REASON:: Eric Persing, Creative Director at Spectrasonics, has informed me that licensed users of Spectrasonics libraries are allowed to use them in the 1.0.1 Reason Published Song format (RPS Files).

1.0.1 RPS files disable the audio export feature if any parameters are changed in the Reason document, and they cannot be opened in Reason version 1.0. The Sample copy protection is increased - to a degree, but ... well I don't have to mention the totally obvious flaw here - Even Phead, Dan E. told me - nothing is 100% unbreakable, but the encryption in Reason 1.0.1 is damn good.

Although it was not mentioned, I'm assuming Spectrasonics new policy DOES NOT INCLUDE PUBLICLY AVAILABLE REFILLS - Importing their samples and packing them into a ReFill for your personal use is probably cool, but posting these fills on the net would be a clear violatioin of their copyrights.

TXT:: I received this interesting email with the subject "Juno 106 vs. CZ 101, SJB 1985". Apparently my old old old friend Alex happened to install the demo of Reason and saw the my credits for my Reason Demo track. Alex and I grew up together and during that summer we used to jam on our keyboards along with his friend Nick. The Juno was my first keyboard and the CZ was his. Both are classics now :-) It was a nice suprise to hear from Alex again, since we've lost touch when our lives moved "geographically" in different directions. After all these years, our mutual interest in electronic music has crossed paths again!

Mr. Stamm (our teacher was extraordinarily supportive of our interest in science), Alex, and Me at the Exploratorium in San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts (early 80s) - not surprising, but we were tweaking knobs

Alex reminded me of an old track that I created with my first sampler, the Ensoniq Mirage. The track was a sample of my father farting. This brought back a lot of memories and I immediately went digging through my DAT archives for this old track. I found the DAT copy and did a transfer into Pro Tools then encoded it to MP3. So for anyone curious to hear this silly little piece, go right ahead. It's available for download:

The Fart Song [8bit Mix] Song Info

The fart ensemble was all sequenced in the Mirage's internal sequencer and If I remember correctly, Darryl Crumm (who managed the Keyboard dept at the San Jose Guitar Center) let me copy the simmons drum samples. I think that Darryl is now a keyboard management big wig down at the Hollywood Guitar Center... -- yet another person I've lost touch with.

ReFills:: P001 - Subtractor Patch ReFill is now available for download in the Reason Archive Page. It's a small file (160K) zipped for easy download:

Peff 001 - Subtractor Patches.rfl

It looks like Spongebrain has taken his Mellotron samples and produced a nice fill as well. It's available for download from his site:

www.spongebrain.co.uk

ReCycle 2:: I received the ReCycle! 2 package from Sweden today. To my surprise it included a cool little bonus gift: The Official Limited Edition ReCycle Mouse Companion! - A mousepad production from Propellerhead Software! Now the Ultimate Tool for Sample Grooves is that much cooler :)

ReFills:: The first ReFill is ready to go. I'll be posting it up in the next few days. The second available refill will probably be P003 - 303 Square Bass. Which is the multisampled TB-303 NN19 patch and samples. I'm considering adding a few user RNS files to the P002 so I'm waiting to hear back from a few people.

P003 - 303 Square Bass ReFill Demo

Other ReFills - if you haven't already heard - are available from:

AMG www.reasonrefills.com

www.sounddimension.com

ReWire:: My friend, Casey, has been trying to suck me into the world of Max/MSP by Cycling 74. The recently released version now has a ReWire object. I just downloaded the demo version of Max/MSP and started fooling around with it. Amazingly it works with Reason! There's a lot of potential here from Tempo Maps to outside custom crazy DSP which apparently will work seamlessly with Reason. I'm still a nubie to this stuff, but I think it's worth the effort to finally sit down and learn how to use it.

Props Stuff:: ReCycle 2 is launched! Stereo REX files are a Godsend for every Loop Manipulator out there. Use it with a Sampler or with the Dr:REX modules in Reason. Check out the Propellerheads site for more details.

ReFills:: I'm getting ready to post some ReFill archives. The first is a ton of the old Subtractor Patches from the 12/2000 archive along with a few more and a demo.rns file to give people an idea how the sounds can be used.

