Bolder Sounds Granular

Bolder Sounds Format : Akai S1000, Kurzweil K2***, Redbook Audio Review by: Clif Marsiglio Thursday, April 20, 2000 Are you looking for a truly unique sampling CD? I know, this is a quaint phrase that starts off most reviews (and several of my own) but I believe this actually fits in this case. Granular by Bolder Sounds is just this: Granular Synthesis. While an older and sometimes more academic type of synthesis, it just has not been fully explored by the mainstream. Touted by the more esoteric as the next big thing, its organic and almost natural sounding output is perfect for today's sounds. Granular Synthesis Explained: GS is the process of breaking up sounds into small chunks, the grains, and playing them back at various speeds and pitches in what's known as a Cloud. Within the Cloud, these grains are all overlapping and pseudorandomly interacting in ways that form new sounds that sound both otherworldly and natural at the same time. This is a complete oversimplification of the process, but you will need to hear it before you truly understand this. Stop on over at Bolder Sound's MP3 page for a few demos on this: http://www.boldersounds.com/granular.asp http://www.boldersounds.com/mp3.asp Bolder's Granular is based on audio created by Dennis Burns and processed through one (or more) of these programs: SuperCollider, Logic, Infinity, Sound Designer II, Sound Hack and Alchemy. The important ones, SuperCollider, a musical programming language in the vein of CSound, Sound Hack and Sound Designer are used for the main creation of these sounds. The Review As one would imagine, getting the sound you want is as much of a function of having the right input files as it is knowing how to process them. In conversations with Dennis Burns, he mentions this: "A great deal of time was spent 'making' the soundfiles first, that I would eventually run through Gran. Synthesis. A lot of those Modal Soundscapes were make by multitracking electric guitar volume swells in a certain modality, and then stretching the hell out of it so an 8 second soundfile lasts 45 seconds. A sound that I truly adore!" While the process sounds much easier than it actually is, it is a time consuming endeavor. To get a good minute of sound, you may spend hours on preparing input files that, depending on the tonal bandwidth, will give you one sound or another - and then hours 'pruning' and processing the output into usable chunks. In the same conversation with Dennis, he admitted there were thousands of hours put into the sound design aspect of this. Luckily enough for us, the sounds created are very usable and the only time you'll spend is the time it takes to load up the patches. These, in fact, are so usable, it kinda makes Granular Synthesis seem like something that anyone can do (Don't worry, I got a list of resources at the end so if ya wanna punish yourself, you can do so...). The disc is setup into several areas: Loops & Hits, Modal Soundscapes, Metallic, Pads, FXish, FM and Out There. Loops & Hits are 'drumish' loops that don't always play exactly how you'd expect them. Don't get me wrong, this is a good thing. They are perfect for experimental works, or layered onto standard drum tracks for adding grit and texture to otherwise sterile loops. Add a little or a lot, but you won't be disappointed. I especially love the loops that sound like there were some funky vocordish bits thrown in. Next is the Modal...these as noted, are all listed as the tonality outputted from Augmented to 'Desolate'… and all modalities between them. Metallic are very similar, but focusing on the metallic end of things...my favorite being Long Gong, a 30-some second evolving program sounding like a shimmery gong/cymbal that just won't stop. Pads, while being one of the smaller sections, isn't small on usability. To be honest, most of these sounds could be used as pads. Almost all sounds are 30+ seconds in length and I can almost guarantee that you won't ever get to the end of most of these sounds unless you play them all as pads. My three favorite sounds on this disc are in this section, Gnawing, a NiN’ish sounding pad based on processed samples of an Ebowed Guitar (or so I assume from the keymapping notes). Seabed, a sound that utilizes some of the best layering and VAST Programming on the disc - and Hymn, the perfect Organish sound. I must note that most of the VAST Programming done on this disc was Shane Etter's, more on that in a bit. The rest of the sounds, FXish, FM and Out There are more or less as noted. The FXish sounds are nice and I especially liked the Synclaverish and Smear, a piano based patch that sounds nothing like piano. Out There are the less harmonic sounds and are great for FX-based playing. FM are the Odd sounds on this disc, not being Granular in nature, but just as good as the rest of the disc. Pros and Cons The sounds are all quality in nature and very usable. Most sounds are far longer than most will actually use and I love this. I am so sick of sounds that cut off just as they are getting interesting. I love tweaking sounds off of discs, and usually end up finding some of the better textures towards the end of samples right where most end. What I didn't like: The sounds don't note across the whole keyboard. This is less of a problem if you are on a K2500 or K2600 as these have a bit better pinning capabilities. This is only a problem on the upper octave, though dang it, I play big chords like that. This register is easy enough to fix if this bothers you. See my notes below if you are interested. Also, these sounds lend themselves to being taken apart and relooped and revasted and all sorts of other things. Here I'm just being greedy. The disc is so full of usable sounds that they just lend themselves to exploration and reinterpretation. I seriously doubt that one could create all the possibilities that this disc allows for, and that's just from a programming point of view, not a musical one. As such, if you have this disc and wish to create new programs and edits (hey sometimes a half second loop can be as interesting as a 50 second texture), please send me the patches (ccmarsig@NOSPAMsonikmatter.com) and I will make sure that other users of this disc can access this library. Ok, I guess these are not as many complaints as they are wishes and