At last, February and its big bag full of suck has passed. To say that the month sucked a thousand magnificent donkeys would not be an overstatement.

To celebrate my return to blogdom, here’s something on the elaborate side for you, my loyal two readers.

About two weeks ago, I picked up the Jomox M-Resonator. I had been wanting to get an analog filter, since I did not have one about, and did have many digital filters already. I especially wanted something tabletop-sized and stereo to go with the MPC500 (pictured together above). I got mine from the fine folks at Analog Haven. Top service from the lot of them, highly recommended dealing with them.

The M-Resonator is cool, but isn’t perfect. It works very well as either a distortion box or a special effect. It doesn’t always have to make an over-the-top sound, as it can be subtle, but I find that a) it wasn’t really designed to be a simple, straightforward lowpass filter, and b) it can be tricky to get the same setting twice. Given the amount of knobs and the complexity of the feedback routing, I went in mostly expecting both of these conditions. They are only shortfalls in that it would be handy in some cases to move from simple to monstrous gradually, which isn’t the easiest thing to do with this, or rather, it can be easy, but in its simplest arrangement (a straightforward lowpass filter) the filter resonance can sound a little on the thin side.

One note on the build quality: the box itself is very sturdy, and the pots all seem like they’ll hold up, but the knob caps are pretty crappy. The place marker is a separate plastic piece placed inside the knob cap, and sadly seems prone to moving around independently from the knob. I’ve already had to dismantle and glue three of them in place. Not difficult to do, but annoying for new gear.

The envelope is very versatile as envelopes go (actually it has two envelopes doing some underlying voodoo). I do kind of wish it had an LFO. It’s not essential, since some the envelopes are pretty deep, but it would give you a means of getting sonic variety without resorting to moving knobs. Move them too much and the filter will go off on its own crazy little path.

Here are some sound clips to give you an idea of its sound:

Here’s a dry loop with some tablas.

Here’s an example of the filter being used subtly.

Here’s another reasonably low-key setting, gives you some nice envelope shaping capabilities.

Here’s some distortion.

Here’s some more distortion, screaming stylee.

The way the envelopes work, you can get all sorts of cool wavering effects with the filter. And you can kept some pretty huge bass sounds. However, it is often inclined to run off and play on its own, so with a lot of settings, you get a lot of this.

I’ve so far found that I like the sound of the filter best when set just on the cusp of extreme settings, since the feedback will move in and out of oscillation, and you can create some nice textural sounds. I had been playing around with it to see if I could come up with something to go in to the SIGHUP Machines series, but so far, I’ve come up short. It does have its own sound, but finding it outside of those dreadful Youtube demo cliches (watch me turn the thing on and randomly adjust every knob like I have no idea what each one does) might take a bit more time.

Here’s a somewhat unsuccessful attempt at a track emphasizing the filter. I don’t think I chose the right bed of sounds for it, so there’s an odd disconnect between what is on top and what lies underneath. But, as an experiment, it has some interesting things to say. It’s one live take playing the MPC through the filter.

SIGHUP – sketch #02

The track isn’t exactly my strongest effort, and highlights some of the difficulty I’ve had working the MPC into my style (i.e. lots of looped and droning sounds) since the MPC wasn’t exactly designed for sustained sounds. Which actually might be good for me in the long run, get me to using some new kinds of sounds.

Expect the M-Resonator to start showing up in my stuff more and more, already made heavy use of it on the first track of my next big project.

There’s a long held belief in the musical quarter of the interweb that the sounds used in sample-based hardware music instruments, like old sample-based drum machines and wavetable synths, are in fact protected by copyright.

It seems a bit of an obvious call to me that any raw PCM data contained in the EPROM of any of those machines is somehow protected under the law, in that I’m sure it’s illegal to rip that data and use it as the EPROM of another machine. But it is often said here and there on the web that just recording, sampling and redistributing/reusing those sounds as played by the machines is also illegal. Well, I want proof.

So please, please, please, could someone point me to actual legal evidence of such statements, like explicit mention in law or any legal precedent in which such laws were tested. I can find no precedent, nor any actual copyright statute that states such things explicitly. I know sample-based software manufacturers often have EULAs, but a license isn’t the same thing as copyright law. And I know lawyers from the mega-corps often send intimidating letters, but that isn’t the same thing either. And it has never been clear that those scary letters were threatening over copyright or trademark infringement.

