Waldorf Largo

Unofficial sources say Waldorf Largo will ship May 11, 2009 ... never soon enough!

Largo softsynth info

Next VSTi Purchase

The studio's next VSTi purchase will more than likely be Waldorf's new Largo softsynth.

This synth which was announced, of course, at the 2009 NAMM show, seems to contain all the good things about the Blofeld hardward synth that came out last year. I couldn't justify paying $800ish for a DSP based hardware synth, when all I really wanted were the filter drives modes that it contained. So needless to say I'm VERY happy there's a VST version which appears to contain the same filter drive modes which produced some very tasty results when I played around with the Blofeld last year. Hopefully a demo or some samples will be out sometime soon!

Sidechained Compression

Sidechained compression is something I still haven't used as much as I know I should, partially because it can become a routing mess very quickly. It was easier in Logic than Cubase, and the ease of routing is probably still the biggest thing I miss about not working in Logic anymore.

I tried a new trick in Cubase where I'm using only one compressor and using the left channel as the compression trigger and the right channel as the compression content (then expanding the right channel back to stereo before routing to the main mix).

It worked quite well, and allowed me to use VST compressors that don't natively support sidechaining.

Here's the sample: [link]

New phaXis Hard Techno Mix: Sour Gas

I've put a new phaXis hard techno mix up on the Calibrated site in the releases section, called Sour Gas. The mix features a decently wide range of hard techno starting with liberator-ish styles, to Schranz, to some Industrial Strength stuff. Tracks featured includes some of the new Calibrated releases and a range of artists that have been doing some wicked cool stuff over the past year or so, including Concrete DJz, Patrick DSP, Rowland the Bastard, DJ Ogi, and Alex Calver.

N-Joy!

Happy New Year

Happy new year!

Back from vacation in Belize. Very cool country, diverse in both culture, races, and topography. Not to mention having average temperature highs that fluctuate from 26 to 31 degrees throughout the year! Music down there (that I was able to see and hear) ranges from punta rock, raggaton (Latin influenced reggae), world beat/folk, and some good drumming like the Garifuna Drummers group that performed at my friends wedding down there. As much as I love Manitoba, going someplace that isn't -30 (yes, 60 degrees warmer!) for the holidays is certainly a plus.

Now that I'm back, I've finally got the first six Calibrated Records tracks uploaded to the digital stores, so they should be available for download within the next day or so.

Now that that the techno's taken care of, it will be back to freeform for a while.

On the promotion side of things, it looks like Facebook allows public pages designed for businesses and artists which don't require a personal Facebook page to be created, although it limits you to what you can do on the Facebook network. It does allow you to create a network of fans and browse the artists your fans have as well as keep a list of your own favourite artists - which rivals MySpace's functionality. So, I now have a dj phosphor Facebook page. We'll see how long I can go with this before I end up creating a personal Facebook account for myself. The only problem is that it is difficult (or impossible from what I can see) to search for other artists without chaining through fan and favourite links of existing pages - tho I expect that Google will eventually spider into the Facebook pages (hence the blog link here to spur that on). At least the layout is much more attractive than MySpace!

Audio, Video, and Noise Toys

Here in Ottawa, the art-tech festival Electric Fields is going on. It started this past week and goes until this weekend. It is a similar concept to the Send and Receive Festival hosted in Winnipeg as it presents an array of experimental audio and video performances with a focus on creative use of electronics and technology. Needless to say what I've seen so far has been quite inspiring, as I love festivals like these.

The fantastic Carrie Gates was in from Saskatoon performing on Friday night in a very special collaboration of Carrie's no-input video feedback with the circuit bent audio of Ottawa's Squelchbox. One of the innovative features of the live performance was using an array of photo resistors suction cup'ed onto an old commodore 64 monitor split off from Carrie's video feedback which directly modulated various portions of Squelchbox's audio rig. Squelch's audio also directly drove - or overdrove in some cases - Carrie's video signals. Very cool to see live. Hopefully some portions of the video recorded at the event will make it onto her site.

One of the other performances Friday night was the Montreal based group Tvestory. Their audio is directly generated from what's displayed on the screen - so you're hearing 60Hz based music, and since white and black offer the most contrast on a screen, the audio follows suit. A very intense experience when you are presented with 3 large vid screens and a set of 6 smaller monitors in a darkened church with a nice sound system. The youtube clips just don't quite do it justice!

Hopefully I'll be getting out to the "Dorkbot" workshop tomorrow which is a showcase of a few people who do 'strange things with electricity.' Hopefully at lest one will focus on building strange sounding audio generators...

Calibrated Records

The Calibrated Records site has now been officially launched.

Calibrated is the new sub-label of Blizzard Tracks focusing on hard acid techno represented by my alter techno ego, phaXis.

As a result, this blog is now serving both websites as a repository for the Igloo studio activities, be it freeform, techno, or whatever might be getting worked over, torn apart, or reassembled.

Samples for the first six releases are up on the site, along with a couple techno mixes from a while back.

Working on the details for a couple digital stores sorted out in hopes to have the releases available before the end of the year.