Sound Design for Arturia CZV Synthesizer plugin

So after a few months under a Non Disclosure Agreement, I can talk about the new Arturia CZV plugin because it has been released for a few weeks now.

Arturia found me originally because of my long-running blog post all about the Casio CZ series of synthesizers which you can read here.

Just before the release, Arturia interviewed me for their Sound Designer page, but I cannot wait to talk to you all about this so I have published it here. I also found an old photograph of my first studio, which I talk about towards the end. So I think this could be interesting for all you music technologists out there!

Arturia: What is your favourite preset and why did you choose it?

My favourite patch in this set is called Atmosweep. It originated from a set of patches that were accidentally randomised when my CZ RAM cartridge ended up in the washing machine! Amazingly it still worked! After that I worked on the sound for a long time to get the release and atmosphere. The patches from the washing machine used the resonant waves in ways I hadn’t thought of so it was fun to explore this happy accident. With CZ-V my archive of patches since 1992 has really come back to life. Several years ago I deep-sampled 102 of my favourite CZ patches for Kontakt (you can still hear those here). Now I can finally put those away and use the sounds in a much more organic way in CZV with the Macros.

I was stoked to see three of my sounds in the “Featured” list!

Arturia: What are the main strengths of the CZV according to you? Did some specific features or aspect positively surprised you in the instrument?

Tomás: Yes I was pleasantly surprised that the real character of the hardware is right there in CZV! And to answer your question I think there are four main strengths, in order of importance:

1.    The percentage level control on each envelope really opens up the possibilities in a very big way, allowing the CZV to respond to the player in a much more organic way from modulation. It also makes it much easier to have bright or dark within the patch. Even on the CZ-1 with its limited velocity modulation, I would make several versions of a patch going from dark to bright, in order to get this same depth. It was much more laborious than it is with CZV. Now it’s so easy to tweak the patch so that it sits right in your track. I love it!

2.    Of course the DCW level can now be swept in real time like an analogue filter, not just with the envelope. This gives a sound unique to the CZ. It’s quite different to sweeping the harmonics on an FM synth (or an analogue synth) and can really warp sounds in a spectacular way, while still keeping the flavor of the basic patch. 

Analog Lab library of programmers

3.    I love the chorus. With one voice it is very much like the hardware CZ, and with two or three voices it is lush like the Roland Juno chorus. It is pretty much the perfect chorus for a synth!

4.    When I got the initial spec from you, it was the looping envelopes that most excited me. I would have killed for this feature on the hardware, back in the day. It took me a while to figure them out, but I did, with relative ease, and they are hugely useful.

Arturia: What was your approach regarding your sound design work ? Had you a specific type of sounds in mind? A specific method?

The old CZ Librarian running in Sheepshaver VM

Tomás: There are two answers to this, because I have been using a CZ since 1992, starting with the CZ-5000 and ending up eventually with the CZ-1. Back then it was my only polysynth. With the sequencer it was like an affordable workstation, so I wanted it to make every sound possible. An impossible goal, but a great way to learn everything about a synth. I wanted the sounds that I heard on classic records, such as Jarre’s Rendezvous where he uses the Fairlight and the Synthex as well as the CZ-5000. I would spend a lot of time trying to get these classic sounds on the CZ, and learning what the limits and unique qualities of the synth were.

Later when I had more synths I used the CZ-1 for its strengths. To me it is a wonderful bass machine. I love pad sounds too, and the CZ does these with a unique character. You won’t get wide soft MemoryMoog pads, but you can get some very atmospheric stuff using the resonant waves with the envelopes for movement within the sound. Nothing else sounds quite like it.

I always carefully backed up my patches and kept them well organized with descriptive names, first with cassettes and later with SysEx on the Apple Mac. So I was able to load my library into CZV. It’s so cool to see the patch names you made years ago coming up in the list!

The second answer is that with CZV it is more of an adventure. This is because it is exactly the same as the old hardware and at the same time is a very up to date synth with all the features we take for granted in software today. So the method was simply to explore and have fun! Several times I started from an initial patch and just explored the new possibilities, especially with the extra Mod Envelopes, the more detailed velocity modulation and the Custom Waveform.

But more often, I was able to take an old patch and make it more like what I wanted it to be from those classic records. Unison Mode really made that happen in a big way, and again the detailed modulation and the live interaction with the Macros made the sounds much more alive than is possible on the original machine.

