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Sunday, 4 January 2004

Absynth makes the part grow longer ::

It was probably around Monday when I got to the synthesizer-free-jazz—no wait, this is a composition, it’s a “cadenza"—in the middle of this opus. I was stuck for sounds. Fortunately Native Instruments’ Absynth had arrived just before I left for Christmas, so I installed it and started exploring the factory sounds, which was a great distraction, lots of awesome stuff, but nothing was fitting. I’d have to find/make my own sound.

I was so disappointed that Absynth didn’t have a randomization function that I almost set about to decode its preset format and write one. Yes, I’m almost that crazy—understand, in January 1987 I was writing an editor/librarian for Opcode on a we’ll-pay-you-when-it-sells basis. Dave O flew me out to Palo Alto for two weeks before NAMM, during which time I added Patch Factory to what was then Patch Librarian 3.2 (later Galaxy), and suddenly it was Patch Librarian 4.0 and I had a new job. Anyhow, sanity ruled for the moment—I didn’t want to program an Absynth randomizer, I wanted to program a sound I could use.

I remembered one of my favorite DX7 lead sounds, a cross between a filtered reed and a sine wave, with a mushy attack, long release and just enough glide so that I can play ornamentations and get really nice pitch effects. I decided to dive in and program from scratch. I was quite pleasantly surprised to have made a quite decent replica of my DX sound in just an hour or so. Another couple of hours later, I had a second new Absynth patch, a bit like long slow, slightly distorted strings with some grungy modulation, and the cadenza was conquered.

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2004 > January

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