chris caines

The wealth of music making apps being launched all around the place for the iPad this week has reminded me to post the next in my most beloved apps series. This one being about songwriting tools, I’m not talking about actual audio creation tools or instruments, but more tools for coming up with chord progression ideas. The best of these is called ProChords and whichever starting chord you choose to begin with it gives you a series of chord choices to continue with based on a huge song database ranging from the most common to least common following chords from your starting point.

You can then save combinations and sequences for refining later on the keyboard or fretboard of your choice. Unfortunately all of the samples used to play the chords are of big acoustic piano sounds so it can feel like you are writing a 90s house anthem. Nonetheless it is a great way to tinker around with sequences you might not come up with otherwise. Simple Songwriter uses the same idea but restricted to a smaller pool of chords, the LE version is however free.

The only instrument I have enough fluency on to then start fleshing something out is the guitar, and I’ve found this Chordmaster app invaluable as a chord lookup dictionary. Again there is a free LE version, I eventually moved on to the pay one for the wide range of different voicings up and down the fretboard for trying out the progressions I’d made.

I’ve only had an iPhone now for a month, but already other computing devices I own are gathering dust and it has cemented itself so completely into my day to day I fear the time is coming when I will inevitably drop it into the ocean from a moving ferry. I was an early adopter of smartphones as they were called back in the early windows mobile days, but of course the difference is the apps. In the interest of sharing navigation tips through the dark forest of the app store, here begins an occasional series on little programs I’ve found useful, addictive or fun.

First category: Traffic apps.

Sydney teeters on the edge of traffic chaos most days and knowing there is a breakdown or accident on your route is the type of foreknowledge you want to have. Snarl pulls data from the RTA website about reported incidents and combined with the traffic overlay on google maps it will usually prove useful, if it also gave info about roadworks & closures it would be hard to beat.

Just to make sure before you leave the house or office, look through the relevant traffic cameras just to be certain the reports aren’t lagging with SydTraffic.

There is one of these Doepfer analogue synth modules in the studio at work, used for teaching synthesis concepts. I’d been meaning to learn how to use it and play around with it for ages but didn’t do it till just recently. I think for the first time after years of using virtual analogue and various types of hybrid sample sound devices I really began to understand the practical basics of designing sounds this way and I can understand how it can get pretty addictive. Firstly, compared to software it feels quite out of control and you can never save anything so unless you record as you go (or are willing to document patches) its all pretty in the moment. Secondly, it’s quite a lot of fun. I spent a few hours burbling away with it the other night, forgetting all worldly cares. The Doepfer is quite cool and germanic sounding, a cliche I know but I even thinks its true of Native Instruments products, compared to the only other analog synth I’ve ever played (a Moog).

Unfortunately I can’t drag it home to my studio, so back on the software instrument trail I’ve found something very similar.

Somehow Fab Filter Twin 2 pictured above here captures that weird fragile instability, that feeling that you are playing with modulated electric current that is more the attraction of the real thing than the sound for me.

I’m doing a fair bit of sound design work recently, mostly soundtracking for some longish sound driven video pieces I’ve had percolating for a while and recently I’m very excited to be re-discovering the joys of the sampler. What I do sound design wise has been formed by the sampler as a tool/instrument to a large extent, when I first began experimenting with types of non-linear sequencing with tools like M.

I was working at ANU and in the wonderful studio at ACAT they had an early Akai S900 & I spent a lot of time squinting at the two line display finding loop points.

The last few years I’ve been much more into synthesis (especially on playing with things like this) and re-discovering sequencing through the wonderful Nodal developed by the Centre for Electronic Media Art at Monash.

And along the way I somehow lost touch with the simple joys of the sampler. Of just recording something in the world, mapping it across a keyboard and playing it. And so I’ve been spending most of my “sound time” recently in Kontakt, playing along to the images the projector throws onto my studio wall.

If you do get into Kontakt, don’t miss the Vimeo tutes from the Create Digital people, like this one with a great downloadable musicbox sample set at the original post.

Music-boxing in NI Kontakt from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

I love bits of gear & software that you can work with like an instrument. By that I mean, fluidly and fast and where time spent honing some proficiency and familiarity is repaid with more interesting and unique results. Aside from the sort of relationship you can have with a video or stills camera you use over a long period this isn’t a common way of working in film or video. Editing software and compositing, animation and effects packages lean toward a complex detail oriented non realtime workflow that while it can of course be engrossing, doesn’t lead to the sort of play you can experience with a softsynth or something like Ableton Live.

When I started out making video one of the tools I had was a Fairlight Computer Video Instrument, the much much cheaper visual partner to the famous pioneering CMI sampling keyboard. What was most amazing about the CVI was that it really was an instrument, the tactile sliders and buttons allowed for live play with digital video in ways that haven’t been equaled till recent  years.

