Since that Daichi chap doesn’t have the English manual for Synth1 updated in accordance to the latest version (and probably doesn’t intend to change this any time soon), I tweaked the effects in the plug-in and understood what every effect does (with the extensive help of the Japanese manual translated using Google when it came to the compressor and the spectrum analyzer in Renoise with the phasers). This is a reference for me and for anyone else who stumbles upon this blog some time. I’m thinking of making a full and updated guide to the plug-in now… for some reason.

Notes:

• a.d.1 and a.d.2 are different, but with all my slightly-bigger-than-average knowledge in synthesis, I have no idea what algorithms are used. Same for d.d. (though it’s clear that this effect is impossible to replicate using analog electronics).
• “Level” and “Mix” are different: a “level” effect will mute everything when it’s 0, but “mix” effects adjust the dry/wet percentages. I have no idea why there are only two effects using “mix”, but you can use an external effect any time in any case.
• I don’t care if you don’t know how a compressor or whatever works.
• Tell me if I missed or screwed anything in a comment. Compliments and condemning are also welcome (though I’d rather you avoid the latter). Ah, what the hell, nobody’s ever going to read this.
• Version used – 1.07 (the latest, and probably the last).

When I enabled viewing hidden files for a while and stumbled upon my D: drive directory, I noticed a folder titled “diary”. Inside, there was a ZIP archive with the same name and a “password.txt” file. I opened the archive, opened the text file inside and entered the password provided in the text file when requested. Inside, there were five diary entries by myself, spanning a period from March to June 2005! I’m not going to post them, since this is private stuff, but here’s a few things I found out, and was reminded of, from reading it.

• Strangely, I didn’t remember this diary-keeping attempt.
• My skills in English grammar were even weaker than they are now.
• My former obsession with everything Mega Man came from reading “Bob and George”, and not the other way around.
• Half my thoughts at the time were occupied with school, the other half – with computers, especially downloading things from eMule and Shareaza, and #bobandgeorge.
• I was just as horrible at keeping a regularly-updated diary as I am now.

It was really fun to read through what I was thinking at the age of eleven. I was in sixth grade back then – that’s still elementary school! It was obvious to me even without calculations – my friends from the elementary are mentioned here and there. I remember getting a broadband connection to the Internet not a long time before this period.

Right now, I’m feeling pretty bad about my current lack of a proper way to make (to be exact, render) new music, so I think about releasing a small “B-side quality outtakes”-type album to compensate for this. Some people apparently like my music, so I want to show what my brain’s like on jamming.

Right now, I have a couple of nearly ten minute-long mediocre monsters created with ReBirth RB-338 and a piece of four-minute long simple drone music made with SynFactory that I think of including there. I think of attempting ambient music in ReBirth (since my current ReBirth-related output is overdosed on distortion and resonance sweeps on the 303 clones… damn it, I love ReBirth) and figuring out SynFactory some more – beyond sine wave drones and frequency modulation, anyway. Learning how to use sequence modules without any documentation provided will be fun, I’m sure.

I don’t like commercial software. I hate its price. I don’t like being confined to one operating system.
I’m never satisfied with computer music software I use, so, for the hell of it, here’s most of the features a perfect DAW should have, in my opinion.

