea to ANYONE at Korg is a real mystery, as it effectively kills the entire usefulness of the function.

Further, the device has a gate envelope with no release; What this means is every time a note stops playing, it “snaps” quiet with an audible pop. When notes are played in close succession, this is not an issue, but when played from the ribbon it means you can’t trigger notes independently of the envelope; Release that ribbon and POP, no matter what envelope shape you’ve chosen. Adjusting the note gate time from the ribbon is possible, but shortening the gate time for a sequence results in a sharp series of these pops that are very unattractive.

This is particularly frustrating if, like me, you intend to run the Monotribe through an external effects processor such as the Mini-KP. These pops introduce high end where otherwise there should be none, so reverbs and short delays with high feedback sound horrible, when they could have sounded smooth and luscious.

Summary

It probably sounds like I’m really down on the Monotribe, but in fact I don’t regret my purchase one bit. I’m disappointed in it in the same way I was disappointed in the DS-10, because it is so close to being very special, and makes some embarrassingly idiotic decisions on the way there. I’m disappointed in it because the sequencer offers way, way less than I had made myself believe it would, and because the zero-release gate feels like someone clicking their tongue in my ear while I’m trying to make rad sounds.

The thing is, the Monotribe is a piece of garbage if you want deeply expressive musicality, or a travelling workstation for sketching out your next track. It’s not that kind of unit. What it IS is a playground where you can experiment very freely and very intuitively with the core principles of analog synthesis. It’s easy, when you’re patching a Nord Modular G2 with dozens of oscillators and LFOs, to forget how much can be done with a single oscillator and a single LFO, and the Monotribe gives you the ability to not just make crazy noises (you can), but also to *understand* what makes these noises.

I’ll go as far as to say I didn’t understand how to construct an FM patch until i spent a while on a couch with the Monotribe simply experimenting with the musicality you can get from subtle shifts in modulation.

No, this is a wonderful little gadget, and you could even argue that its blatant deficiencies shave a strictly unnecessary layer from your ambitions, and let you simply play with sound with no pretensions. It’s a synth and sequencer my girlfriend picked up and had fun with instantly, and with a few more sessions it could be her first real entry to analog synthesis in a very tactile package.

Still I’d strongly recommend giving a demo unit a spin before committing to the purchase, as I can imagine the Monotribe easily ending up in some forgotten cupboard gathering dust. Me, I’m happy making clicky, random monophonic acid techno at 3am when I can’t sleep.

About 50 minutes worth of massive, dark and melancholy ambient to go with your coding session.

Featuring tracks by Bruno Sanfilippo, Tim Hecker, Murcof, Cliff Martinez, Inade, Jackson C Frank, Max Richter and Christoph de Babalon.

Music for Programming is an ongoing collection of mixes designed to aid your brain activity in moments where blocking out the outside world is imperative. It’s currently a collaboration between myself and Datassette.

I recently did an interview with the hardcore/techno zine The Harder View that I think came out pretty good. It goes into detail on why I got into hardcore techno to begin with, and why I eventually got out of it. It’s pretty candid stuff, so if you’re interested in that sort of thing it’s worth a read

Check it out

Look this up in the dictionary. I believe you'll find it under "Fucking awesome"

In my young mind, before games like Ninja Gaiden played around with more complex narratives, this was the most amazing story to be allowed to play. There is something to be said for simplicity and linearity that the early Castlevania titles exemplify:

As Simon Belmont stands outside the imposing gates of the castle courtyard, looking up at the dark castle looming ahead. This is his first opportunity to turn back. He passes through the eerily quiet courtyard, lit by a few lone torches. He reaches the entrance to the castle proper, and you, the player, make him walk inside. The gate slams shut behind him. The music kicks in. He is immediately assailed by panthers, bats and ghosts. Holy. Shit.

He fights his way to the end of the entrance hall, defeating a giant killer bat by throwing axes at it (you know you did). Then the gravity of his situation sets in.

Castle map from the Japanese manual

Linearity and the need to fight

The thing about Castlevania and the linear narrative that I like so much, is that once Belmont breaches the gate, there is no turning back. Every door slams behind him. He is being led inextricably towards the final confrontation with Dracula himself in the lonely peaking tower of the decrepit castle, and the path ahead is gruelling indeed. But he must fight. Simon has gone and gotten himself into this shit because it is what the Belmont family does. When Dracula reappears, the Belmonts must defeat him. That is what they are born for, it is what they do. Someone said every generation has to experience some sort of war, well, every generation of Belmont needs to experience some sort of Dracula.

As Castlevania titles and other games experimented more with freeform gameplay, the systemic complexity of the gameplay perhaps changed for the better, but as the impetus to fight became blurred. Since Castlevania became Metroidvania, the primary reason a Castlevania character fights is out of duty. There is no real gravity felt by the player. Just the battle, for the battle’s sake.

