Results for water

Bolder Sounds has announced the release of Crystal Glasses Volume 2, a sample library for Native Instruments Kontakt.

The Crystal Glasses volume 2 is a project I began in 2007. I worked on it sporadically over the last 3 years. Bolder Sounds already has a very popular sound set entitled Crystal Glasses and Meditation Bowls. So – why create another? The crystals recorded in that library date back to the mid 1990’s when 16 bit mono samples was the standard format ( the Meditation Bowls were sampled at a later date in stereo ). Also – the idea of recording these crystal glasses as a group of glasses opened up the door to different sound design opportunities.

Crystal Glasses Volume 2 features

• Sampled Articulations:
  • Hit Crystal Glasses – (3 round-robins per sample zone).
  • Soft Hit Crystal Glasses – (2 round-robins per sample zone).
  • Singing Crystal Pads – wet finger along rim of glass.
  • Granular Crystal Pads – Ethereal pads created via granular synthesis.
  • Bowed Crystal Glasses – Both short and long articulations.
  • Crystal Morphs – Kontakt multi instruments which morph between individual instruments.
• Extensive scripting for Kontakt giving the user an elegant and intuitive user interface.
• Help menu built into the Kontakts front panel.
• 24 bit stereo sample in .wav format.
• Total size of the Crystal Glass Volume 2 library is 490 mb (270 .rar download).

Note: Crystal Glasses Volume 2 requires full version of Kontakt 3+. The Kontakt PLAYER will only run for 30 minutes in demo mode.

Crystal Glasses Volume 2 is available to purchase for $49 USD.

Bolder Sounds has also released Granular Water Bottle, a free instrument for Kontakt and EXS24.

This the Klean Kanteen water bottle I drag around with me throughout my day. It has a very nice resonant ‘bonk’ sound to it. Originally I thought I’d sample it as more of a traditional percussion instrument and fill it with sand, rice and water etc.. But once I started applying granular synthesis to just a few hits that I recorded that was the end of the line for me. A whole weird world opened up

More information: Bolder Sounds / Crystal Glasses Volume 2 / Granular Water Bottle

Some interesting things I found recently:

# Dance music with MindStorms sounds

organfairy writes:

It has been a while since I made music on the MindStorms bricks. But now I present the longest and most complicated piece of MindStorms music I have ever made. The title of the melody is “the Future Child” and the idea is to make a cheerfull bleepy melody with the NXT’s tones and use the other sounds as effects while an organ and a synthesizer supplies the orchestra. Most of the pictures are robots made by myself. The rest is something I photographed at the First LEGO League competition in Herning back in 2007. The screenshots are from the NXT-G PC programming tools.

# Tic Tac Tunes – Now with Tic Tac Beat Box

AndyGadget @ Instructables created a Micro-organ and drum-kit in a Tic Tac box

This tiny box will give you hours of fun composing your own tunes. You can vary the tune tempo and switch between a pentatonic and blues scale as well as producing a variety of percussion sounds.
Load up a different program and it will compose its own percussion rhythms(Tic Tac Beat Box) or play with half a dozen different musical scales (Tic Tac Scales). Another cool feature is no power switch – It will hibernate when it's not being used.

There are great musicians around . . . and then there's me with no musical talent at all, but even I can get some great sounding tunes out of this. Watch the video and have a listen to the MP3 files to get an idea of what this little marvel can do.

# Water drop sequencer

The Water drop sequencer is an interactive sound installation. It creates sound by water drops falling on suspended iron bars with piezo elements attached. The viewer or performer can control which tones will be played by placing water bottles upside down in holes that are centred over the iron bars. It is also possible to control the speed of the dripping.

# Zio by Glenn Marshall

An interactive generative art visualizer from award winning computer animator and software designer Glenn Marshall.

Explore and interact with an endlessly generating world of organic visuals.
- Use drag and pinch to pan, move and rotate through space.
- Pause / play, save snaphots to your photo library.
- Switch on audio reactive visuals (for devices with mic only).
- Comes with 3 unique preset Zio worlds.- Shake to shuffle between presets.

Using the same Zio animation technology, Glenn collaborated with Peter Gabriel to create The Nest That Sailed The Sky music video which won at Prix Ars Electronica 2009, one of the biggest computer arts festivals in the world.

via Synthtopia

# Warped Piano, Zone Shift, and Sidechained Delay

Loudon Sterns writes:

Hello everyone, a student posted in one of my classes asking about this cool warped ambient piano he heard on a recording. It seemed like a cool challenge so I tried to make an instrument that would give a wide variety of spooky warped piano sounds. I created a really cool patch and used some of the more advanced features in Sampler and Instrument racks, so here is the video explaining it all.

Zenhiser has released some new sample packs: The Ultra Distorted Drum Kit 01, The Twisted Electro Drum Kit 01, Pure Minimal Groove Loops 01 & 02, and H20.

The Ultra Distorted Drum Kit 01 is a collection of nearly 300 industrial strength drum sound and drum hits.

The Ultra Distorted Drum Kit is like nothing you have ever heard before, a brand new drum sound collection that not only holds it’s own sound but fits in just about every genre from breaks & d&b through to minimal techno and trance. This drum kit is simply awesome.

Price: $19.99 AUD.

The Twisted Electro Drum Kit 01 features over 270 slammin electro drum sounds ranging from all powerful kick drums through to mind melting percussion and drum fx.

If you liked our Twisted Electro Beats then you’re going to love ‘The Twisted Electro Drum Kit’. Constructed with the same attention to detail The Twisted Electro Drum Kit is a awe inspiring collection electro drum sounds and drum hits that will not only inject an exciting flair to current beat productions but also create a brand new style of quirky and prolific electro beats.

