I’m excited to share my latest album, Belizean Heat! It features nine songs that are each built around field recordings gathered during a short visit to Belize I took in 2015. If you listen closely, you’ll hear birds, crickets, underwater reef crackling, and a persnickety naval radio. One of my favourite recordings was of a massive colony of grackles. Continue reading “Belizean Heat Out Now!”
Tag: Music
Synthesis Essentials: All About Oscillators
Oscillators. The raw sound source that spawns the diverse range of tones and timbres spewed by all synthesizers. They come in different shapes and can be produced by a variety of techniques to make your imagination audible. If you consider the fact that all of the sounds we hear are vibrations in air, oscillators are creating synthetic vibrations that become sound once connected to a speaker. Instead of moving back and forth like a guitar string, the oscillator cycles between positive and negative voltages. Continue reading “Synthesis Essentials: All About Oscillators”
Review: Soulsby Synthesizers Oscitron
The Oscitron from Soulsby Synthesizers is a lot of things. It’s their first Eurorack synthesizer product. It’s an 8-bit digital oscillator with wavetable sampling, selectable audio engine resolution, multiple filter types, scale quantization, portamento, bit reduction and preset memory. Amazingly, they managed to squeeze all this functionality into just 14HP. This is achieved through the clever use of two knobs that also function as buttons. Continue reading “Review: Soulsby Synthesizers Oscitron”
Synthesis Essentials: Know Your Filters
The filter is arguably the element of a synthesizer that does the most to define its character. Words like squelchy, brassy, creamy, gritty and so on are often used to describe their impact, and reading those adjectives in this context probably made you think of a few specific synths. Perusing the various offerings in both the fixed architecture and eurorack markets presents a perplexing plethora of jargon. To make matters worse, many of these terms overlap, as manufacturers will often use different names to describe the same feature. So what makes all these filters different and how does that affect the way a synthesizer will sound? Continue reading “Synthesis Essentials: Know Your Filters”
Review: Pittsburgh Modular Lifeforms Percussion Sequencer
The Eurorack realm has no shortage of sequencer offerings, and for good reason. They can generate the pulse that drives an entire system, bring a patch to life with modulation, provide the rhythmic foundation to support your patch, or whatever else you can conceive. Because they are so critical to so many systems, and because there is such a diverse range of approach, the market still does not seem saturated. However, I imagine it’s becoming increasingly difficult for manufacturers to make sequencers that stand out by offering something unique and exciting. Pittsburgh Modular adeptly pulls this off by creating a relatively small, hugely functional, performance ready, four channel sequencer. Continue reading “Review: Pittsburgh Modular Lifeforms Percussion Sequencer”
SUBLIME SOUND 