Other games “suffered” for me in this regard too. I’m not about to say nonlinearity is bad. I’m trying to say that linearity used well with purpose can offer the player a need to play that nonlinear games cannot. I’m not ashamed to say I haven’t completed a single Grand Theft Auto game, ever, though I’ve played them all and enjoyed them for their sandbox fun. Given such freedom, there simply isn’t enough need to go on.

So Simon goes to the castle, alone. First out of a sense of duty perhaps, but once that gate slams shut his path is clear. There is no turning back. There is no time to dilly dally around the place or “explore” or any of that crap. Either Simon dies, or Dracula dies. Death at the end. That’s all there is.

Belmont’s Revenge

For me, while the series linear form peaked with Super Castlevania IV on the SNES, my heart has always kept one peculiar little game hidden in a dark little oft-forgotten chamber. It is, ironically, the first truly non-linear Castlevania game, and it was the second Castlevania title on the Game Boy.

Belmont’s Revenge was special to me, because it had some of the best and most technically accomplished music ever put out on the Game Boy, which axiomatically means it’s some of the best chiptune work ever done. Symphony of the Night is often held up as the go-to Castlevania game for music, but I’ll take a single piece of Belmont’s Revenge soundtrack over the its entire mass of jazz-rock nonsense any day of the week.

Having played Castlevania: The Adventure, which was a middling but acceptable platformer with average written all over it, my hopes weren’t exactly high for Castlevania 2. To be met with such an onslaught of brilliant music took me completely by surprise, and became my driving force to keep playing the game. I’ve read stories of other kids loading the game up just to listen to the music, and I was one of them. I used to sit in the local park with my earphones in, playing the game not only because it was a lovely, gothic platformer, but because that music made me want to make music like it.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Belmont’s Revenge was one of the primary reasons I became a musician. To this day I can hear similarities between my own style and what this game taught me.

Low tech, bad ass

What needs to be understood about Game Boy music was that these guys had next to nothing to work with. Skipping the details, at it’s absolute most, a Game Boy can produce 4 simultaneous notes, which is barely enough for a power chord. Yet here these guys were looking at these capabilities and working out how to use tempo, arpeggios, psychoacoustic tricks and pure composition to produce works of blistering drive and energy, with structures right up there with classical music.

To contrast, the first and third Game Boy Castlevania titles never even approached this grandeur. Competent, but not much else.

Castlevania Adventure had a fairly good style exemplifying Konami’s bass-heavy arpeggio-laden chip music through the 80s and early 90s.

Castlevania Legends (Adventure 3).. I don’t even know what to say about this one. It’s primarily remixes of tunes from other games, and sound like someone violently rammed the MIDI files through some primitive cookie cutter to stuff it on the cart. It’s just disgraceful.

So.. Belmont’s Revenge:

What. The. Hell. You just didn’t go into a handheld title and expect something like that. You weren’t getting it from NES titles, or even PC games for the most part. Stuff with proper sampling capability didn’t commonly attempt this kind of stuff. To hear it blasting out of a tiny bit of gray plastic bent my mind apart.

New Messiah

Perhaps the best known track from Belmont’s Revenge is ‘New Messiah’, a high energy arpeggio-driven anthem piece that could not serve as a better backdrop for whipping the shit out of some burning eyeballs in a crystal castle.

While not my favorite, it’s only appropriate that when Konami decided to remake the Game Boy Castlevania titles in Castlevania Adventure Rebirth for the Wii, this was the one track they decided to take with them.

The dude behind this stuff is one Hidehiro Funauchi, and as game crediting wasn’t exactly given where it was due in the early days of the industry, tracking down his catalog is difficult. It pains me to think that such a talented artist can fade away into obscurity in such a way. Here’s a toast to H. Funauchi! You helped make me who I am!

Exploring Game Boy music further

If you’d like to explore Game Boy soundtracks further, I can not recommend Zophar’s domain enough. It’s just an amazing repository of music files and tools.

As a developer, I’m utterly blown away that this thing is running in the plugin as well as it is. It’s a massive feat in terms of engineering.

As a musician however, I find it absolutely infuriating to actually use, to the point where I literally can’t even grit my teeth and brute force my way through making something musical in it. I find it absurd that I am being offered such a suite of interesting and useful tools, yet interface choices and device design niggles consistently impede my progress.

I need to stress that I am a huge fan of the research and work being undertaken by these guys, and I think what they’re doing is absolutely integral to the future development of the Flash platform.

A little background.

I’ve been using various software sequencers for about 20 years, from ProTracker to Screamtracker, Emagic MicroLogic through Cubase, PlayerPro, Rebirth, Fasttracker 2, MadTracker, Modplug Tracker, Reason, Ableton Live and now most recently having landed firmly on Renoise. If there are any specific features of a sequencer I am after it is accuracy, speed and clarity, which so far has meant returning to trackers time and time again. In other words, I am partial to a keyboard-driven interface, and I don’t much like scrolling around a window to find what I’m after.

