TXT:: Happy Independance Day Weekend. Actually it's been a rather patriotic week for me. Last monday, I attended the Panetta Institute lecture with honored Guest, Rudolph Giuliani, former Mayor of New York City. It was very interesting hearing stories of the 11 September tradgedy from the former Mayor that were overlooked by major media coverage. Also speaking was Richard Grasso, head of the New York Stock Exchange. He also shared some interesting stories from last september, however I was a bit disappointed with his rhetorical comments about the current situation with Corporate Ethics and accountability. Mr. Grasso stated that corporate executives should be held accountable for deceptive actions, however he never commented on

Anyone need Harley-Davidson engine samples? Every year on Independence Day Weekend, they have an annual biker Rally in Hollister, CA -- pretty close to my house. I dropped by the rally for a few hours yesterday to check out the noise. There were thosands of motorcycles parked up and down main street. The police were in full force because of fears of a possible gang war, but fortunately there were no incidents of violence. There were some beautiful machines, but I fell in love with the Harley-Davidson V-Rod--It matches a Titanium PowerBook :-)

TXT:: Before I forget, I want to clarify something about the very generous gift the merkle brothers sent me, The SoundArt Chameleon. Apparently there's some confusion about the device and my comments earlier may be somewhat misleading, and I apologize for the mix up. The Chameleon Software Development Kit and support software is only for Windows based systems, however the device itself is a stand alone unit and "operates" without a computer. It has audio inputs/outputs and midi connections as well as a serial port for interfacing with a PC. You can load patches from any sequencer that supports SYSEX dumps, however you can only create patches using a windows machine. The device is in it's early stages of development, and I really encourage sound-art to develop a mac os based programming environment.

ReFills:: The Super Subz refill is now available from the main Reason Archive as well as the Malström Patches Refill. The Malstrom Patches include a variety of sounds from "Acoustic Wannabes" to "Weird Solo synths". The patches are categorized in folders however for the convenience of browsing, a duplicate set of patches is placed in the "All Patches" folder with a three letter abbreviation suffixed to the patch name. Also include in the Malström Patch fill is a set of drum samples created using the malstrom, then rendered and imported into ReDrum. This seems bit overkill, but the CPU overhead from a Redrum is a lot less than setting up 10 different Malström synths.

In the works is a huge Rhodes Electric Piano Refill for the NN-XT. I'm not exactly sure how i will present this one. It might be two fills or one large one. It started with about 800megs of 24bit samples from the Rhodes that i recorded this past weekend. One channel is recorded from the output from the amplifier jack on the speaker cabinet in to my ADL stereo Tube D.I., while the other channel was mic'd up with an SM57 on one of the cones. To minimize phase and stuff, I disconnected three of the speakers in the cabinet. The D.I. and the SM57 were connected to the apogee Trak2 which has a really clean mic-pre. The Digital output was connected to an AP2496 S/PDIF input and I recorded the Rhodes into MacOS X using Peak 3.01r1. There were some problems with clock drop outs. Probably due to driver problems.

I ended up recording the samples at 44.1khz. Editing down the samples has been the task at hand and figuring out an effect velocity cross fading scheme has also been tricky. In an effort to minimize the size of the refill, I downsampled the audio to 16bits. The idea is that you can access either the D.I. Recording or the SM57 Sample by connecting the the Left or Right outputs of the NNXT. This is a little idea i drew on from Eric Persig's new Spectrasonics instruments. He did this with the bass instrument and the results are great. The D.I. sounds clean and you can hear a lot of the pickup harmonics while the mic sounds a bit gritty and noisy with a bit of ground noise.

The D.I. samples work great if you run the output through a phaser module for that phaser rhodes piano sound, however the SM57 samples are better if you want to add LFO modulation of the output amplifier for the classic rhodes tremolo effect.

Because the fill is so big, i may decide to break it down into two refills. I will probably still make the 24bit version since the work files are all in 24bit, however the source files total to about 350 megs and the refill packs to about 130Megs. The 16bit version is only a 40 meg ReFill but it will still require about 200megs of free ram to load all of the samples.

Before you get your hopes up, the sampled version does not sound exactly like the original. The synthesized rhodes emulators probably sound better because they take into consideration the effect of overtones generated on neighboring pickups and tonebars. However because i've sampled several different dynamics ranges, it is pretty effective for playing simple stuff to go from a mellow sound to a gritty and sometimes distorting hammer hit.

ReFills:: So You've got your copy of Reason 2.0 and now you want some stuff to use with it. I've been busy making a some stuff for Reason 2, and one of the projects is my first Reason 2 ReFill containing a bunch of Malstrom Patches as well as a few other Malstrom surprises.

Since I'm playing catch-up with other stuff, I'm just going to make the file available from the link below:

Peff 017 - Malstrom Patches.RFL

Also, I just sent out the e-mail with the Reason Archive download page update. All of those fills without links are now available for download. Please, check your e-mail for the URL.

Reason 2.0:: Is Shipping! Propellerheads Software has announced that the long waited update to Reason is now Shipping. Featuring a lot of new cool stuff like the split sequencer window, the new NN-XT sampler and Malström Synthesizer.

If you're a Reason 1.0.1 user, then you will definitely want the upgrade. More information is available on the Propellerheads Website.

ReFills:: I've made the Prophet 5 Bass Refill available on the reason archive. This Fill features a variety of SMP files which use 3 octaves of analog multisamples. This fill is really versatile especially if you're looking for that distinctly analog synth sound with some chubby character.

Also, there is a new refill packer for Version 2, and I will be switching over and making R2 fills from this point onward. There are about 4 refills which i have not yet released. I will be finishing these up using the 1.0.1 refill packer and releasing them all soon. Naturally subscribers will have first shot at downloading them.

TXT:: For those of you who have been sending and phoning in messages of concern. Please rest assured that the 5.2 Magnitude Earthquake is not as bad as the Loma Prieta Quake of 89. There has been no superficial damage in my area, but we're still waiting to see if the integrity of the infrastructure is still in tact. This quake was on a different fault line and had more of a rolling feel like being on a boat. :-)

I've used the nickname, "Peff" or "Joy!peff" for the longest time now. It was one of the first things I discovered while poking around the data in my old Mac IIci. I thought it would be a funny obscure little name to use because of it's significance with PowerPC applications because it's the Mac equivalent of ".EXE". The other day, I received the coolest e-mail from Kevin Looney who worked for Apple. Rather than paraphrase it, Kevin has given me permission to repost the e-mail.

So In the future, when I decide to retire the site, I'll start a new one called "Deadbeef.com" :-)