I have been writing a column for them in which I go over some useful production techniques, my last one was about creative uses of side chaining, and this time I go through how I like to use an awesome piece of free software called Paul Stretch. Paul Stretch allows you to stretch audio into unimaginably long lengths. Check out the article, complete with a tutorial video, at Sonic Scoop and download the instrument rack below! Have fun and enjoy!
The Paul Stretch Rack is a free download at AfroDJMac.
Paul Nasca has released version 2.1 Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch, or Paulstretch, a program for stretching audio.
It is suitable only for extreme sound stretching of the audio (like 50x) and for applying special effects by “spectral smoothing” the sounds. It can transform any sound/music to a texture.
Changes in Paulstretch v2.1
Added loading/saving parameters.
Added Linux Jack support.
Added “Symmetric” mode of Binaural Beats.
Support for longer stretches – for the really patient ones – up to one quintillion times ( 10^18 x ).
Fixed a bug which produced infinite loop at the end of some mp3 files (at playing or render).
Fixed a bug in the mp3 reader.
Other minor additions.
Paulstretch is open source software released under a General Public License (GPL2). A Windows binary is available to download.
I’m pretty sure you’ve already heard (about) this, but I just wanted to stress the fact that it’s the excellent Paul Stretch that makes stuff sound cool.
Here's a little sample pack I put together using my Microkorg and FB383 synthesizers. This Pack contains 4 Bass Patches [NNXT] and 22 synth Percussion hits
Peter Kirn talks with Sebastian Dittmann, CEO of developer Audanika, developer of SoundPrism, the app they describe as something they are not entirely sure of what it is. From audanika.com: "We think it might be a musical instrument but we're learning new stuff playing with it every day… which sometimes goes beyond the scale of that."
Peter Kirn writes:
Using an array of rectangles arranged in a harmonically useful way, and color coding for pitch, SoundPrism is a glimpse of a more graphical future for music software design. (Nor is this necessarily limited to the iPad in the long term – in addition to Windows 7, Ubuntu 10.10 is getting official multitouch support, which I think both validates Apple’s work and suggests we’ll see more platforms for this kind of interface.)
And, bonus, it all demonstrates why arranging pitch by the Circle of Thirds can be ideal. I got a chance to talk to the developers of SoundPrism about the thinking behind the software.
Resampling is an incredibly simple yet powerful technique in digital music production. The idea is straighforward: Record the output of one or multiple tracks into a new, editable audio file. It’s not much different than rendering your composition, except here you’re actually going to incorporate the new file into the current song.
Leon Theremin (born Lev Sergeyevich Terme) was born on this day, August 15th, 1896. To help celebrate I’m going to do a bit of a stream of consciousness post and will offer some links on Leon and his wonderful instrument and some notes on my use of it.
Hang in there till the end of the post as I’ve created a Soundcloud set called “Theremin Action” which is a collection of all the songs from REBOOT and I Hear Your Signals that use that Theremin sound or Theremin as a Controller.
Mark controls virtual synths in Ableton Live using the Theremin and Percussa AudioCubes
Since Paul only released binaries for Windows, Kent Williams took the source code and made a working version for Mac.
Kent writes:
Yesterday I couldn’t spell OS X Developer and now, I are one!
With some help from my friends on the CMake mailing list I finally got a running standalone OS X application built out of the Paul Stretch source. As I wrote yesterday, it’s free, it’s easy, and it makes hours of freaky soundscapes out of any audio file.
Except for mp3 files. If you try and load an MP3 file it locks up. Oh, and it wants WAV or OGG files — as far as I know it can’t load AIF files. But it’s free, right?
Visit Kent’s website for a link to download PaulStretch for OS X.
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