As for hardware and devices, I currently own and use a Korg R3 and Z1, a Nord Modular G2, a Nord Micro Modular, a Waldorf Blofeld and, oddly, a Theremin. I have been using VST plugins for about as long as they have existed, and I have used both PureData and Max MSP; I am used to cable spaghetti, both virtual and physical.

Musically, I’m much more of a “tinkerer”. I produce few tracks, but I experiment and create patches and loops near constantly. Over time, I’ve become very interested in synthesizer and sequencer UI.

Now, I’m well aware that the Audiotool is not intended to replace any of the above mentioned products. It is an educational community oriented tool that offers a sizable subset of synthesis and sample based functionality in the context of a modular “studio” environment. It opts for a “physical look and feel”, presumably to inspire play and lower the level of abstraction.

So take the following list of issues with a big pinch of salt; These are my personal geeky gripes, but I still feel i should get them out there.

Effect unit GUI design

This is my biggest gripe overall, and it may be the most personal; I have no idea why these devices have to take up this much screen real-estate, yet use so little of it on actual GUI, only to maintain a kind of pseudo-simulation of real world devices. Some devices are more guilty of this than others.

For instance, the Kobolt 16 channel mixer pulls it off just fine.

I’m of the personal faith that virtual knobs are a deadly UX sin, being much more in favor of sliders or even value input text boxes, but in the context of a device with this many controls, knobs actually allow for more GUI in less space. The device is obvious and well designed, it looks physical, and uses its real-estate effectively.

However the effects are where things start going downhill.

These things make me absolutely crazy. You look at that “effect pedal” and you think hey,  even if it’s a 150×256 area used to show a total of two knobs and a button, that’s not THAT bad is it?

This is a single effect chain for compressing, filtering, driving, low gaining and delaying a single drum instrument. Actually setting it up, connecting it and using it is no effort at all, but it takes up a chunk of workspace larger than a 16 channel mixer, and 60% of that lost space is just a row of big on/off toggle buttons. The pedal metaphor simply falls flat on its face here. Imagine having 8-9 of these chains in addition to your actual instrument devices. You are constantly scrolling around trying to orient yourself as to what goes where. The teensy tiny pixel text labels on the tiny knobs are like a slap in the face of UX conventions as well.

Suggestions:

• I strongly suggest ditching the antiquated pedal metaphor. Redesign the devices to sit more comfortably in a row, taking up only the space they absolutely require. Alternatively, introduce a Reason-style combinator unit.

Modularity and the Splitter device

At the heart of Audiotool is the user’s ability to connect devices through a series of inputs and outputs. Devices are placed on the “table” by drag and dropping instances from a bank. To get audio output from a device, it must be connected to the audio chain by way of cables, which are created by dragging from a port to another. This sort of setup is quite common, used in visual programming languages like PureData and Max MSP, but also in virtual modular synthesizers like Native Instruments’ Reaktor or the Nord Modular series of synthesizers. Compared to its peers, Audiotool’s implementation suffers tremendously.

Ports are categorized into inputs and outputs. Logically, an input can only have one source, and this is enforced. However, outputs are only allowed one connection, forcing you to set up a series of splitter/merger devices. These devices have idiosyncrasies of their own, for instance splitting an input into three outputs, specifically. So if you need 4, you need to chain one of those outputs into a new splitter. Each splitter takes up another chunk of screen space for seemingly no reason at all; I have yet to encounter an instance where I actually needed a complicated signal mixer for a split signal, and I’m not talking about Audiotool. I’m talking about every other modular system i have ever used. The Merger device is much, much more useful than the splitter, since an input can only logically take one source unless you do some kind of automatic mixing behind the scenes (which wouldn’t be cool from a UX pov, muddling the user’s expectation of what will happen). There is however no good reason why you can’t simply drag multiple cables from the same output to several inputs. The splitter device ends up becoming a huge speedbump I find myself forced to cross time and time again, contributing further to the screen clutter, and is probably the single biggest interface impediment to a quick modular workflow.

The beautiful thing about modularity is the playfulness it inspires. If it won’t cost you extra effort to make that extra connection and see what happens, why don’t you just go ahead and try it? Currently, the Splitter sits squarely in the way. There’s certainly a use for the functionality offered by the Splitter and Merger, but in my mind, having written rudimentary modular systems before, there is no good reason why you’d impede the user’s playfulness in this way. As it is, Auditool replicates the worst of real-life cable spaghetti. That’s a physicality I’d much rather leave in the past.

Suggestions:

• Allow multiple connections per output.

The layout grid

When you drag a device onto the workspace, a grid of sorts appears, allowing you quick and easy alignment of new devices. This is brilliant. However, the layout engine doesn’t allow you to drag and drop a device “between” existing devices, moving them to either side. Instead, you must move the devices apart manually, then move your new device in between. With the aforementioned considerable screen clutter, this quickly becomes an absolute nightmare.

Suggestions:

• If the current system makes this form of automagic difficult to implement, I suggest modifying the layout engine to use a looser spring constraint based layout where device bounds, weighed by size and using connections as additional springs, push against one another until there is no contact.