desires, but a good product will always want you wishing for more and thinking in ways that you had never thought in the past. A musician will pick this up and immediately start playing. A programmer will be inspired to expand on the works presented here. I don't know what else one can ask for. For more information on the Granular CD-Rom: http://www.boldersounds.com/ http://www.boldersounds.com/granular.asp For more information of Granular Synthesis in General: Software used on this release: SuperCollider Soundhack Sound Designer Other: CSound - a free, mostly academic software for almost every platform out there. This software can do almost everything from granular synthesis to physical modeling. Granulab http://hem.passagen.se/rasmuse/Granny.html PC Based Software for realtime Granular Synthesis. Thonk http://www.audioease.com/Pages/Free/FreeMain.html Mac based Granular Synthesis with interface designed by Antiorp. There are only a few controls given for this software and once you hit generate, ya just wait for the output. Being one of the more interesting applications I've used, it was recently upgraded to include a dozen more algorithms. Grainwave3 http://nmol.com/users/mikeb/grainw.htm The premiere Mac application for real-time granular synthesis. More control than most other non-real time software. Pretty much the antithesis of Thonk. PC software called CHAOSYNTH http://www.sonicspot.com/chaosynth/chaosynth.html (plus info on granular synthesis) MAC software called MACPod 13 http://thirdmonk.com/ PC software called AUDIOMULCH http://www.audiomulch.com/ Granular Explained http://homepages.kcbbs.gen.nz/gordon/granular.html Good reference pages for Granular Synthesis. Thanks to Cowzar for the last few links, and to Dennis Burns for being patient while I asked him all sorts of 'stoopid' questions relating to his work, as well as everyone on the Kurzlist for their insight into Granular Synthesis. Postscript: Extending Upward Sample Ranges Extending a Sample Range: The K2500 introduced new software and hardware that allowed for a higher 'Pinning' of sounds so that you can play higher registers. On the K2000, the sound has almost a One Octave upward stretch for samples recorded at 44.1 kHz, as the Max Playrate is 96 kHz (I believe, though I can't seem to find my well-used manual tonight). Downward expansion, on the other hand, is nearly infinite. The 2500 introduced a hardware feature called Sample Skipping: The sound still pins at 96 kHz, but it overcomes this limitation by stepping down the sample to a lower rate before doubling or tripling it. In a sense, it allows you to stretch samples far beyond where they should be stretched. Many samples found within CD-ROMs and sample archives for the K2000 hit this limitation and if you are content to play the sound as intended, this ain't bad. You loose a bit of quality when stretching too far up and the 'realism' is lost, especially on synthetic sounds, as they tend to take qualities not associated with the original sample. How do you overcome these? Well let me just pull up my Kurz and we'll both find out. On the Granular Disc, I first load up HYMN, one of my more favorite sounds on the disc. It is an earthy organy sound, very tranquil, it also pins right above C5 so you loose some of the high end and are left with only a 3/4 of the keyboard to play with. Call up the sound and then hit Edit. This will take you into the program. From here you'll want to look at the keymapping. Keymap1:200*Tranquil PS-L1 Keymap2:201*Tranquil PS-R1 Doh! Its Stereo so you'll just have to do everything twice. Select Keymap1 and hit Edit. Here’s a shortcut you will probably want to remember for your own programming: I want to see what sample is assigned to D#5 the first pinned note. I hit Enter and then the Key. It will instant take you to the assigned key. Hitting Enter and then a Note or a Controller will give you a lot of shortcuts that are actually quite intuitive once you figure this out. It will speed things up quite a bit. Luckily enough, there is only one sample assigned to this range so this was actually unnecessary, so back to the topic as hand. You have the sample selected, click edit once again. You are now in the Sample Editor. Click Misc, and look around. Doh! The sample rate is at 44100Hz. Of course it’s going to pin if the root key is assigned to anything lower than C6, we can now attack this sound knowing what we gotta do. We need to drop this rate to something that the K2000 can understand and keep up with. Now simply click DSP and resample. Lets go to half the current rate: 22050 this will give us another octave to play with. You may want to select Quick 0 to try this out (it's the fastest) and always allow it to adjust the rate to match whatever loops you may have. I selected Quick 1, so I'm going to go make myself some dinner and I'll be back in a few minutes… Ok I'm back, other than the fact that my stricter vegetarian diet is getting on my nerves (my cat can eat meat and I gotta be living in hell. If you've never had a Tofu-Dog don't! And if you have, don't even kid yourself into thinking it tastes anything like the lips and snouts we are all used to in this bastardization of a bad traditional White Trash American dinner.) It sounds fine, though I lost a bit of the sheen off the samples. Are you short of memory? If so, and you don't mind the loss of high end on the original samples, save overtop of the old samples and you are finished (don't forget to do this with the other keymap as well). If you aren't short of sample space, find another sample location to save this in (I saved to 204) then hit done and then exit. This will take you back to the Keymap page. On the Key mapping page, you'll need to make a few minor adjustments: Reselect the original sample (200) for the original keymapping. Hit Assign, and then select the newer sample (204) You'll need to now select the new range you want this sample to occupy. Lower: D#5 Upper: D#6 (I only gave it enough 'wiggle room' to go an octave) You should now have ample room to play the extra octave and things should sound pretty good on all ranges. If you have a stereo keymapping, you will now need to do this on the other sample as well. Remember to save this to a Hard Drive, its not a hassle to do this once, but it is a pain in the ass to do it again.