So if my plea makes its way to any copyright law experts, please get in touch (the Intelligent Machinery forum is ideal, but my email address can be found over here) and let me know what is owned by whom.

I’m a sucker for gear documentaries. Doesn’t matter really how good they are. From the old Rock School series with Herbie Hancock to the CBC’s radio series The Wire, I’m just a sucker for them.

So with that in mind, here’s an 8-part series from the U.K. called “The Shape of Things that Hum.” I know nothing about it beyond that, except some fine fellow called Elektroid from KVR posted all of them to Google Video.

The series is good fun, even though, if you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself often wanting to punch several of the tossers they interview in the face, hard, particularly the two most irritatingly useless “music journalists” surely to ever walk the face of this planet (shouldn’t one actually have a fairly broad understanding of the history and practice of music before one calls oneself a music journalist? Based on these two living braindeads, clearly not).

No idea what the proper order is, but here are the links to each episode. As with all things copyright and Internet, watch them now before the lawyer dogs have at it and spoil everyone’s fun:

AKAI Sampler
Fairlight CMI
Roland TB-303
Roland TR-808
The Vocoder
Minimoog
Simmons Drums
Yamaha DX7

For non-Canadians, Brave New Waves was a late night radio show aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for 20+ years, and officially cancelled recently by the network. It was the only way in Canada for a long, long time to hear music that didn’t fit nicely into the generic commercial machine. There are thousands of people much like me who grew up with BNW, and it helped shape our tastes for and understanding of music immensely. Without hyperbole, the music I make as SIGHUP, and in fact the person I am today, would not be the same without Brave New Waves.

Sadly, CBC rarely exhibited confidence in the show. Always tucked away neatly after midnight, obscured by a station (CBC2) whose programming catered mostly to the bluehairs, and seemingly in re-runs for the better part of the last year and a half. There was talk that the CBC wanted to turn BNW’s time slot in to something resembling its CBC3 “we are trying to be hip” format, which ultimately would have meant more countdown crap with Jian Gomeshi (it looks now that the countdown crap with Jian will be on CBC1). Instead, CBC will be over-emphasizing its jazz programming (you know, the music of Canada) on CBC2 to appeal to that great “youth” market, the 35- to 50-somethings. Oh well, at least I hope they get the jazz stuff right (of course, they won’t – no free jazz, no 70s fusion, no Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Herbie Hancock, Leroy Jenkins, Eric Dolphy, Sun Ra, &c, which will also mean rarely anything made after 1955 and certainly nothing without a pleasant tune warmly approved by Wynton Marsalis).

The CBC is programmed by people who aren’t interested in the CBC. Just look at what they’ve done to its television network. And consider, for a bilingual nation, why are the French and English networks perfectly ghettoized from each other? Or for a nation as multi-cultural and cosmopolitan as ours, why is there nothing on the radio networks aimed at people who don’t count Europe as central to the ancestry? I’d be perfectly happy to see BNW go, if instead they were going to play nothing but dancehall, French hip hop and bhangra every night.

Some folk have called for an end to public broadcasting in Canada, but Brave New Waves is the perfect example of why public broadcasting is a good thing. It allows for music programming that caters to all tastes and perspectives held by Canadians, including those that aren’t always big money makers.

We just need to replace the CBC with an organization that is actually interested in serving the public. Brave New Waves also tells us that there was a time when the CBC took some chances but I think that time has passed. The organization is just overrun with people who view themselves as apart from the Canadian populace.

So, farewell, Brave New Waves, and thanks for all the tunes.

The good Hermann Seib (maker of the very useful VSTHost) has just released a PPG Wave simulator as a VST instrument.

Some folk might think upon seeing this that Waldorf got there first many moons ago, but what sets this one apart is that it is an actual emulation of the 6809 CPU, peripheral chipset and OS. It’s confusing as all get out, as it works exactly like the hardware, so if, like me, you have never actually used a Wave, then reading the documentation is a must. You can also use Hermann’s Waveterm emulator (in some way, a mystery to me still) to work in conjunction with the plugin for the complete (but, according to Hermann, unnecessary) experience.

Very cool, leads me to think that there ought to be more full-on OS/microcomputer emulations in VST form around. My vote goes for a Fairlight emulator. Click on the picture to take you there.