Now the CZ is like a MiniMoog or a Prophet 5, with the sound-morphing easily integrating with your performance in a truly organic way. Thanks so much to the Arturia team for making the dreams of 18 year old me come true!

Transitions 4 EP

EP 4 in the series. All of the tracks transition into each other like a DJ set. So you could have a (short) party with this! The tracks are me having fun and geeking out with music technology. Getting various ideas,then painting it all together in Pro Tools. For this EP it was all about not judging too much, letting it flow and remembering the dance music of the late eighties and early nineties with the omnipresent 909 type kick beating the pulse. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did 🙂

  1. Sequencer Sanity: Experimenting with the step sequencer on a Casio CZ-5000 back in about 1992. Hypnotic patterns and rhythms in 4/4 time. This is the kind of thing that sometimes falls out of the pile of old ideas, and becomes fresh again with age.
  2. Dimple: The result of experimenting with turning up the quiet bits at the end of samples in the grungy 12 bit Yamaha TX16W. This is from a sample made by Paul Wiffen. Fun with the Kaoss pads and FM synthesis. April 2016.
  3. Snow White: Tuning experiments with the Monark MiniMoog, an un-predictable un-stable analogue beast. This is a preset, go find it and have fun with it yourself. A bit of Korg Wave sequencing and a keyboard electric guitar solo at the end, making a transition. December 2014.
  4. Epic: Weeks spent sampling orchestral chords on a Casio SK-5 instead of study for my Leaving Cert (the State Exam) in 1990. Beats made with a Roland drum pad plus a Roland drum machine triggering a Yamaha CS-5.
  5. Transition 4: Experiments with layering and modulation on a Casio CZ-1, with old tape machine noises. September 2008.

Equipment:
Here is the list of instruments and equipment I used on Transitions. Any hardware listed as software is stuff that is either sampled into or physically modelled in the computer.

HARDWARE
Akai MX-1000
Casio CZ-1
Casio CZ-5000 sequencer
Emu ESI4000
Focusrite Scarlett 6i6
Korg Kaoss Pad 1+2
Kawai K1, K4
Lentek S4
Novation KSR
Quad 405
Roland SPD-11
Roland TR-505
Sennheiser HD25II
Yamaha TX16W

SOFTWARE
Arturia ARP2600
Arturia ARP 1613 sequencer
Ensoniq SQ-80
Emu Emulator II
Fairlight CMI IIx+III
Korg Wavestation
Martin Luder PG8X
Monark MiniMoog
Native Instruments Battery
Native Instruments FM8
Native Instruments Guitar Rig
Native Instruments Kontakt
Native Instruments Reaktor
Oberheim DMX
Pianoteq
Roland TR-909
Roland TR-808
Sonic Charge Cyclone
SoundToys EchoBoy
Sunbird acoustic guitar
Waldorf Attack
Yamaha CP35 (Sample Katra)
Yamaha DX100
XPand!2

Recorded in 27″ iMac running Pro Tools 12.

Transitions 3 EP out now

Some techno for you…

Dystodrift is the lead track. It’s based on an idea that was sitting around since 1997. My old Spirit mixing desk sounded very nice when overloaded, making this very intense sound like a didgeridoo. So I put in some drums with some pitch bend. I re-discovered the track this year while remixing music by one of my old bands. Turns out there were enough melodic ideas already there to develop the intense vibe. What really lifted it was using some new old synths which are better than the old synths I had in 1997 (honestly that make sense, read it again lol). These are a MiniMoog and an ARP2600 (not real ones, computer models). So with those and some little musical tricks I’ve picked up since then, the track took shape. Then there was this really great drumming by Declan Campion, so I made some loops of that and it’s the big beat that kicks in halfway through. Thanks Dec, it was worth all the work 🙂

Track 2 is inpsired by bonzai (she’s all lower case as well, cool) saw her at the Forbidden Fruit Festival this year– awesome show.

Transitions 3 is a bit of sound design in Kontakt with samples I made in 1999 of a Cristal Baschet at the Triskel Arts Centre, an amazing sculptural instrument.

Leeds Warehouse (club mix) is inspired by the work of Mark Bell of LFO (RIP) who was an amazing producer whose work inspired me back then. I programmed the drums from a Wild Beasts song into a Roland TR-909 (again a computer model, not an actual 909). That guy is an AMAZING drummer.