The Pulverisateur device

This thing is fantastic. It is, as I understand it, Andre Michelle’s first “real synth”, and it does a ton right, including often forgotten features like oscillator sync, optional keyboard tracking, audio input and a filter envelope with an interesting and powerful loop toggle. However, it can also be very difficult to use for anything precise. The biggest culprit is easily the LFO waveform knob. Since there is no pitch envelope generator (argh), if you want to use the Pulverisateur to create analog kick drums that go beyond the limited capabilities of the two supplied drum machines (more on the 808 later), tweaking the LFO to perform as you wish feels like a total crapshoot.

Suggestions:

• For morph knobs, allow clicking on the symbols to set the knob precisely to that value.
• Introduce a pitch envelope

The Beatbox 8 device

Less critical this, but I’m a TREMENDOUS 808 fanboy. This should have been my absolute favorite device. I have sat night after night working on an accurate 808 emulator patch on my Nord Modular, so BE IT if it consumes 99% capacity, and it is bloody hard to do, so I can see why this unit isn’t feature complete. The 808 is one of the dirtiest, grimiest drum machines around, and the first unit I drop on the Audiotool workspace. You drive this thing through a few effects, and every single instrument on it can be a monster. I implore you: Finish this device!. The lack of settings on some of the drums absolutely cripple it, and actually enforcing the If you want this to be a real 808 tribute, please include feature parity of some sort, especially on the kick drum and snare. The Beatbox 8 is a pale shadow of the 808, yet close enough to frustrate. To spend this much time on recreating the UI and sequencer, only to leave out integral drum part features is really cruel! Actually enforcing old flaws of the unit, such as the need to sacrifice the hand clap for maracas just adds insult to injury. There is no “lesser” drum on the 808, and denying users the full palette is.. Let’s just say there are unhappy kittens out there

Samples

I’ll be frank; I can not stand the samples on offer. I have made a huge effort to explore them, but it is utter sample-CD drivel. I’m sitting on harddrives worth of personal sample collections; Why am I not offered the ability to upload?

Suggestions:

• Offer users 100 megs worth of sample space or use local file paths. If copyright infringement is called into question, block the associated song or user, and allow users in the community to tag songs as questionable.

Summary

Audiotool team; As a musician I would love to make music and share it with others using your tool, but as it is, I feel my ambitions get truncated by the UI choices you have made. I can stomach a lot of odd choices, but the moment something stops me from doing what I want before I do the truffle shuffle it wrecks my inspiration.

Very much looking forward to your next version! You guys are champs.

The Enticer – Oblivion VS Rigormortis Live PA

My god, it makes me want to get back into hardcore. Give it another go. Every time i make another pass into what it’s become now i get more and more depressed by it, but listening to this still-fresh 4-year-old stuff we were up to makes me think there’s still hope

Regardless of the awkward format and the fact that the list has EVERYTHING including the really, really shit stuff, i hope someone will find some enjoyment in there. Watch the volume though!

A special notice. Jeroen of Zero71, and Aaron of Hardcore Crossbreed; I know i let you both down tremendously near the end, and i’m deeply ashamed at how poorly i handled things. I hope you understand that i was at somewhat of a musical critical point, where i literally was feeling pain at cranking the stuff out. It wasn’t fun, it didn’t feel good. Like a gangrenous leg, I needed to cut it off completely. I’m nothing but grateful for the support you showed me, and i hope you can forgive me.

For all its ridiculousness, these are seriously good news! I’ll sum up the tastiest bits gathered from the available info.

• Uses the faster DSi clock speed to effectively double the available synthesis. That’s 4 dual-osc synth parts and a ridiculous 8 drum sample channels.
• Even if you don’t have a DSi, DS-10+ will finally unlock the song sequencer nice and proper. Videos show performers tweaking parameters and making on-the-fly edits while the song is playing. Previously, the song sequencer was an either-or situation, meaning for the most part if you wanted to make music, you were stuck with rapidly toggling patterns manually OR tweaking parameters. Now you can sequence the track in its entirety and make parameter adjustments as it plays. Hello effective live performance!

To give an indication of what people can do with a dual DS-10 setup, have a gander at this rather nastily polished trance track.

Excited! Woo!

To begin with, there’s a dilemma at play here. On one hand, the DS-10 is a softsynth marketed as a true synthesizer, a tool for music production, and AQI have emphasized the difference between the DS-10 and music games time and time again. “This is not a toy” they say. “This is a synthesizer that happens to be running on the Nintendo DS”. On the other hand, this is a very limited synthesizer obviously aimed at entry-level practitioners, running on a game console. In addition it has few if any “professional” features, including a woefully limited sequencer.

So what do we review it as? A my-first-synthesizer to ease beginners into the sheer awesomeness of patching and playing a synthesizer, or as a real tool for making serious music? Much like AQI, i can’t seem to make up my mind, so i guess i’ll be reviewing it as both.

