Yes, Thanks to all of the people who came out to the events in Copenhagen, Rome, Nottingham, and London. It was great meeting everyone. Special thanks to the people at Luthman Scandinavia, MIDIWARE in Italy, and M-Audio in the UK for organizing the conferences, and the people of Artlab, The Saint Louis College of Music, Confetti Studios, and Access to Music for their hard work at each event. Of course, I’m extremely grateful to the Props for asking me to participate as a guest lecturer.

Normally I would have been a writing like a mad-man about the trip on this journal, but the lack of sleep, and in some cases, the lack of internet access made checking email as difficult. Fortunately, I did take quite a few notes and scribbled down a bit of what happened at each event. I’ve sent in these reports to the Props head office, and they should be posted up on the Producers Conference website:

theproducersconference.com

June is going to be an exciting month for Reason Users worldwide! The Propellerhead Software Crew has organized Producers Conferences scheduled in various cities in Europe as well as Tokyo! The schedules are packed with some outstanding artists who use Reason. You can find out more information about the events by visiting:

theproducersconference.com

I’ll be back in Europe in about a week to present at the dates in Copenhagen, Rome, Nottingham, and London. James Bernard and I will be traveling together during this tour, and we’ve planned a few days of respite in Rome to explore the city before heading to the UK. I’m looking forward to visiting Italy for the first time, and especially to meeting fellow Reason Users in all of the cities we’re visiting.

A new forum on the Virtual Instrument Magazine Website has been launched. Dubbed “The Composers’ Workshop”, this messageboard allows people to post a link to their MP3 files and receive honest feedback from other composers, as well as the forum moderator, respected guru of electronic music, Jim Aiken!

To quote Jim, “I’ve noticed that a lot of electronic composers (including myself) work in isolation in our studios. The Workshop is an opportunity for us to share our work with one another and offer support, suggestions, etc. It’s about the music, not the gear … and not primarily about the style or genre, either. I’m hoping to attract musicians from a wide variety of genres, because I feel we can all learn from one another. As the moderator, I’ll be trying to stimulate discussion and keep the threads from going too far afield.”

To find out more about participation, please visit Jim’s Site, MusicWords.net

or

Visit the Virtual Instrument Magazine Website - Composer’s Workshop Forum

The Propellerhead Software Producers Conference in Hollywood was yet another great event. It sold out with over 150 people attending, and users from the SF Bay Area trekked down to club King King on Hollywood Blvd. The program started at 10:00 in the morning - a decent hour - but people were arriving well before 9:00. We anticipated a crowd who would be into hip-hop, but there were people into a wide range of genres. The one facet we didn’t think about was the film and tv industry people who came. It was very cool mix of interests all related to Reason.

Despite a lack of sleep the night before, Rob Pointer and Dave Dolan were at the venue early setting up. Even though the venue has a sound system, they had to bring in their own Mackie rig for the conference. There always seems to be some kind of technical issue with these gigs, and the Producers Conference LA was no exception. We ended up using S-Video rather than VGA for the main projector. It was passable, but not quite as sharp as it could have been.

Chris Petti started off the schedule with a demonstration of ReWire into Ableton Live and exporting Reason songs as individually recorded tracks. He then went through and demonstrated using a variety of Line6 plug-ins to sweeten up his mix.

James Bernard followed up with a demonstration of his new Multi-Band Toolbox Refill. The Refill features a variety of BV512 based effects including some excellent chorusing modules and the phat parallel compression effect that produced some huge drum sounds. This is a free download from the Propellerhead Software website.

After sorting through some other technical problems, Richard Devine rounded off the morning schedule with his presentation on sound design and Reason. This was definitely one of the highlights of the day especially when he played some quicktime movies of commercials where he applied his sound design skills.

My session in the afternoon was not without it’s problems. I was dealing with micing issues. Eventually James came through and fixed me up with a better mic with a fresh battery. My presentation on Control Voltages and modular routing in Reason was based on Power Tools for Reason 3.0, but presented in a different manner for people who are unfamiliar with synth programming.

