Record of Motion

Vocoders are amazing. I cannot say that any more clearly.

I’ve been playing with synths for almost two years now and just recently decided to play around with the Vocoder found in Reason. (Yes, I know! It’s not FLOSS! But it is easily the best tool for audio production I have ever used.) My initial attempts at getting it to work failed. After a bit of reading, that changed.

I’ve uploaded a couple of sample loops to show you what a bit of what a Vocoder can do. Vocoders are used most frequently to produce those ‘electronic’ voices that are heard in most techno and pop. A lot of people seem to think that that is all they are good for. Those people are wrong. Below I have two loops: One pad synth and one arpeggiated lead synth. While each sounds good on it’s own, and they both sound good played at the same time, the vocoder mixes them together for a completely new sound.

Lead Synth

Pad Synth

Vocoded Synths

I’m not going to go into details about how Vocoders work. A quick google will explain it better than I can.

Oh, and by the way, emallson is back!

Why in the world does Adobe Illustrator not have an export batcher? I have 188 high-res photos to export from .ai to .png in 2 different sizes (thumbnail and fullsize). It makes my life much more frustrating. I did get ~40 done today, but I would’ve had them all done with a batch processor (not counting cropping off some whitespace afterwards, but that’s quick enough). On a slow computer the exports take awhile, and I have to load, preview export, resize, and export each individual one manually. Isn’t the point of computers to automate routine tasks?

Besides that, my day went pretty well. I just finished up a new song, the first one I’ve done any post-processing on in awhile. It turned out pretty well. And I got my hands on a copy of Neverwinter Nights Diamond. That was the reason i didn’t post yesterday.

One last thing: today I worked more on my work-in-progress Pen-and-Paper RPG: Twin Lands. You can check it out at http://smithy.ath.cx Any comments would be appreciated.

So…I did very little over the past 5 days. Ate, slept, played Warcraft III, and Perled. Lots of Perling. I can now write a semi-competent script to do something other that format the printing of “Hello, World!”. When I got back tonight, I went straight to my computer and threw together another monosynthic song, which isn’t up on reverb yet. About the end of this month I’ll albumize it and put it up on jamendo. I can’t find it now but the thing that brought the music to mind was someone who recorded the sound of his perl script collection and put it up on jamendo. Some of them (which he claims were the better-written ones with strict pragma) were actually very good. Anyway, I start work tomorrow writing the backend of my new employer’s commerce site. I anticipate more than one stress-wracked night of tossing and turning wondering if my security is up to par…