First impressions, a walk through the basic features
The DS-10 is a very sexy package. From the black, faux-brushed-metal case to the sheer black cartridge proudly carrying the Korg logo, it immediately commands a sense of awe. Booting it up, seeing the Korg logo flash by on a DS is a kind of crazy experience. It’s a seal of quality for a kind of gear far, far removed from Nintendo land. The presentation overall is minimalistic, with labeled square buttons on a gray background. This is not software that tries to impress you visually, but its clean and refined design impresses nonetheless. It is clear from the start that these guys mean business.

The first menu offers 4 options; Single play, Multi play, Data exchange and Options. Single play is where you’ll spend most of your time, Multi play sets up linked play between up to 4 DS consoles, Data exchange lets you transmit song data from one DS to another, and Options swaps between left and right handed control configurations, as well as several brightness settings. Tapping buttons is fast, accurate and responsive, something that remains true throughout the whole application.

Opening single play throws you into the song browser. The DS-10 can store up to 18 songs across 3 banks (labelled A through C). 3 song slots are dedicated to two demo songs and one “init” song that loads with default settings.

Opening a song slot faces you with the DS-10 workspace, where one screen contains a flow chart describing the signal path, as well as buttons linking to the editors for the various devices the signal will encounter along that path, as well as buttons for saving, setting the tempo, and other options affecting the song as a whole. The other screen contains whatever editor you have currently selected from the flow chart. The flow chart is always navigable with the face buttons or the d-pad, and the screens can be swapped by pressing a shoulder button or tapping an icon in the top left of the screen.

The signal path is quite simple (as expected), containing two emulated MS-20s and the DS-10 specific drumsynth, all of which pipe in parallel through a mixer device with a single assignable effect device.

Songs consist of 16 patterns, each of which can contain up to 16 measures of time in which to place notes, drum hits, knob tweaks and any other kind of data the DS-10 lets you record or explicitly set in one of the many editor windows. in addition, patterns on the DS-10 hold patch settings for both synthesizers (not the drums however), meaning you can have some really wild differences in sound from pattern to pattern.

A “blank” song isn’t quite blank when you first load it up. When you load an empty song, every pattern contains a 4-step “metronome” beat, with a kick drum every 4 measures and a single note from one of the two synthesizers. It’s ridiculously easy to begin playing around, and AQI have done an excellent job putting the most important features within immediate grasp.

The first touchscreen you’re faced with is the keyboard controller for Synth 1, and tapping the key produces an immediately satisfying saw wave tone with absolutely no latency whatsoever. This immediacy is integral to the pleasure of playing a synthesizer, and i literally breathed a sigh of relief when i heard it; Commands given the DS-10 are carried out instantly and accurately.

Quickly browsing the further editors for Synth 1, we see a matrix-style sequencer (for precise notes and adjustments), an x/y controller (for setting more than one property at a time in a quick and intuitive way), a synth edit window (with all the knobs for setting up the “static” sound of the synth) and a patch window (for setting up parameters that change dynamically over time rather than just when the note is played). This setup is naturally the same for both synths.

At the bottom we find the drum sequencer, a deceptively simple 4-track matrix sequencer using samples pre-generated with simplified versions of the synthesizers. In addition a 4-pad drum controller has been included, letting you trigger drums using 4 large finger-friendly buttons, triggering in sync with the tempo of the pattern is playing, which is a very nice touch.

Patterns are easily switched between on the pattern screen, with large buttons for every pattern, as well as the option to wait until the current pattern has played through before triggering your new selection, ensuring everything happens on time. This screen also has mute and solo buttons for every instrument, which is quite handy for doing ridiculously clicheed things like dropping out the kickdrum for a bit and then letting it back in, or soloing the bass synth.

It can’t really be understated how quick and easy it is to navigate the DS-10. It’s a very efficient setup perfectly suited to the device, buttons and knobs handle lovely, and the unit never really feels inadequate for hands-on purposes.

Overall, first impressions are incredibly good. This is an entry level virtual analog synthesizer running on a Nintendo DS. It’s almost too good to believe.

Working the knobs
Watching youtube clips of DS-10 users can be a depressive affair. The unit is a playground for jamming and making fun bleeps and boings, but apparently rarely sees use beyond that. Let’s be clear about one thing if any; You can produce monstrous sounds on this unit if you know what you’re doing.

The DS-10 synth engine has 2 voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs), each running one of four waveforms; noise, sawtooth, pulse or triangle. The absence of a sine means the triangle becomes the sub bass element of choice, whereas the pulse and sawtooth are excellent for kick drums and leads respectively. The noise oscillator mostly sees use when generating percussive sounds, though the oscillators can be pitch tuned independently (hello unison saw!) or duty cycle synced, and synchronizing a noise wave to something like a sawtooth can produce some very gnarly sounds. Cool.

Every synth has a single resonant voltage controlled filter (VCF), which can be set to either bandpass (let a subset of frequencies through), highpass (let high frequencies through) or lowpass (you get it by now).

A single ADSR envelope generator sits pretty on the far left, and it’s all the envelope you’ll ever need. Assignable both positively and negatively to almost any parameter you can think of, this is where you’ll get most of your dynamics from.

