That was an interesting experience, I’m proud that I managed not to make it sound like horrible noises too much.
Even if it was just a handful of people, knowing there’s an audience immediately changes how I interact with the instrument, there’s no more muting channels to isolate problems. I was often doing things not being quite sure they had an effect at all, and not knowing my setup so well, which made for a very conservative performance. Still, it gave me a lot of thoughts how to improve at this. I’ll be doing more streams once in a while.
Yeah, I was still uploading it to youtube! I added it to the post.
It seems there’s supposed to be a tool to link twitch and youtube accounts, but I didn’t see it on mine… maybe it’s a service you have to be grandfathered in, with amazon and google and other feudal masters always having little proxy wars at our expense. Takes forever to upload it yourself.
Edit: The stream is over! Here’s the replay on Youtube:
It went to pretty harsh, glitchy dissonant territory this time. A few computer performance issues on this one, so I stopped the stream after an hour. Sorry for the few video freezes.
Here’s also a short excerpt on Soundcloud if you prefer:
One thing I couldn’t show in the video above but might be of interest is how I integrated Reason 11 to the performance. See also my dedicated thread about this:
First, the Kong drum machine. I’m using Nektarine since it’s the most reliable of them all for instruments. Very straightforward setup, I send it notes it outputs to two stereo pairs. (Kick/Snare, and Hi-hat/Percs)
The other one is more complex. I use Elements, since I need to process audio from VCV (Nektarine can’t do that) and in that Elements I have two Reason instances (the Reason VST has only two pairs of Audio inputs, so I need two instances).
The second instance contains the “master” section, and by master I mean I just squash this mess with a brutal limiter. It also contains a Neptune, to auto-tune incoming microphone audio, with the industry standard Cher Effect to sound like a vocoder. It’s then recorded and live lopped in VCV’s Luppolo3 for texture.
Look at this! Just found out your stuff while looking for fixed rack examples and philosophies. Very interesting. So are you still using a fixed rack? Maybe you expanded the one you started with?
Cheers
Sure do, same evolving setup for half a year that I use every so often. It went through many changes since the start. I swap things in and out all the time, so it barely resembles how it started out. It’s the one I use in my occasional streams (see a few posts above).
Mainstays are everything Vult, GTG mixers, BPM LFO, all those 3hp Bogaudio utilities, Erica Black Wavetable VCO, Plaits, Impromptu Clocked, and of course, the Turing Machine.
Not that happy with this quick patch as a song, but I’m trying out a few interesting techniques:
selectively writing zeroes on the turing machine while it’s locked to dial down the rhythmic density of some elements
having Dopamine improvise on a keyboard riff
And more importantly, trying out the newly released Prok drums. Those bad boys are really CPU hungry! Hard to budget for them in my fixed rack. But they do sound great. The author is aware of the issue and mentioned they will try to improve CPU usage in the future, too.
Not pictured in the video: a few Reason effects on the mixer buses (chorus, delay, reverb, compression) and MIDI I/O.
Tonight’s jam turned out pretty fun, I’m glad I recorded it, despite having not prepared at all before performing.
A handful of slightly jarring noises at times unfortunately, but I like how it turned out.
Even discovered a fun trick for my module in development, Modulus Salomonis Regis, while playing (you can send queue step pulse 2x as fast toggle the queue keep/reset mode to enable/disable double time runs)
Aria - This is refreshing stuff. I listen to a tune, recognise I love its style, next. I’ve listened to your “Banquet” thrice. A shit ton of great sounds and surprises in Banquet, and loads of go fuck yourself moments till it suddenly all makes sense, then on to the next chapter.
Just received a Novation Launch Control XL in the mail! What better way to use all those knobs than some filter house? I only bound a few controls to avoid being overwhelmed.
Solomon’s House
This shows off live patching my new module, Modulus Salomonis Regis, around the middle.
What I’m doing is pretty unorthodox, intentionally, so I end up with an instrument that’s truly mine:
Every Host instance you see is a Reason Rack. Not pictured - opening them hangs the UI thread for like 15 seconds.
Fader 8 scrolls the rack, and the knob above it changes the opacity
Fader 1-6 are mixer channels, but they do not control the GTG mixer - they control the Vult Send! This way, if I have no send, it’s a normal fader, but if I add a send, it’s a crossfader.
Fader 7 is for the kick - it has no send and is wired specially for side-chain compression
The 7 knobs above the 7 first channels control the Vult Disjoint. Filtering is the only way to (almost) mute channels with a send. The disjoint is the input point of every channel.
The two sends on the GTG mixer go to my favorite delay and chorus in Reason and are set up manually.
The first button below each mixer track sends audio to Chronoblob, pre-crossfader. The “Send Select” buttons and the two knobs next to it control it. It’s used purely as an effect for mangling, not as a smooth delay.
The first button below each mixer track sends audio to a Reason Rack, where a Combinator is programmed to enable up to 4 different effect. The 4 buttons to the bottom-right of the Launch Control toggle those effects (I have patched them to be latches rather than momentary)
Four remaining buttons are assigned to the Big Button sequencer
The rest of the knobs control: 2x2 Vult Knobs to be assigned as needed, 4 additional filters, the Turing Machine, the Big Button sequencer channel, Grids densities and X axis
Two more quick performances with my “fixed” (by which I mean ever-changing) rack using the launch control:
Yazetoowohk
A lot of the Reason magic that makes this rack tick is offscreen. The vocal synth is a barely edited Parsec (reason additive synth) preset, because I had no clue how to make it sing something different, editing the parameters would just destroy the effect lol.
Heckdoomed Bells of Heck
Trying my hand at a mostly percussive piece.
I need to record videos that show me operating the controller, I guess!
I made this little picture for myself to display on a secondary screen to remind me of my bindings :
This one isn’t interesting as a song, but it showcases a way of using QQQQ to make chords that are part of a scale. Can you figure out how it works? Voices are color-coded for your convenience.
Trying to figure out why people even like Clouds in this one. Never got anything special out of it, but
I figured Supercell being out for 1.x was an occasion to actually sit down and try to get decent sounds out of it.