Transition 4 is loosely based on the choir chords from “Leeds 1990” but in a more pensive key, with a Gregorian choir I nicked from Thomas Dolby’s soundtrack for the film Gothic (great music, his first time with an orchestra, real genius). He was tongue-in-cheek-annoyed about it when I told him years ago, when I emailed him a couple of times at his Headspace company; because he said spent so much time sampling it into the Fairlight LOL. Seriously, he really doesn’t mind. It turns up on the Prefab Sprout (love them) song Micheal as well, and now I’ve used it too. It’s a nice way to come down from those dance beats.

Download the full EP on Bandcamp

I hope you like it 🙂

Transitions EP series in process

I’ve started releasing an EP series called “Transitions” inspired by this time of year, when the birds prepare to migrate from wintery Ireland to sunnier countries. Each EP will have several short transitional pieces linking the main ones. I enjoy playing around with structure so this idea gives a nice excuse to indulge this 🙂

This track is called “Yay!” and came together very quickly. Around the time I finished it, a flock of swallows were gathering on our houses. Then the buzzards came along, for their breakfast. This was great because I’d been trying to photograph them all summer, out on the bike following them. They are quite timid and tend to fly off when you reach for the camera. So imagine my joy when I could just stand in the studio window and get great close ups! At one point she looked right at me. They also played around with each other, pouncing in mid-air. Spectacular. This video is made with my own photos.

My wife helped me with this one. The synth groove had been sitting around since 2012. The Pro Tools session fell out of the big pile of Pro Tools sessions of ideas, and she came up with a great orchestral line (violins, cellos and a touch of English horn) a piano part and the reversed bridging parts. The drums are from a Minnie Driver record. We tried to keep the mood of the synth groove while adding a cinematic build to the piece. We hope you like it 🙂

I played guitar on the other tracks, a Gibson Humming Bird. The final track “Sun Groove” came out of doing a cover version of Mike Oldfield’s version of Francisco Tárrega’s “Étude”. WIth the way Pro Tools works, I was able to keep all of the sounds of the original, and do a completely new piece of music. So this has some of the original old Fairlight percussion that Mike Oldfield used, taken directly from the original 8″ floppy disks. I also used a few Emulator II sounds in the same way. I love the atmosphere on this old sounds. The people that made them had to take great care in the recording to get them to sound so good with such limited sound quality. It’s nice to stand on the shoulders of giants!

Download the EPs here.

Live music – the good and the bad…

Alternative title – Live music – the good and the rib shattering…

It’s been a really great summer for live music. I got to see some of my all-time musical heroes and discovered some new ones along the way.

Kraftwerk – my first Heroes

Like all of the best music, it was a friend who introduced me. My salvation as a teenager was the local Scouts. We were all big music fans and sharing was a great way to pass the time in the days before the internet. So I first heard Computer World on cassette in 1986, and honestly, I thought it was a bit strange! Good strange though. That same year The Telephone Call was a single, and I remember it jumping out of the radio and I went “Wow what is THAT?”  I first got to see them live at EP2006, a very special year with an amazing line up (Goldfrapp, Human League, Arcade Fire, Flaming Lips).

So this year Kraftwerk played the Bórd Gáis Energy Theatre. We were immersed in their world for a few hours, with sweet melodies, punchy robotic grooves, retro-futurist style and humour. The graphics were minimal and beautiful. During Spacelab we saw Earth from a 1950s space station, which hovered over a Google map of Dublin and then landed outside the theatre in glorious black+ white. Founding member and singer Ralf Hutter did make a few little mistakes but these only served to emphasize the frailty of humanity and how we help ourselves to thrive with our machine creations. Writing this now I wonder if it was done on purpose? Either way, it worked just fine. He’s been performing since 1968 and it showed in the slick and professional performance and superb dramatics of the whole show. His vocoder performance on Man Machine in particular was stupendous. Despite the robot exterior, Kraftwerk gave a lot to their audience. The encore was raucous and everyone left smiling.

Orbital – My Second Heroes

My old friend Sandra O’Mahony, an accomplished live sound engineer and festival manager, put on Orbital’s first album while I worked on getting her MIDI gear synched with mine, back in 1996 when synching an Atari to tape was still a big deal. I was blown away by the album, as well as the extreme quietness of her family home where the loudest thing in the area was the cows mooing! Not your typical rave-era experience, but great memories 🙂

The evening after the Kraftwerk gig, Orbital headlined Forbidden Fruit ’17. Pretty amazing right? Two electronic music legends in one weekend. This event was filled with teenagers already drunk by 2 pm. My wife even had to help one group make sure a drunk friend got home without getting them all banned from the show! We had a hilarious conversation with the coffee vendors about social media, responsible drinking and fake tans (maybe a blog for another day!). Spotted the same stall at Beatyard actually!