The voltage controlled amplifier (VCA) has few but handy options; a volume knob, a drive control and a toggle switch for the envelope generator. The sheer terror a resonant highpass filter coupled with the drive can inflict has to be heard to be believed!

The DS-10 lets you save your synth settings to one of 24 slots which carry over from song to song, and also comes with a selection of handy (though clicheed) presets to start you off.

An introduction to patching and CVs
The synth patch window, where you drag “cables” from outputs to inputs to add dynamics to a sound, is an area i’ve seen people bewildered in the past, so i’ll go through the basics of patching; On voltage controlled synthesizers, parameters could be controlled by, you guessed it, voltages.

It helps to think in simple mathematics. What happens when you multiply a number by 0? You get nothing. You multiply by 1? You get the original value. You multiply with something between those two, you get a percentage of the original value. Control voltages (CVs) are typically bipolar, meaning our “simplified” CV can be a number between -1 and 1, letting you invert the CV as well.

The DS-10 has a selection of CV outputs that can be connected to controller inputs. Most of these outputs are LFO (low frequency oscillator) outputs, and the DS-10 comes with 4 variants of LFO;

1. Triangle (goes up and down)
2. Sawtooth (starts at the top, drops down, then hops back up top)
3. Square (flips between high and low)
4. Sample&hold (randomly picks and holds a level, useful for those cheesy 70s computer noises).

When you patch an LFO output into something like the pitch input, the knob over that input works as a multiplier for that CV. The default zero position (centered) is 0, the far left is -1, the far right is 1. What this means is if you turn the knob to the far left, the pitch will be bent down hard as the CV approaches its peak, and bent up hard as the CV approaches its nadir. Turning the knob far right gives the opposite result. The starting offset for this modulation is wherever the pitch was to begin with.

All LFOs run in parallel, meaning they have the same starting point every oscillation. The frequency for the LFOs can be tweaked freely, or syncronized to the tempo/BPM of the song, in which case the LFO frequency knob works as a multiplier knob of the song tempo.

There are SO many ways to apply patching to create an interesting sound. The DS-10 patch window lets you patch the maddest things, such as the second oscillator output to the filter input. The simplest things work great too, such as adding a slight triangle LFO oscillation to the pitch for vibrato. In addition, as you’ve probably understood by now, patching stacks with knob tweaks, which really opens up for some fun realtime tweaking!

What about drums?
The MS-20 was apparently quite well known for it’s great percussive sounds. The DS-10 tries to give us a taste of that by offering what is essentially a drum sample generator. Drum sequences can be built with up to 4 different mono drum samples, none of which can be tweaked live. This can feel staggeringly limiting at first, but once you realize you can still control gates (how long each note lasts), panning, volume and pitch per note, you begin to realize just how much you can hack out of the drumsynth with a little creative programming. Far from limiting, i found the drum synth and sequencer among the most creatively inspiring elements of the DS-10. Sometimes knowing where the walls are makes it easier to place the furniture, if you know what i mean.

What’s this network play about then?
One DS-10 runs as master, other DS-10s run as slaves. What this means is that all slave DSes will run in sync with the tempo set by the master. I haven’t had the chance to really play around with this yet but i think a few dudes with DS-10s can put on a killer minimal techno set with a little practise. The facilities for tweaking parameters on the fly in pattern mode are that good.

How does it all sound then?
Quite good! In spite of the DS’ natural limitations (something comparable to 22khz sound) and the basic requirement of an external amp and great headphones, the DS-10 is a very capable synthesizer, and has quickly become my favorite way to pass time. Perfect for playing around when in transit, waiting or otherwise, the DS-10 is as close to a fast forward button for real life you’re likely to find these days. It’s simply awesome to have this kind of sound in such a small cheap package, available at any time. That the DS-10 uses next to no battery is another huge bonus. That’s the magic of music really; With tools like these you feel like the sky’s the limit. Which brings me to the next point…

What the hell were they thinking!?

The DS-10 is crippled. Straight up. For a piece of software ostensibly made for music, the facilities for actually making music are barely even there, viciously tearing the DS-10 from the pantheon of GODS and reducing it to something it set out specifically to avoid becoming; A toy. The problem can be summed up in a word: Sequencer.

The DS-10 offers 16 patterns per song. What this means is that your entire song is made up from 16 tiny bits of music put in varying order. It will take you mere moments to realize the 16 patterns simply isn’t enough to write a melody in, or even to create a real sense of structure to your song before it starts sounding repetitive. You can’t layer patterns, and most crucially, you can’t tweak them while in song mode. Switching between patterns manually is far too cumbersome, and as efficient as the interface is, actually hopping between tweaking a knob and back to the pattern screen to go to the next one is simply not a viable option.