Price: $19.99 AUD.

Pure Minimal Groove Loops 01 & 02 are two collections of 60 minimal groove samples each.

Simply Looptastic! ‘Pure Minimal Groove Loops’ is exactly as the title says, pure unadulterated minimal grooves for the concerted minimalist. Constructed to give your productions the professional minimal groove they need ‘Pure Minimal Groove Loops’ delivers all and much more. Each sample pack includes over 60 pristine minimal loops including drum loops, bass loops and rhythm loops. These minimal loop packs are the perfect starting ground for getting your minimal grooves off the ground by delivering extremely high quality sounds and an extremely high level of programming.

Price: $9.99 AUD each.

H20 is the first in Zenhiser series of Sound FX & Foley, featuring over 320 mb of pristine water sounds available in wav format (106 files).

This broad collection of extremely high quality 48 khz water sound wav files scopes the realms of water fx and delivers a large digital library of water sounds second to none. Recorded on site these are original recordings of water sounds ranging from Ocean Sounds, River Sounds & Waterfall Sound through to Water Drop Sounds, Water Splash Sounds, Tap Sounds & a great array of Running Water Sounds.

Price: $29.99 AUD

More information: Zenhiser

Some interesting things I found recently:

# IK Multimedia Rebuts Mag on Free Software; Why They Missed the Point

Freeware vs Commercial software? I know what I prefer… Whatever gets the job done!

Peter Kirn wrote a great article at CDM:

There’s a strange debate going on over the free software (as in freeware, not necessarily open source) issue of Computer Music magazine. After seeing the magazine’s top 10 reasons to use free software, commercial developer IK Multimedia got surprisingly defensive, and issued a rebuttal.

# aeo: DrawSound + Balls
DrawSound is a performance instrument that uses multi-touch input technology to create sound and music from the act of drawing. DrawSound has been used live by The SINE WAVE QUARTET and aeo. It was on display at the Second International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction [Bonn 2008].

# Stanton to Release Touch DJ Controller; Surface One, Thunder, Reborn?

Peter Kirn reports on the Stanton DaScratch

Stanton is teasing a new DJ controller with touch controls, and particularly a circular scratch/control area, with live LED feedback. This allows “virtual” controllers not only for DJs, but (Stanton hopes) VJs, laptop musicians, and the like. (Stanton says “multimedia artist,” to which we suggest “visualists”.) I especially enjoy the “confidential” site, though I’m not sure marking press release with “do not publish / embargoed” has much more impact given a lot of sites these days.

# hiuman – Runaway Harp – As the 1mm water streams are interrupted, the light weakens, fingers find delights in the water harp. Echo is silent, until light returns.

# TENORI-OFF
FUKUCHI Kentaro writes:

TENORI-ON is one of the coolest electric musical device: it is portable, easy to play and good for audio-visual performance. But I have not purchased it yet because it is expensive and a shortage in Japan.

So he built his own version, the Tenori-Off.

Some interesting things I found on August 18th, 2008:

# Learning Reaktor: 10-Step Path to Building New Sequencers, Beatboxes, and Effects

Peter Kirn writes:

“What if you had to take just one software instrument with you to a desert island?” It’s not an entirely silly question, with so many choices in software potentially distracting you from real music making. I say, cheat: take a tool that lets you build your own tools, specific to the job. Reaktor immediately springs to mind.

# Echoplex Drum Simulator – Mike L’s Nine Inch Nails-inspired Echoplex Drum Simulator, a Windows drum sequencer.

# New Circle Sound bank available… – A new bank of 30 sounds for Circle, designed by Dajan Izzo is available on the Circle downloads page

# NOR_/D TouchKit – TouchKit is a modular multitouch development kit with the aim to make multitouch readily available in an open source fashion. It is a sister project of the CUBIT multitouch system and aimed at rapid implementation of multitouch projects.

# little-scale: Toriton Version 1.5 – Sebastian Tomczak upgrades his Toriton water surface instrument.

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.

# Underwater Microphone (Hydrophone) – Construct a inexpensive hydrophone out of things laying around your house.

action_owl writes:

I decided to put up this instructable because (to my surprise) no one has a hydrophone instructable up yet. I made mine using a mixture of other people’s hydrophone creations that I found through a google search and a bit of ingenuity.

# Circuit Bent | Modified Fab Echo – Unlocking the Fab Echo’s delay potential. Add a Delay Rate knob (speed of repeats), increase the mix knob to full wetness, and to give it full feedback (which literally makes it feedback). Modded LFO’s to the delay circuit that cause strange swirly sounds, and pitch bending weirdness.

# Create Your Own Guitar Effects Pedal – This is a general instructable about how to build your own pedal clones.

It’s not hard to do, just take care that you read up on some info beforehand. There’s numerous schematics and layouts on tonepad.

If it’s the first build you’re doing it’s best to start with the easier stuff, like a simple fuzz or overdrive.

# Review: Percussa AudioCubes

David Battino writes:

At present, AudioCubes shine as a cool-looking device for experimentation and live performance. Only you can say whether that novelty justifies the boutique price; the results will depend on your creativity.

# Isidore, the modular robot with CV lights – "My friend Louis shot this video while I was testing the voltage controlled lights with some 16 steps sequence MIDI running in cubase, then converted to CV by Doepfer MCV24. All sounds by Doepfer A100 modular synth."

# How to Deal with MIDI Clock Signals in Arduino – Sebastian Tomczak shares some generic Arduino skeleton code that could be used to synchronise many different types of things to MIDI clock (and therefore ProTools, Ableton Live etc — any type of host sequencer).