So in the little spare time I have between work, preparing to move, and trying to finish a w-a-a-a-y overdue track with Tetramorph, I’m trying to prepare for an upgrade to Snow Leopard. Essentially this means checking lists to see if any key apps are incompatible, trolling for updates, and generally “tidying up” before upgrading.

Somewhere during those travels, Alchemy decided to stop working. Just “pffft!” Anytime I launched Logic or LIVE, BAM! instant crash out of the program and to the desktop. This had not happened before. I thought maybe it was the LOGIC9 install. (Nope. As it turns out, it happened in LOGIC8 too.) I updated to the latest version of Alchemy (a Release Candidate at that), but the same thing happened. I trashed preferences, rebuilt permissions, etc. Zilch. No luck.

So I searched online. Were others having this issue? It seemed not. Nary a peep of problems with LOGIC or LIVE. So I headed over to CamelAudio’s forum site over at KVR. I posted a question on the forum asking for help at 5:46 pm. 20 minutes later, Andy from CamelAudio responded with some suggestions. These didn’t work, so we went back and forth a bit. He suggested I send to him some log files, screenshots, etc.

Yet another Voice of Passion?

A couple of days ago I came across information on a small outfit called Tonehammer. From their site:

Tonehammer is owned by Academy Award Winning Composer, Troels Folmann and TEC Award Winning Sound Designer, Mike Peaslee. Tonehammer is specialized in creating unique- and powerful virtual instruments for feature, tv- and video games composers.

In particular I came across their latest product Forgotten Voices: Francesca. It’s damn good.

I don’t want to recreate information you can find on their site. Suffice to say that it’s a female vocal library of phrases arranged in categories that have names like Slow Chanting, Playful Chanting, Flute Singing, Lullaby, Powerful/Forte, Slow/Dark, etc. By adjusting the mod-wheel and pitch bend you can control sample start points and time-stretch/compress the phrases. There is also a bonus set of vocal ambiences that for me cinched the deal. Overall, the programming is quite evocative and usable and I really like those ambiances quite a bit.

According to Tonehammer:

The combination between sample off-set control and time-stretch/compression allows users to seamlessly morph different phrases together, which brings endless possibilities for creating new phrases.

Perhaps in theory. In practice, well, it takes practice to make the above happen. From the “happy mistakes” I made this weekend, I think there is promise.

FabFilter has released FabFilter Twin 2, the next version of its Twin synthesizer plug-in. Featuring more oscillators, ring modulation, a new delay effects section and extensive modulation possibilities it’s a heck of update to the original.

FFTwin2 has a beautiful interactive interface design...

A really great feature is the approach to the interface:

• First, only the elements actually used in the patch are represented in the interface. So if you are just using a single oscillator+filter+envelope in your sound, that’s all you will see. Add more elements and they will appear.
• Second, hovering over any element with your mouse shows a couple of parameters that you can change quickly by dragging the mouse. For example, hover over the filter icon and you can quickly change cutoff and resonance. Click on the filter icon and a panel slides away revealing more parameters to work with. Slick.
• Lastly, the lower half of the screen scrolls to reveal deeper editing options for various components in your modulation settings as you select them from a small horizontal list of elements. And setting up modulation could hardly be easier.

Sounds damn decent too......

Just released by DiscoDSP: Discovery Pro is a virtual analogue synthesizer featuring 12 oscillators (8 Virtual Analog + 4 Wave) with extensive sound design capabilities. It’s available for Windows and Mac as a VST and AU instrument. It features 4 layers, WAV and SoundFont (SF2) support, 2X oversampling/undersampling, built-in arpeggiator, sync, FM, 12 filter types, panning modulation, stereo delay and gate effects, graphic envelope modulation. And it imports Nord Lead 2 SysEx data.

It sounds pretty damn good. Check out some of the demos.

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More info on DiscoDSP DiscoveryPro is available here.

Run — don’t walk — over to the Camel Audio website to check out the Alchemy video overview and tutorials.

Wow. First Omnisphere, then this. Truly an embarrassment of riches…

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• Learn more about Alchemy here.
• Learn more about Omnisphere here.

Now for our Windows cousins too....

Obelisk is a spectral multi-effect that combines a Spectral Delay, a Spectral Filter and a Spectral Gate and gives you really interesting ways to interact with them.

I don’t use Windows for music stuff personally, but I do use Obelisk. If you are a Windows user and are at all interested head over to the ArtificialAudio site and check it out.

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• Previous blog entry on Obelisk and more detail can be found here.
• The Artificial Audio website can be found here.