It’s still possible to make songs on the DS-10, but your songs will invariably be incredibly limited, repetitive affairs. You will bash your head into the 16-pattern ceiling over and over again until you finally give up and start accepting that these are your options and what you have to deal with. However, unlike the limitations of the synthesizers, the limitations of the sequencer scream “i could’ve been fixed!” at you every time you run into them. There is simply no good reason there is only 16 patterns available. Even 32 patterns would have alleviated this problem tremendously. To put things into context, a typical Renoise song of mine uses something in excess of 70 patterns, and each one of my patterns has 64 steps. 16 patterns is just a joke, and i’d love to hear why AQI made this choice, because it has effectively denied me the ability to make real music on their software.

I just have to say this one more time; You can’t tweak knobs while in song mode. Who the hell thought this was a good idea?

What we have here, friends, is an awesome, AWESOME DS software package with killer sound and lots of headroom, and these guys have just gone and taken a big fat dump on their amazing product for what appears to be shits and giggles. It’s unforgivable, and so frustrating it almost makes me want to cry sometimes.

Overall
The DS-10 is a fantastic entry to the world of synthesizers. It’s quick and easy to learn, it sounds great, and it’s a perfect match for the Nintendo DS. It is, however, a complete joke as a sequencer; You’re so limited you can barely even afford a pattern for the ENDING of your track, much less a pattern for snare rolls or other such fun stuff. I recommend it to any and everyone. Just keep your ambitions in check, and know what you’re getting into.

Examples
Transit (MP3)

Kraftwerk- It’s more fun to compute (“remix” or whatever)

In spite of some minor (easily mended) sound issues and the wireless dropping out on us basically *precisely* when we needed it for the streaming, it was a total riot. My face still hurts from all the smiling.

Special thanks go to Blå, for being supportive, helpful and supplying a fantastic venue and crew, Fux and Benny Ill who volunteered to open with an utterly massive hiphop/baltimore club/electro/dubstep set, really nailing the kind of mood we wanted for the night. Thanks guys, you rule.

Only downside to it that i can find is that it only supports “songs” made up of 16 patterns à 16 steps. 256 steps does not a whole lot of music before you have to repeat something. Thankfully it’s pretty easy to tweak on the fly, and it’s better as a doodling/inspiration tool anyway. Just lots of fun to use.

I recently had to get a quick replacement for my faulty M-audio Trigger finger MIDI control surface, and the cheapest/nearest alternative was the Akai MPD24.

I haven’t used it so much yet, but first impressions are generally good. The hardware itself is weighty and solid, the pads, knobs and faders feel great, and the performance i used it for went down well. Now i’ve spent a day trying to get used to it, and the thing is just packed with poorly weighted design choices for a general purpose MIDI controller, and if you’re looking to buy this thing i think you’re entitled to hear about them

Aftertouch with no CC fallback
The vaunted aftertouch for a controller of this sort is a huge misstep. Typically you’ll use such a unit with a software sequencer or such and route midi from there. Midi CC, as supported by the Trigger finger, is easily the way to go. The fact of the matter is, you can’t use the pressure sensitivity of the MPD24 with any of Ableton Live’s effects, nor any other effects on any software that uses CCs for MIDI control mapping. This is a near fatal limitation for me, as the device is used primarily as an effects or DMX controller. The reliance on aftertouch, with no CC alternative, denies me the use of 16 potential controllers on the surface, leaving me with 16 digital switches in their place.

Control knobs with no physical limits
The knobs on the device have no physical limits, nor a center “groove”, not letting you check with a light tweak of the knob wether the knob is at an extreme or at a center. Having to actually look at the display to get the current value feels somewhat ridiculous.

“16 levels” mode is pointless
The device has a mode where hitting a switch will map the same pad to all 16 pads and divide their velocity maximum by their pad number. I’m curious as to what situation would require you to play the same note with velocities that precise (yet arbitrary). Particularly for drums!

4 pad bank buttons only alter pad nodes
You get 4 banks of settings to hotswap between during use. Except these don’t change CCs for sliders and knobs. Given that the aftertouch basically renders the pads useless for effects use, you’re left with 4 sets of 16 digital switches. Not bad if all you want are switches, but there are far better control surfaces available for that exact purpose.

Summary
The MPD24 is, i assume, awesome for whatever purpose the designers at Akai intended for it, but as a general purpose controller it’s got some crippling limitations. I just want to make any potential buyers aware of them before comitting; If M-audio’s drivers hadn’t sucked so bad, i’d actually recommend the Trigger finger.

listen to Piano Texture 3

It’s melancholy, lonely ambient on a level i haven’t heard in a long time. Simply numbered rather than titled, tracks 3 and 8 in particular put me in a place that makes me want to curl up and cry.

I often feel as though ambient music is the only genre that can truly transport us somewhere else, sometimes completely changing our state of mind in an instant. I tend to gravitate towards the harsher, darker side of it, but Sanfilippo’s work is gentle and moving, and should be listened to by anyone.

Another favorite for me, right next to Lucisferrato’s Ingermanland.

Listen to the Ultima Thule broadcast, check out the samples on his site, and if you enjoy it, please buy this album to support this brilliant musician.