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Orbital had a very big show and used the huge dynamic range of the PA to full effect, with quiet atmospheric and moody bits right up to blow-you-away loud bits just right at the peak musical crescendos of some of their biggest hits.

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With the abstract and giant, atmospheric video mapped display, it was the best natural high ever – and it lasted for the entire set.

Bonzai (photo by Jamie Macmillan)

Up and coming singer Bonzai also did an explosive set earlier in the day. I’m still still enjoying her Royah and Sleepy Hungry Eps. She sang, danced and swooped her long hair around with amazing rhythm and style, everyone left still singing her songs.

Air – My Third Heroes

French band Air have been an inspiration for me for a long time. La Femme D’argent was another one of those tracks that jumped out of the radio when it was released. They have their own distinct sound and retro-futuristic style like Kraftwerk, but with a more lyrical and harmonic angle. They headlined the Beatyard 2017 festival in Dun Laoghaire last weekend. So I’m still coming down from it! I’ll start with the good stuff – there’s a lot!

This festival is very well organised and family friendly. It’s in a relatively small space but really well laid out. Staff are without exception friendly and helpful, and there is a wide array of amazing food choices. Even the toilets are the most outstandingly clean and well maintained of any festival I’ve been to. Gobsmacked wife made the rather unusual move of posting a pic of a loo on Instagram (note it’s PDT not GMT!)

We arrived a little late but in time to catch trad-fusion band Kila who did a wonderful set. Ronan O’Snodaigh on percussion and vocals was particularly impressive, his drive and energy feeding right into the music. Such a tight and dynamic player! The whole band gelled incredibly well, sounding as one. Irish trad has a particular flavour of melancholy and euphoria, like life itself. Kila created that vibe perfectly and took us on a journey, seemingly effortlessly. I’ve seen them before in a particularly awful venue with a terrible PA and their engineer beat it into submission, getting the best sound I ever heard in there. At Beatyard it was easier for him, the PA was a beautiful Martin (I think) line array. The band sounded fabulous.

Morcheeba were the next act we enjoyed. Beautiful trip-hop rhythms with very tasty drumming, and Sky’s voice is just amazing, soaring with the seagulls who seemed to flock a little more numerously around the stage for their set. Even the sun came out! I didn’t care too much for their cover of Bowie’s Let’s Dance (having been blown away by Nile Rodgers’ drummer doing a perfect Bowie take-off when Chic played Cork last year) but this was a very groovy set. The lighting was minimal but worked superbly well with Sky’s homemade black silk dress, she looked very, very cool. And wife blissed out having been a fan since forever.

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Air at #beatyard by Lynne Crosby @lynnecrosby

Then came Air. I had to get close to the front to see them and to check out the keyboards 🙂 Opening song Venus jumped out of the speakers, especially the main keyboard riff which seemed to exist somewhere outside the system. JB’s vocals soared. Beautiful. There’s not really a bassline on this song, just the low notes on the piano. And the drums are minimal. So I had no idea how bad things were going to get.

As soon as the kick drum came in on the next song, we were subjected to a horrible excess of sub-bass. The kick dominated the music. When Air’s trademark funky synth bass lines came in, entire songs were reduced to a droning discordant bass mush that would loosen bowels. People around us were wincing. My wife, normally a bass junkie, started stuffing bits of tissue in her ears. Not a good sign.

We moved back by the mixing desk assuming the balance there would be just right. No such luck. It actually got worse! Air’s trademark dreamy keyboard strings were simply not in the mix. This sound comes from the Solina string ensemble, a keyboard that JB had prominently on his right. Every time he played it, we heard nothing. The engineer simply sniggered when I pointed this out to him. Yes, I’m sorry to say I was so upset and disappointed at the terrible sound that I resorted to shouting at the engineer – it was the only way to get his attention above the noise. The vocals sat just above the droning bass with little or no harmonic support. It just did not sound like Air, but more like some bad dub reggae. It also seemed that if Nicolas was not singing through the vocoder, he was very low in the mix. Listening to this live recording from Sydney Opera House it appears that is how he likes it, but I think it’s an odd choice especially with songs like Cherry Blossom Girl where, at least on the record, the two voices are equal. They did a shorter set than other shows on this tour, and left out quite a few favourites notably Run and Remember.