DJ Babu finished up the presentations with his excellent demo of using ReCycle to cut up samples and working them into Reason productions. The interesting part of Babu’s presentation was a discussion of sampling and royalties where he talked about some of the exorbitant fees paid for the rights to sample a track. Afterwards we were shooting the breeze and he told me about another project where the original artist started to comment on changes that should be made to a project produced with licensed samples. I told him that he should start working with live musicians and bands to get his own original material - support the hard working musical talent that’s out there!

Arabian Prince and Mocean Worker MC’d the afternoon listening session where attendees submitted their work for review by the panel, which included James. There were some really nice tracks presented including an excellent IDM piece from Quantum Anomaly. Eric from Chronic Productions, a music licensing company in LA, was in attendance and made several offers to people for production work based on what he heard!

As usual, I had a great time. It’s always a lot of fun meeting up with fellow Reason users, and I spoke with Kenny, who runs the MySpace Reason Users page about the idea of setting up a Los Angeles Reason Users Group for people who want to get together and talk shop. If this gets off the ground, I would probably make another trip down to hang out. For those of you who came and asked about Reason Workshops, GW and I will seriously consider taking our show on the road to the LA area. Please send me an email and I will keep you in the loop on when this happens.

Again, thanks to everyone who attended!

More photos are on my flickr gallery

On a side note, I spent Sunday cruising around downtown LA to visit a couple of museums. My first stop was the Japanese American National Museum and then the Geffen Museum of Contemporary Art. The current exhibition at the MOCA is titled “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution”, which features an amazing collection of work. I stumbled across a little installation with hand written notes from Pauline Oliveros from her composition, “To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe, In Recognition of Their Desperation”! It was cool to see these notes on the use of synthesizers, tuning of oscillators, and use of amplification.

For those who may have missed it, the final RB-303 Refill with skins by Hami is now available for download off of the Props Website. You can still download the old version from the refill page on this site, however, the latest version has a few new features including rhythmic polyphonic combi patches.

More information about the skins

More Information about the patches

I just wanted to send out a big Thank You to everyone who attended today’s Producers Conference in Hollywood. I’m about ready to pass out after the long day - unless of course James and Richard decide to come by and drag me out tonight. I was surprised at the great turnout of over 150 people.

I know there were probably a lot of unanswered questions, so please feel free to drop me an email at the usual kurt (at) peff (dot) com address.

Ok, I’m about ready to head down to LA for the Producers Conference Tomorrow. I’ve been working on my modular synthesis in Reason presentation this week. It’s still a bit rough around the edges and I’m still getting the hang of coordinating my presentation with the dialogue. A bit of anxiety always creeps up before these public engagements, but I think things will go pretty smoothly.

Please visit the props site for more information about the event:
http://www.propellerheads.se/procon/

I was tempted to post this on April 1, because it sounds pretty ridiculous. The following post is real - No foolin’, suckah! However, If you’re easily offended by graphic language, please don’t read this entry or follow the links.

seriously….

ok, you’ve been warned.

Eric Barbour is known for some pretty wild music electronics based on vacuum tubes, and the recent addition to his Metasonix catalog is the TM-7 Ultra Distortion Scrotum Smasher. Complete with controls like “Scrotum Up Ya Ass” and a “Double Scrotum” toggle switch to go from “Teabag” to “Blue Balls”.

So what the heck is this thing? To quote the creator, “The TM-7 is basically a mean, angry guitar preamp made of three vacuum tubes. Plus a feedback loop which makes the preamp unstable. There is nothing else like it. No, it does not sound like a Death By Audio pedal. No, it won’t make you sound like Steve Vai. It is unsuitable for 80s nostalgia cover bands, unless they like to do industrial versions of Duran Duran. Scrotum.”

The TM-7 can generate some very cool tube saturation when the “Smash” switch is engaged and the third tube is introduced into the circuit. The “Double Scrotum” switch controls a feedback loop which causes the unit to self-oscillate in a pretty horrible way that sounds like some kind of squealing animal. It’s a different kind of resonance that I personally wouldn’t use all the time, but toggling the feedback in and out results in some cool effects.

