I met up with my friend, Goh Nakamura to give him a hand on a project he’s working on. It would be rather indecorous to reveal any details, but it’s quite an exciting opportunity for him. Goh helped me and John Hinson out with a demo track featured on REDD47.com. Since January when we recorded the tracks, I’ve been messing with the mix and editing the raw tracks into something a bit more polished than the demo track on the Revolution Recording Equipment site.

Goh was asked to submit a track for a compilation CD released by the Kearny Street Workshop, and he selected the version of ‘Surrogate Valentine’ that I produced. He gave me a copy of the CD, and I was surprised to hear that it was copied almost verbatim from the mastered file i delivered. Usually a track is tweaked and equalized to fit with the rest of the album, so i thought it would sound a bit different than the original.

No, i didn’t use Reason’s MClass effects. The rendered mix was imported into logic and processed through my old manley tube compressors which were tracked back digitally into logic pro. With all of the analog gear used to record and master the track, you can hear some noise in the background, but it gives the track a nice character.

I caught the last evening of the Propellerheads North America Tour at the Apple Store in San Jose. It was nice to meet up with Hayden again and see his presentation. Apple Stores are normally outfitted with a presentation area with a large projector and sound system, making these locations an ideal place to do product demos. Hayden told me that these were pretty painless gigs in terms of setup, since Apple provided just about everything.

I was quite impressed with the presentation. Two Hours seemed to sail right by with a lot of time was spent explaining the combinator as well as the other new features of R3. Pictured: Hayden is showing patches from Lizard’s FSB-01 Workstation Replacement Refill

Following the presentation, a few of us were chatting, and I met this one guy, Zolt, who is working on a Max/MSP patch for ReBirth. It’s an editor that will edit 303 patterns and send them to ReBirth as MIDI events. It was also nice to meet other Reason users and talk shop.

Afterwards, Hayden and I went to dinner along with a new acquaintance, Dan, who is out here for the holidays from Tennessee. As usual, when you get a group of music guys together talking about electronic music stuff, we overstayed our welcome at the restaurant and shut the place down

The final version of the Vintage RDK combi Refill is now available on the Propellerhead Software website. There were a few bugs in the Release Candidates which were fixed and a selection of over 40 REX Loops have been included in the archive.

Originally I planned to do a separate REX Loop only archive, but apparently this would have violated the license agreement for RDK. In other words, people cannot use the Reason Drum Kits refill in order to produce drum loops for sample libraries-commercial or otherwise. With their permission, I’ve been allowed to produce a number of loops which are all included in this one ReFill.

The Combinators are structured from the producer kit template included in the RDK2.0 Refill.

Vintage RDK Controls

PRESSURE controls the aux return input on the primary mixer which adds a compressed kick, tom and ambience signal back into the main mix creating a fuller low end.

TUBE PHASE CXL is tone control created using phase cancellation. The Aux 2 bus is routed through a scream 4 set to the Tube Distortion algorithm which induces a slight phase offset. Sweeping this control causes certain frequencies especially in the treble range to filter out.

AMB & VERB LVL controls the amount of ambience and reverb in the final mix.

FIDELITY CV primarily controls the gain of the high shelf eq on the MClass Equalizer. This control is driven by the Gain Reduction control voltage of the MClass Compressor and the optimum setting is around 63. The rotary control also modulates decay release, pitch bend, and PEQ-2 equalizer parameters which creates real-time variations based on the loudness of the mix.

BASS BOOST enables a low frequency parametric equalizer section on output MClass EQ.

TUBE BIAS switches the bias settings on the Scream 4 Distortion which induces the phase shift for the TUBE PHASE CXL control.

AMB & VERB MONO switches the stereo spread of the ambient microphone signals and the reverb outputs to mono.

SHELF EQ MOD enables the Hi Shelf EQ section modulated by the Fidelity CV control. Disabling this button will only switch off the high frequency contouring. The pitch bend, envelope, and PEQ-2 Equalizer modulation routings are not affected.

I finally received copies of Power Tools for Reason 3.0. What is it that people say? “Better late than never”!? — whatever. Anyways, thanks for everyones’ patience. I certainly hope that it’s worth the wait.