If you’re not up to speed on this; watch this.

Done? Here’s Timbaland’s response.
“It’s from a videogame, idiot. Freakin’ jerks”
It’s around the 6 minute mark.
Not enough for you? Well.

from mtv news:

A European musician Tim is familiar with is, however, is the Finnish producer who accused him of stealing a beat (see “YouTube Clip Claims Timbaland Got Furtado Track From Finnish Dude”). Timbaland called the accusation “foolish.”

“It makes me laugh,” he said. “The part I don’t understand, the dude is trying to act like I went to his house and took it from his computer. I don’t know him from a can of paint. I’m 15 years deep. That’s how you attack a king? You attack moi? Come on, man. You got to come correct. You the laughing stock. People are like, ‘You can’t be serious.’ “

Great work man. Not only did you demonstrate complete ignorance about how the fuck copyright laws operate, but you showed complete disregard for the hard work of another musician, which makes you, by most standards accepted in western society as fact, a fucking asshole.

I used to have a great deal of respect for this producer, and that respect just became really hard to justify. I find it intensely satisfying that the first hit that pops up on youtube when you search for timbaland is evidence of plagiarism. Rock on.

There was a time, right after i felt the whole ID&T Thunderdome/Gabber thing was beginning to bore me, when i turned to breakcore. I’m not sure exactly how i got into it; probably through Ec8or, considering the Patric C connection to the gabber scene. Before breakcore became a household term, DHR was basically the easiest way to get at it, and for a while it was good, bullshit politics and all.
For a while i was making the most godawful amen-driven mashup garbage imaginable, and i thought Alec Empire was a god. Ironically, this album was what turned me away from DHR completely.

According to discogs.com, the album i’m writing about was released in 97, making me 15 at the time. I guess my slavering over DHR, which seemed at least to WANT something, can be explained away with puberty. However, this album and my long surviving love for it is something i’ll stand for anytime.

Purchased at Tower records, somewhere in london, at a time when i was going through some pretty rough times at home, Christoph de Babalon’s debut album, “If you’re into it, i’m out of it”, stands, in my opinion, as the single most mindblowing experience in terms of electronica that i can remember. It beats out listening to Arne Nordheim’s Warszawa when i was a kid, it beats out Klaus Schulze’s dune, even discovering Kraftwerk. All these artists, awesome as they are, don’t stand for any particular philosophical direction beyond their work. They never represented more for me than sound.

I listened to this album expecting breaks and distortion. What i got was the beautiful, haunting opening track Opium; 12 minutes of pads, strings and reversed bells, echoing on forever.
I listened through the whole album lying in my bed that night, start to finish, and not a single sound was disagreeable. It embodied everything i needed at the time; A frustrated yet melancholy *drive* forwards, in spite of the label that released it. Nothing else on DHR ever came close to matching the originality and artistry of this release. This album was never particularly dancable, moshable, or even headnod worthy. What carries through like a straight line right through it, is the will to combine an emotional core with a violent exterior.

The first real mindblower came with”What you call a life”, with its Charlie Manson samples underlying a simple, building amen breaks over melancholy pads, is something i listen to often, to this day. It went on to inspire most of my work from there on. It taught me that a piece of music doesn’t have to be all out in any direction. It can be multiple, separate entities all going their own paths, but coming together where it counts; in essence.

“What you call a life” is the single most inspiring piece of music i’ve heard, and you can hear its influence in almost everything i’ve done since then.

The second most amazing piece on the album, “Water”, was a darker, less emotional piece, mechanically pounding through complex patterns of amen breaks, super low pitched kicks, noise bursts and howling background ambience. The track has multiple directions at any time, making it pleasingly tough to hear whenever something begins or ends. “Water” taught me about messing with expectations, it taught me how to build into a break when you least expect it, cutting it off when it hurts the most, and how a simple evocative title can communicate more images to your listener’s mind than any number of samples or lyrics.

“If you’re into it, i’m out of it” is the most evocative breakcore record ever made, and at the time, there was nothing like it. Nothing.

To get your hands on the glorious soundtrack, simply make a copy of sounds.dat (located in your Defcon install directory), change it’s extension to .zip and extract its contents with winzip or winrar. The files are (logically) the largest ones in the archive, and they’re all high quality OGGs. If you want them on your iPod or somesuch, it’s pretty straightforward to transcode them from ogg to mp3 using winLAME for instance.

Thanks Introversion for a fantastic game AND a fantastic soundtrack. It’s kept me company at work for quite some time now

Some sweet spanish fetish-tinged electro/industrial for those that care. Not really work safe, some nudity involved. Ye have been warned. Defcheck out their tune Meskaylina. Very sweet roll to it.

http://www.renoise.com

Renoise 1.5 final has arrived, and it’s every bit as good as we were hoping. If you’re looking for a budget priced sequencer that kicks all kinds of balls, you’re set. Tres bon

www.outlet.no

or for a lovely lil shortcut to the good stuff:

Straightjacket EP-2005.rar