Even though the output of the TM-7 has been designed to work better with squalid-state devices, I found that running it into a transformer D.I. works better. I was getting some horribly uncontrollable clipping when running it straight into an audio interface, but running it through a St.Ives transformer (in a homemade passive d.i.), kept the levels fairly stable. The following clip is a little tweaking done with a TR-808 going into a Moog MF-101 into the TM-7 through the D.I.:

808+MF101+TM-7.mp3

For the past month or so, I’ve been helping my friend, Goh Nakamura, work on some stuff for his next album. Bear in mind that Goh and I are probably at the opposite ends of the musical spectrum. These days, my world is pretty much software and he’s an old school singer/songwriter troubadour, but we both have a bad case of gear lust. We set up a home studio rig in a living room at Goh’s place and I brought in a variety of Mics and Mic Pres and a Valve Compressor, and a couple of EQs so that we could capture a really nice sound of Goh’s singing and guitar playing. We eventually got the right sound after a bit of toying with sound treatment along with some Tube Traps.

Last week, Tim Bulkley was in town from New York for some gigs, and we ended up tracking Tim on several songs at Open Path Studio in San Jose. Since we had access to some nice vintage gear, including our REDD.47 pres, and a modified Altec (Len Page specs) I decided to see if we could get that ‘ringo’ sound on Tim’s drums. We ran a U47 FET on the kick, and a U87 on the mono overhead through the pre’s and managed to dial up a nice vintage mono drum sound.

As a backup, Lee, Open Path’s engineer, setup a standard stereo overhead and close mic setup to have some options down the road. We managed to knock out 6 tracks that day. The tracks are currently stewing and I haven’t had the chance to listen to them closely yet, but the initial rough mixes are starting to sound pretty good.

The last Reason Laptop JAM was bigger than expected which turned out to be a mixed blessing. It was great to have a large turnout, and surprising to see so many Reason users in the Silicon Valley area who were up for the challenge. We even had one fellow Reason user come out from way out in the Central Valley - Fresno! Special Thanks to Tony (Cubricon) for organizing the location at his school, Cogswell Polytechnical College in Sunnyvale.

It seemed like the first 90 minutes or so we were plagued by technical issues. Darrin W. and I both had recently acquired Novation Remote SL61 keyboards and could not get MIDI Sync running properly. Ed had a new MacBook Pro and couldn’t get his MIDI drivers working. Nick and Marc also had driver problems on their PCs, and the real kicker was troubleshooting MIDI to find out that I had plugged them into the wrong sockets. Such are the woes of dealing with electronic music and MIDI.

Eventually things were working right and we managed to get a few moments where things fell right into place. These are definitely learning experiences, and each event seems to get a bit more interesting.

You can see a few picts from the event and past events here:
Peff’s Laptop Jam Pics

Since the acquisition of Backbeat Books by the Hal Leonard Corporation, a few changes have been made and most of the first two chapters from Power Tools for Reason 3.0 are now available online for preview. Essential Shortcuts covers some of the main time saving features you can employ like learning Key Commands and File Management. Control Voltages is probably the most important chapter in the book since it covers the basics of understanding CV and Gate routing in Reason. I always suggest that people read through and do the projects in the Control Voltage Chapter and the Audio Routing Chapter first before attempting to jump ahead.

Preview PTR3 on Google Books

Search World Cat to find a Library that has PTR3

The San Francisco Bay Area Reason User Group is planning a Reason LaptopJAM on Saturday, March 3, 2007 from 6pm to 10pm or later. This session will be held in the South Bay in Sunnyvale.

This is a semi-private event. The location details are disclosed to Registered Reason Users who RSVP in advance. To receive an invitation and to be added to the group roster, please contact Ed Bauman.

EditEd4TV (at) yahoo (dot) com

More Information

Follow this link to read more about equipment needed and how the session is organized:

SFBARUG LaptopJAM

San Francisco Bay Area Reason User Group

SFBARUG

The SF Bay Area Reason User Group is a community of Reason enthusiasts who were originally acquainted through the Propellerhead Software Website forum.

In 2005, we started organizing dinners to meet up and chat about music software and audio technology periodically. This is the same thing we do over the internet, but with food and drinks rather than networks and servers.