I’m fairly certain that I received these copies before the distributor, so it might be a few days before Amazon pre-orders are fulfilled. I may try to get copies available for direct sales if anyone simply needs a copy right away.

At first glance, it’s much thicker than the first edition - over 300 pages. The new cover image is pretty cool, especially with Hami’s combi skin spread across the little polygonal window. The CD-Rom envelope is improved, so there’s less of a chance of destroying the CD or the back cover. The layout is a little crammed in certain chapters, but the printing appears to be far superior than the first edition. The new illustrations look really clean with more detail.

Voila! Hami has sent me the combi skins and splash screen for Vintage RDK. He’s been working on creating a worn out interface GUI and I thought it would work perfectly for these combis.

Due to personal reasons, i’ve had very little time lately to work on stuff, and this project has been a way for me to blow off some steam at the end of the day. Things are progressing at a leisurely pace, but eventually it will get there.

The refill has gone through a few changes from the early beta version, including a few more REX loops and more example RNS files. It’s doubled in size, and looks great with the new skins.

I’m going to test it out again, over the next few days and do some final tweaks. If you have RDK and wish to test the release candidate you can download it here:

Peff 029 - Vintage RDK Combis.rfl RC2

* The File has been updated on 05.11.18

Delete any previous version of Vintage RDK if you downloaded the beta. If you happen to find some problems, please let me know. Thanks!

I’m close to finished with the Vintage RDK ReFill. Other than some customized skins for the combinators, it’s pretty much ready to go. Rather than create just a fill that relies on owning Reason Drum Kits 2.0, I’ve added a few REX loops created with the combinators along with the RNS files.

The end result of this project is exemplified in the VRDK REX.rns file in the ReFill. The idea was to use RDK2 to create my own breaks rather than rely upon the same old loops with questionable copyrights. Once processed with ReCycle, the loops are processed into a little dnb-ish sequence.

So if you don’t own RDK, the combinators are useless, but you can still use the 8 loops included in the ReFill. However, if you do own RDK, then you can use the combinators as well as the loops and loop creation song files.

I’m waiting to see if hami will come up with a skin for the combis, and for now the refill is still a beta:

Peff029-VRDKbeta.zip (Offline)

I’ve been working a set of combinator patches for RDK for a few weeks here that make use of the new NN-XT hierarchical structure used in the new RDK 2 (Reason Drum Kits v2.0) library from Propellerhead Software. RDK is great for adding the live drum feel to a production, but I wanted something different. I wanted a set of drums that I could manipulate to make drum loops that sound old school-like early 70s recordings.

Starting with the base RDK All microphone set ups, i’ve come up with a set of patches that use different combinations of drums and effect routings that are dynamically controlled with subtle pitch and envelope modulations to create timbral variety depending on the type of sequence being created. These patches are little more elaborate than simply processing the stereo mix through a Scream 4 and a filter.

I’ll be releasing an early version soon in a ReFill, but there might be a final version with a customized skin that aptly fits the concept of “Vintage RDK”

I’ve also posted a set of combis just for fun based on the BitSutra Malström patch i created for the FSB3.0. If you haven’t found them already on the combinator patch download page, you can give them a try here:

8-Fold_Bit_Sutra_Combis.zip

I’ve received a couple of emails asking about the old links pages. They were a little too much to maintain, and many sites had the horrible tendency to go bad after a year or two. Instead of having the old structure (as well as another effort to avoid using tables on the site), I’ve opted to go with bookmark and link communities as well as the wordpress blogroll feature. All of these can be found in the XFN List Navigation bar.

My blogroll (with the exception of a few) links to friends sites and usually includes people i know from the offline world. My ~digg page is a collection of general links and articles that I find interesting, while the ~del.icio.us page is filled with links to the sites listed on my old links page, complete with tag categories to identify relevant information about the link.

If you really want to find something on the old butchered page, you can follow this link:
Peff.com v3 Links Page

It’s like reunion month or something. I’ve been receiving emails and phone calls from old friends and it’s been nice to hear how people have been doing and what they’ve been up to-come to think of it, this entire year has been filled with these reunions. Yesterday, I met up with Ritchie Argue, known in the ReBirth World as Cipher - one of the old CC crew and maker of the Regulator mod hack. Knowing full well how much i hate unexpected guests, he (with my cousin, Tamiko, in tow) decided to make an unannounced visit.

