One of Native Instruments’ latest KORE SOUNDPACKS is FM8 Transient Attacks, a KORE sound library featuring cutting-edge FM8 sounds for modern electronic music production, ranging from dirty electro basses to otherworldly FM grime at the touch of the Morph pad.

For those not familiar with the KORE product range, the software part of KORE includes six Native Instruments sound engines (REAKTOR, MASSIVE, ABSYNTH, FM8, KONTAKT and GUITAR RIG) and provides ready-to-play sounds that can be easily browsed and tweaked from the interface. KORE SoundPacks are expansion packs for KORE products such as KORE 2 and the free KORE Player.

As its name suggests, FM8 Transient Attacks delivers new sounds using the FM8 audio engine.

The product page reads:

the sounds of FM8 TRANSIENT ATTACKS have been meticulously crafted to deliver extremely diverse yet exceptionally playable FM bass, leads, percussion, arpeggiated sounds and more. Taking advantage of the parameter-driven nature of FM synthesis, the morphing functions of FM8 and KORE have been extensively incorporated into the sound design, allowing everything from instant sound adjustment to radical transitions and giving you a total of 1,600 sound variations.

FM8 Transient Attacks comes with 200 exclusive KoreSounds (not available in FM8 or KORE 2 factory libraries) and each sound has 8 variations.

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FabFilter has recently released Volcano 2, a versatile filter effect plug-in.

The product Volcano product page reads:

FabFilter Volcano has proven to be one of the few plug-ins that offer convincing high quality digital filtering with unique analog character. With tons of new features, modulation options and a highly improved user interface, the new Volcano 2 is absolute top of its class!

So what does Volcano 2 have to offer?

• 4 multi-mode stereo filters (each with low-pass, high-pass, and band-pass responses with 12, 24 and 48 dB/octave slopes) and 11 different high-quality filter characteristics that define the unique sound and overdrive of the filter.
• Flexible routing allows you to route the four available filters in almost any way you can think of.
• Extensive modulation options for XLFO, Envelope Generator, Envelope Follower and the MIDI source, and drag-and-drop modulation with the 24-slot modulation matrix.
• Innovative “what-you-use-is-what-you-see” interface, and interactive filter display.

Just to name a few things…

Getting started

The first time you open Volcano 2, you may find its many options a little intimidating. With its various shades of red, and cone shaped filter slopes it’s actually not that hard to imagine a landscape of erupted volcanoes. Looks beautiful to me!

Anyway, as with other FabFilter products I’ve worked with, the GUI is very clear and intuitive and FabFilter’s interactive help hints will get you on your way in no time.

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Some interesting things I found on June 9th, 2008:

# Intua BeatMaker

The first music creation studio for the iPhone and iPod Touch

BeatMaker introduces a new generation of mobile instruments and music creation software. Inspired by hardware beatboxes, loop samplers and software sequencers, it combines them to turn the iPod into a unique, inspirational software instrument.

# Playing the Building | An Installation by David Byrne - a 9,000-square-foot, interactive, site-specific installation by renowned artist David Byrne. The artist transforms the interior of the landmark Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan into a massive sound sculpture that all visitors are invited to sit and “play.”

# Radiohead Nude remix on Sinclair ZX Spectrum - A remix of Radiohead's Nude played by a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer, Epson dot matrix printer, HP Scanjet scanner, and an array of hard drives.

# Roland TB-303 # Roland TR-808 # Roland TR-909 - Pattern Library - Erik Zimmermann's "very happy" acid website

# Nine Inch Nails - New band, new tour sampler - I am proud to announce the final personnel lineup of nine inch nails for the foreseeable future. We’ve added, we’ve subtracted and we’ve wound up with unquestionably the strongest lineup I’ve EVER had.

# Music Thing: Chimera BC16 mini synth review - Tom Whitwell shares what he's thinking after a week with the Chimera BC16.

# A short review of the Tascam DR-1 - Brad Linder's friend and colleague Eugene Sonn recently purchased a Tascam DR-1 handheld digital audio recorder. He wanted to put it through the paces before deciding whether this low-cost recorder was a keeper.

# The Gerbil’s Revenge - Sasha Frere-Jones on Auto-Tune

Sacha writes:

No one has used Auto-Tune’s zero speed setting more consistently and successfully than the R. & B. singer T-Pain. Born Faheem Najm, in Tallahassee, he has become such a common guest on pop records that in a single week last year he was featured on four singles in the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, including the No. 1 song, Chris Brown’s “Kiss Kiss.” In the same way that the dry, flat drum sounds in Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” will forever say “mid-seventies,” T-Pain and Auto-Tune will forever remind people of the late aughts.

Some interesting things I found on June 5th, 2008:

# CellularRecombomat: patch-bay circuit bent cellular automata video synth

Tom Koch aka Univac writes:

My main idea with this gadget was to have optical control over the three main basic cellular automata (CA) controls (which are controlled by the pots on the right side, from the top): algorithm (the algorithm used to generate the type of cell which also controls what tone is generated based on the object created), width across the grid, and speed of cellular generation, each line generated one at a time from top to bottom.

# Drum Master - DIY Electronic Drum Brain - The Drum Master system is actually comprised of two parts:

1. The hardware brain module (containing the Arduino microcontroller and a collection of circuits to assist in obtaining the sensor information) is called the Drum Master. This is connected via USB (technically, a virtual serial port over USB) to a computer,
2. which is running the Drum Slave software, written in Python.

When a sensor is hit, the Drum Master converts the signal to a digital value, and sends this value (and the port on which the sensor was detected) over the serial port. The Drum Slave program listens for this, and plays the corresponding audio sample.

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