Or maybe I just didn’t hear it- #notevenjoking

This was such a disappointing show. Wife got her dose of Morcheeba so she was still ecstatic. But I was, in truth, devastated. This was a festival with a well fed and watered audience, so they were not going to leave but there was an awful lot of chatter during this show, even compared to Morcheeba who were playing earlier in the day with kids around. I can’t understand how Air, known for being particular, sounded so bad compared to Kila and Morcheeba. This was a really good PA system.

This audience recording from San Francisco last year gives you a good idea of the poor balances. Nicolas’s vocal is almost inaudible compared to JBs, and you can hear the bass and kick drum dominating.

As lasthousemusic put it “Completely agree. Many blissful textures missing. Great set but could have been so much better…”

Is there a Solution?

Well, I’d love to see Air put someone they trust out in the audience for the next few shows, and get an independent review of what the sound experience is like. Honestly, I think they’d be pretty shocked!!

My next dose of live music will be Megacone with my friends Zombie Picnic – can’t wait!

The album tracks part 2: For Gaza

It’s hard not to feel powerless against the human rights violations being committed by Israel. Back in 2014 when it flared up, again, I saw a video by Israeli film director Naomi Levari. A very brave move for an Isreali national. I composed For Gaza quite quickly, to raise some money for the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) whose aim is “…to participate in international efforts to put pressure on the Israeli state to cease its oppression of the Palestinian people”.

The fund-raising was a great success, and this new album was an opportunity to do a remix of the track, and change a few things that were not quite right.

The process

The origin of the piece goes back to 1990 with the little Casio SK-5 8 bit sampler and the Yamaha CS-5 synthesiser. The heavy drums and the bass loop are sampled from that original tape with all the noise and distortion it had. The strings are a development of an idea from back then. I didn’t even realise this at the time. I just went for a performance on the keyboard, while listening to the horrendous news from Palestine with tears in my eyes. In electronic music, what you hear has often been programmed in the the computer. This artificially tight, sometimes robotic rhythm is one of the cool things about electronic music I think. But it’s good to have actual live human playing on it too! Towards the end of the process I was very tempted to move some of the notes around because I felt they weren’t quite on the beat. But that’s where the feel is. Sometimes, just because it seems to measure right it doesn’t mean it hits the soul! So I built up some layers of different string sounds, to give a Turkish ensemble effect, a sound I heard a lot in North Africa and Southern Spain. The slight variations in each part are just like what happens with a real string section.

The rhythm guitar is sampled from a jam session with one of my old bands, played by Ken Hayes. This was cut up in Recycle and the parts placed across the keyboard so they could be replayed. The lead guitar at the end is from the same session, with the notes and timing played around with in Melodyne, an amazing software tool that makes pitch and time totally flexible.

The atrocities continue, so please support the IPSC.
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The Album Tracks Part 1: Orchestrion

This is a combination of atmospheres and sounds from the 1870s and the 1970s. The Orchestion of the title is an Imhof & Mukle Orchestrion Music Machine. It uses a wooden barrel with pins on it to open valves in over 100 pipes that are built like woodwind instruments such as clarinets and flutes. Basically, a large version of the barrel you would see in a music box. To run it, you wind a weight up to the top of the machine, and as it runs down it drives the barrel and pumps the air through the pipes. This one was located in Dunkathel House, where I worked in the recording studio. Here’s a picture of the actual machine in the house, courtesy of the RTÉ archive.

Orchestrion featured on Treasure Ireland (1993)

Orchestrion featured on Treasure Ireland (1993)

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New album release

It’s finally here!

madtheory-electrickery I’m very pleased to get this released. It’s been a long time brewing. Many thanks to my friends who helped with feedback and encouragement:

 

Aidan O’Driscoll
Brian Dunlea
Dominic Murphy
Eoin O’Sullivan
Enda Grennan
Gary McKee
Mike Gavin
Mike Lyons
Michael O’Sullivan
Ralf Kleeman
Ronan O’Dea
Rupert MacCarthy-Morrogh

And my lovely wife Sally O’Reilly for encouragement both musical and emotional 🙂

Some of these ideas go back to 1990 when I first started to compose. I think it’s important to keep an archive of ideas and stuff to play with- play being the key word. I really enjoyed the process, with all the help and support. I hope you all can feel the same joy I felt in making this music. 🙂

 

 

[bandcamp width=350 height=786 album=519834530 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5]

Also available on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify etc. etc.