Having never visited the house here, i gave him the full tour of the quaint little town of San Juan Bautista. We took a stroll down the main street, and over to the Mission. Then the three of us to a drive up to Fremont Peak State Park, where you can see the entire central coast region around Monterey Bay up to Santa Cruz.

I picked up a new power supply for my powerbook last week, since my older one seemed to be malfunctioning. My first thought was that the outlet was bad, but after testing it on two different outlets, I assumed it had died. So I purchased a replacement, and plugged it in (to the same socket) and it too did not function. I tried another outlet, and both the original and new supplies functioned properly. So I went to back to the apple store and they were happy to provide me with a refund, but i took the proceeds and picked up an iPod Nano. I got a white one… i know people say the black nano is cooler, but i like the classic apple design and color. Besides, the cables and earbuds are color coordinated for the whitepods. The size is one thing, but the bright color display is fantastic. I gave it the acid test yesterday when I went to the gym, and it’s nice that you don’t have to worry about munching a hard drive head while running. My only complaint is that it’s lacking a decent carrying case with a belt clip.

I also picked up an iSight for video conferencing. A few iSight equipped friends have been encouraging me to get one for several months, especially now that i have broadband. So I looked at it and figured, “eh… what the heck” I was thinking about trying to start up some kind of public conferencing of Reason users, and see what kind of resolution you could get, but it’s pretty miserable.

iSight connections are a bit odd, some people on AIM cannot connect to the video, and I had audio problems with the iSight connected to the G5 tower. I moved it to my old panther-powered G4 TiBook, and it worked better with the exception of the echo loop created from the proximity to the speakers. Using earphones fixed this.

It’s been a fun distraction talking to friends and family, but the camera lens is pretty slow and an f2.8 aperture is insufficient in low light situations. My first conference to my cousins was a fun little experiment. The little siblings crowded around the computer as i sent a live bootleg of Harry Potter to their machine. We caught up on the latest family gossip and they even read a bit of a Hardy Boys’ Mystery to me.

So. The good news is that we’ve finished going over the composites for the book. The bad news is that we had absolutely no time to do a thorough pass-through. I’ll apologize in advance for missed errors and such, but overall I think things look pretty good with Power Tools for Reason 3.0. Apparently the book is being indexed this week and will go to press early next week. It should be here by 2007, but with the way things have gone with this project, I wouldn’t be surprised if some catastrophe prevented it’s release.

It’s been a little frustrating, but what can you do? I think it’s time that I learn Quark or InDesign should I plan to do another title. In the idle months that have passed since we finished the manuscript, I could have probably learned to handle layout.

Again, my apologies to those who have placed their orders in advance, expecting to receive a copy in September.

The Props have released Reason Drum Kits version 2.0, a refill sample library for Reason 3.0. For those who are not aware of what RDK is or does, it’s basically a massive sampled drum kit library with many velocity layers for dramatic and lively rhythm sequencing. These are not loops, they are straight samples. But they are more than just samples, they are what the props are calling “hypersampled” drums. When you mic up a drum kit, you use several close-up mics, overhead mics, and room mics which are mixed into a complete drum sound. In most cases with sample libraries, all of these signals are mixed and delivered as stereo sample files. With RDK, each of these signals are directed to separate audio output jacks on the NN-XT, and you can mix them to fit with a production.

For those who have RDK 1.0, you are going to love the combinator patches in RDK 2.0. Instead of having combinations of drums fixed into single patches, each set is loaded into separate NN-XT samplers. If you want to change the kick drum, all you do is load a specific kick drum patch while the snares, hats, cymbals, etc. remain the same.

Bundled with the refill are some very nice preset combinator patches created by serious RDK abusers called “Producer Kits” where eq, reverb, and compression settings are preset and ready to go. Having everything organized into combinators now makes RDK a breeze to use, and dozens of MIDI sequence files are included to quickly create drum grooves along with the custom kit.

The Propellerhead Website has a cool little Video infomercial that demonstrates these features, as well as example audio files. The video even features a new way to use your old copy of Power Tools for Reason 2.5: as a mouse pad! Clever idea, indeed