While most of the presets were cheesy as hell, the synthesis model it was based on meant you could develop your own patches and save them to memory. And if you were like me, then laying the treatments out to tape, layering them up later in expensive online suites. While the sampling inspired by the CMI of course became foundational to modern sound and music production, live video instrumentation and manipulation as a performance or compositional tool has only slowly developed in response to the rise of VJ culture in clubs and in live music. There are now a range of decent software tools and importantly control surfaces like this nanoKontrol (note the similarities to the CVI surface) are becoming widespread amongst the live visuals fraternity.

While live visualism is certainly diversifying into live cinema, the architectural and harking back to ideas of expanded cinema, the tools and techniques still fall into the domain of the eye candy techno Vj style aesthetics that completely dominated not so long ago. One thing holding back integration into more established (and high resolution) video workflows is the lack of recording options in many of the key software packages, the emphasis is all on the moment. While in some ways this is laudable, it is also a stumbling block for allowing live visual “playing” to become part of the process of image generation workflow for high resolution video and for the sort of visuals unable to be generated in realtime. This is only partly about the computer speeds & video hardware improvements required, it is most importantly about recognising what this sort of instrumental play brings to moving image practice in general, both how we produce and read video.

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This is more what I meant, continuous motor drive mode on a Dslr smeared together. In other production process news it turns out that there is a 2GB file size limit on working in filmstrip animation mode in Photoshop even in CS4. I’ve gone back to filmstrip format recently because I like being able to paint big wodges of brush stamps across frames with the wacom. I’m sure the limit was always there, but I didn’t notice working at SD res, at HD 2GB of filmstrip is only around 8 seconds.

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I’m spending a lot of time (well machine time at least) rendering things that aren’t turning out looking like I thought they might. The shot from the previous post for example was very underwhelming, but I’ve discovered something interesting about multi-machine network rendering in After Effects this afternoon while doing this particle displacement test (above) which also didn’t get me very far, though I’m sure after a few more tries I can get something useful with it.

The thing I discovered was that while the multimachine thing can save you a lot of time its not very effective with renders where time per frame is pretty short. The clip above took around 8secs per frame on most of my little three computer farm. That meant however that as soon as the fastest computer (a newish iMac) got into the lead the other two computer spend all of their time skipping frames in it’s wake and not actually doing any rendering. Perhaps this is more a question of why the skip frame process (where program looks at the folder, sees what has been rendered and skips to the next one) is so slow. One computer is connected via gigabit ethernet and the other via wifi, but it seems to make no difference.

I’m not sure if this shot is going to work anyway, but I’m keen to get the process worked out. I set up a little render farm last night of 2 iMacs and a macbook all working on this 2 minute shot above, which has a lot of timebased processing going on. Nevertheless I was surprised by the time it was taking & when I looked closer it seems none of the computers were using both of the two cpu cores they have. Much hair pulling later it appears that having Auto Levels in the effect queue turns Multiprocessing off. Appears to be mentioned nowhere on the interweb except here. Sure enough take that little thing out of the list and cpu dials go back up to 11.

Started using Twitter a few days back & enjoying it so far. Updates down the sidebar there or directly via my twitter page. Like being able to txt to it & in turn to here.

We came back across on the ferry last night trying out the new XDCAM EX3 all the way, which I’m very impressed with. On getting home moving the footage into Final Cut was less than straightforward. Turns out apart from the latest version of FCP (6.05 which I had) you also need a variety of software addons from Sony to get it to work. None too clear from any of the included docs or from anything other than deeply forensic googling for that matter. The real bits and pieces required are listed here. I was filled with dread at the thought of installing Sony driver software which is usually made, as they say, of fail. My fears were misplaced however and the files transferred flawlessly.

Footage below is originally HD at 25p. I’ve slowed it to 50% and crushed the blacks slightly in FCP before running it through the FLV compressor. I’m keen to try the overcranking to 50p that the camera will do if you shoot at 720 rather than 1080.

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I’ll admit I’m not the best archivist. I try in my own shambolic fashion, but it hasn’t been easy. Until ( at the risk of sounding like my soul has been sold to Cupertino ) Time Machine appeared with the most recent version of OS X. I’ve recently rebuilt my home studio adding a new iMac to make two, one as the main production machine and the other as the render engine/photo wrangler.

I’ve now got the main computer with its terabyte external disk and the second mac all backing up automatically to the 2 terabyte disk connected to the second machine. This all happenning over ethernet after wifi proved too slow. Frantic googling led me to think I’d have to be doing some terminal scripting to get the remote disk backup going, but it proved as simple as logging on to the disk as a server and then Time Machine would allow it to act as a backup disk.

Now it would be nice to get network rendering going for after effects, tomorrow perhaps.

Mitchell put me onto Ponoko, an online fabrication/laser cutting service.