The second is the Visions Remix samples for reason users who want to remix this old track. P002 has some new RX2 loops and requires the Reason 1.0.1 update. Anyone who creates a remix, please drop me an e-mail for licensing instructions and let me know where we can hear your it. To hear what others have done with the samples and/or to download the samples yourself, visit the Visions Remix Page.

MP3 examples of the demo songs are available now:

P001 - Subtractor Patches Demo

P002 - Visions ReFill Demo

I will probably release P001 publicly soon. P002 will probably be released at the same time in a Newsletter. There might be bandwidth considerations since P002 is about 16megs.

TXT:: Spent the last couple of days hangin with my friend Casey. He's doing sound reinforcement engineering for some band... I don't envy anyone doing live sound. It's a merciless job with new surprises at every venue. Seen in the picture, he's the one carrying his Ti-Book in the backpack, setting up the rig for Nobukazu Takemura. Juan, the tour manager, (right of iBook) has a Pismo which suffered a fatal system death similar to my Ti.

I finally met Casey's brother, Matt - one of the sexiest people in the SF Bay Area (i kid you not) To the right of Matt is John, one of the most phenomenal drummers I have ever witnessed in my life! (again, I kid you not) Aside from being a phenomenal drummer and musician, he's a gear freak as well. Apparently during the trip through SF, John dropped into the drum machine museum and picked up a new MIDI/CV sequencer.

Nobukazu & Aki's performance was really amazing. They had video sprite animation running on a video projector off the Ti. There was some very very cool footage of Nobu's Buchla 100 modular system. Meanwhile he had a couple of pc laptops and the iBook generating the sound and dsp. They had a cute little animated character on the projection screen synchronized to vocoded voices (Macintalk voices, i believe)

I took Casey, Nobu & Aki down to Silicon Valley to visit Fry's Electronics in Sunnyvale - Casey freaked out. We drove over to Fallafel drive-in for some lunch, and afterwards we dropped into One Infinite Loop to visit the Apple Campus. Aki picked up a Griffin iMic for the iBook, and I picked up an Apple Swiss Army Cybertool - I had to after Case pointed out that it had a torx wrench for opening up the TiBook.

Back at the Fillmore, Tortoise really put on a fantastic show. This is one amazing group of musicians people who combine talent and technology with tradition to create something unique. I know John is fan of ReBirth and Reason :-)

So - Tortoise has a few more dates before they wrap up this tour. Make sure you go and catch them and Nobu and look Mouse on Mars, too: Fri, Jun 8th Los Angeles, Royce Hall UCLA (w/Nobukazu Takemura, Jet Black Crayon) Sat, Jun 9th San Diego, Cane's Ballroom (w/Nobukazu Takemura, Jet Black Crayon) Sun, Jun 10th Tempe, Nita's Hideaway (w/Nobukazu Takemura) Tue, Jun 12th Austin, Stubb's Bar BQ (w/Nobuakzu Takemura, Mouse on Mars, Vert) Wed, Jun 13th Houston, Numbers (w/Nobukazu Takemura, Mouse on Mars, Vert) Thu, Jun 14th New Orleans, Howling Wolf (w/Nobukazu Takemura, Mouse on Mars, Vert) Fri, Jun 15th Dallas, Gypsy Ballroom (w/Nobukazu Takemura, Vert) Sat, Jun 16th Lawrence, Granada Theatre (w/Nobukazu Takemura) Sun, Jun 17th St. Louis, Mississippi Nights (w/Nobukazu Takemura) Mon, Jun 18th Madison, Barrymore Theatre (wNobukazu Takemura) Tue, Jun 19th Chicago, The Metro (w/Nobukazu Takemura, Fred Anderson) Wed, Jun 20th Chicago, The Metro (w/Nobukazu Takemura, Bride of No No)

REASON:: - after all this I have a new MP3 available for download. This is another all reason track - kinda boring but definitely different from everything else i've posted. It's such a shame to use the samples from the Russian Masters library in such a weak way:

"BlackBird" Song Info

Thanks to those people who are testing out the ReFills. After I make the final tweaks and get responses from everyone who signed on to test, they will be ready for distribution. Naturally, subscribers will get the download links first and about a week afterwards, I will post the link publicly.