• Free (as in price).
  As I said before, I hate it when I like a program, but it’s commercial, and since I can’t pay for anything, I can’t use it. Plus, software typically costs a lot, and I don’t have the budget of a studio. So, this is an idiot’s dream, but my perfect DAW would be free. Besides, everyone likes freebies, not only me.
• Free (as in usage).
  Since I was once crazed about using only open-source software on my Windows computer, and still am (but not to such a degree), I won’t go into much detail on this one, except noting that open source would aid further development and expanding of the project greatly.
• Cross-platform.
  In the world of computer music, Linux users are almost always ignored, and while the Mac platform is prominent – if not dominant – in professional studios, audio software doesn’t always support it either. This especially applies to Linux, since it’s free (as in cost). Also, since it would be open-source, users of countless other operating systems could’ve port it to their countless Unix derivatives.
• Support for [the] many important formats and standards.
  VST, RTAS, Audio Units, LADSPA, LV2, Ogg, MP3, FLAC, AIFF, OpenSound Control, you name it. Of course, there would be problems, such as with ReWire and REX, licensing of whom requires a valid company ownership, but as of writing this post, I don’t really care about that.
• Good-looking.
  Enough said.
• Different and interchangeable MIDI editors.
  Sometimes, when I visit Renoise forums, I notice messages along the lines of “thank you, Renoise, you prevented me from being confined to the note roll editor for the rest of my life!” (“note roll editor” as in the MIDI clip editors in Reason, Cubase, Tracktion, etcetera). Why, I’m sure that if Renoise was more widely used, people on the forums dedicated to a specific note roll editor would post things like “thank you, [insert note roll editor here], you prevented me from being confined to a tracker-style note arranger for the rest of my life!”.
  This is a feature I’d want the most: being able to switch between MIDI editors in radically different styles. For example, one could switch between a note roll editor (Reason, Cubase[...]), a tracker-style interface (Renoise, MadTracker, “old school” trackers[...]), and a drum programmer in the style of TR-808, TR-909 and ReDrum, that would trigger selected MIDI notes. This would increase the flexibility and versatility of the software, and reduce the moans from people that don’t like a specific type of note arranging.

Here’s my stupid vision of the perfect way of making music on the computer. Laugh away and blame me for being a communist, not a Linux user, broke, and whatever else that comes to your mind.

Currently, I’m bursting with ideas for new music. Unfortunately, I can’t evolve them past their statuses as ideas.

I’m using Renoise for this, but I’m not registered, meaning I have no idea if these ideas will ever get rendered to WAVE files or not.
It’s affordable (50 euros is, I believe, much less than other hosts), but I have no way to pay for it. Now that I think about it, mail order can be an option, though I have no idea how I’d pull it off.
Also, Renoise’s pattern-based flow is apparently not for me. Sometimes I write ideas too long for its 512 row limitation, and sometimes I just want to improvise using pattern ideas and tweaking parameters in plug-ins. This probably means Ableton Live is more geared towards my style, but it’s much more expensive, and it doesn’t run too smoothly on my computer. Yes, I still have 256 megabytes of RAM.

Nevertheless, I have already finished three tracks in Renoise. One of them is seven minutes long, which is, I suppose, unusual for my standards. I’m using more reverb and delay effects than distortion, so the sound differs from my EP, though not by much, since it’s still me that tweaks those VST instruments and makes up new melodies and rhythms on the spot.
The first one I finished stems from my will to show people what ‘real’ industrial music sounds like. I didn’t listen to much, though, so that probably means I’m just a poser. It uses samples of a train departing and a banana frog, a granular percussion plug-in, and a TR-808/909-inspired drum plug-in. How that actually sounds is up to your imagination.
The second one is in 5/4. It’s not a novel time signature to me, because I worked with it when producing my unreleased Celldweller remix. Here I discovered the Ex commands in the volume column, and used them for some snare rushes.
The third one is the seven minutes-long one I mentioned before. It uses a filtered and reverberated piano SoundFont with lots of resonance, and samples Brad Sucks in a glitch-like sequence. I was running back and forth between my keyboard and the computer, because I got the idea for the piano melodies while playing on the keyboard. That made me think a bit about what it would’ve been like when assisted with MIDI.

As you can see, my new material is using samples. I’m only using samples that clarify they’re under a license I’m comfortable with, though, such as Creative Commons or Sampling Plus. This means I’ll have to change the license in some places because of the “Share Alike” clause in some cases, but right now I don’t think about it and just have fun sampling. Recently, I made a sketch that uses only looped samples from CIRC’s “ungugued”.
I also wonder how can I release the source files for this project – if I’ll ever get to.