Music:: Hosting MP3's from MP3.com isn't quite as simple as it was in the beginning. Now they want to be paid for bandwidth when serving MP3s through sites outside of their own. Considering the number of bytes that they have pushed through the net, I can't say that I blame them for wanting compensation. Anyhoo, I've had to modify the the music page to conform with their new system.

I've created station pages in MP3.com and sorted my work accordingly on these stations. The original page is really slow to load, but the sub pages load really fast so it works better this way.

Meanwhile, I've posted up 3 files up there this weekend, however I beleive one is being scrutinized for Sample Clearance since it sounds like a ripoff of certain major artists - I guess reason sounds _that_ good. The other two tracks are available for a listen:

Eyes Inside [b-side] - the 12Meg RNS version

Sophistic [b-side] Info - Reason Not used. I really like the solo work i did on here

ReFills:: I have a couple of ReFills online now that are being tested - thanks guys. As soon as people give me the ok that it downloads properly and that there are no problems with the files, I'll make them available. One of the Fills is just the Subtractor Patch Archive from last december. The other ReFill is the TB-303 multisample archive. I've been working on an effect configuration to create a nasty distortion effect to compliment these samples.

Reason 1.0.1 & ReFill Packer:: are now available for download from the Propellerheads Website. Although, I had a few ReFills planned out, I've been a bit burnt out on the whole ordeal to finish them up for the release. One of them will be Analogue - Probably those TB-303 multisamples. In the meantime, I've decided to publish the Noesis.RPS to see what happens this time. There are no Spectrasonics Samples included in the song, but there are AMG samples. The download URL will be going out over the weekend through my newsletter.

I've got so many damn unfinished Reason Projects on my Hard Drives that I'm about to clean them out. In the next week, I will encode a few of the highlights and post them up. One track that I'm rather fond of sounds like a direct rip-off of Peter Gabriel's Passion, but it's all created in a Reason.

Propellerheads have invaded my home!:: Dan Engelbrecht was out in California last week for Apple's WWDC. Afterwards he dropped by for a little RnR and goat tending. Beta Testing for Reason 1.0.1 is pretty much finished since He and Marcus are on vacation this week. According to Dan, Reason 1.0.1 should be out any day now. Reason 1.0.1 is a maintenance update which fixes a few known bugs as well as as some improved song authoring protection features. Dan told me funny story about my bug reports and how I would probably be the only person in the world who would ever encounter some of the problems.

I told Dan, that I wanted to be compensated for a new Reset Button on my G4 Tower...I wore mine out from hitting it so often during freeze ups! Meanwhile, back at the ranch.... I had Dan consider the benefits of living a pastoral life coding in the hills with the goats. He also informed me about some cool things happening with MacOS X and Audio/MIDI. The bad part he noted is that they must "write applications for three platforms, now!"

More Beta Testing:: Daggan Stamenkovic (also from Stockholm, Sweden), invited me to help test out a new website called, PrimeSounds. For some strange reason, the site isn't working properly for me now. Well, i've downloaded a few loops and stuff from the site and found the sounds really useful.

This site offers downloadable license free samples, however the service is offered with a premium = It's a pay site (yeah i know---pay! boo!). There are a lot of drum loops available with intelligent search features to make finding the right sound easy. Basically you pay about 10 bucks and have access to download over a gig a month (i think - i can't seem to load the site right now to verify this).

One of the brilliant aspects of this concept is that the cost of maintaining an inventory of sample CDs is eliminated and the time required to release new sounds is dramatically decreased. Contemporary music has this bad habit of changing quite a bit on a quarterly basis, and by the time a Sample CD is published, the sounds on it are old. Delivery by the web will allow the consumers to fresh sounds without the wait for CD Manufacturing and Distribution

Buchla:: Sebastian Kuehnl, in Germany, is doing some research about Don Buchla, and Buchla Synthesizers. I have a smaller modular configuration of a Series 200 Music Easel. Don Buchla was ahead of his time. the Music Easel has a PC card slot where you could insert these "Patch" Cards. On the card you solder in resistors to create hard wired versions of sound patches. During a performance you could swap the cards in and out to quickly recall settings of favorite patches. Since I have a few unused original Patch Cards, I scanned them for posterity ----> Sebastian will be publishing his "Netfomentary" on the SynthMuseum Website.