Studio Notes

Reflection DAW

I've been having a dalliance with Reflection, a DAW currently under development that takes the philosophy and feel of my beloved AudioMulch and updates it for the 21st century. It honestly feels like I'm cheating on a lover.

The UI is excellent - it retains that wonderfully intuitive feel, and without even trying, my muscle memory is already being retrained. There are a few things I miss, but it's evolving at such a pace that I'm sure they'll be on board before long. Some of Mulch's more esoteric features, like the Metasurface, are already recreated pitch-perfect.

Best of all, 64-bit plugins are fully supported, which would mean a clean sweep of my old resources and starting again from scratch (maybe bridging a couple of old favourites). There's something appealing about that, a clean start with no safety net and discovering a new lease of creativity in the process.

Although I'm not a heavy MIDI user, some of the generative devices are brilliantly flexible for sequencing, and it also contains a DIY Lab for rolling your own plugins. It feels like a thoughtful intermeshing of some of the best aspects of Mulch, Ableton and even Max/MSP. Version 2 can be downloaded as a free demo. Highly recommended.

reflection-daw.com

A second Relocations

Turning over the concept of a follow-up to Relocations. The first grew out of Chris Summerlin's guitar phrases; this time I'm drawn to much the same, but leaning the rhythmic feel toward Middle-Eastern patterns and modes, and letting the tape delay and re-amping pull them somewhere less expected. There's the possibility of transliterating patterns from playing Doumbek, Davul et al. into MIDI and driving the same creaking drum machines. With some suitably Eastern guitar parts and drones, I think this could be terrific.

Nothing but vaporware for now, but I'm listening to a lot of hand drums and taking mental notes. If it happens it'll be the same process as ever, only pointed at different ground.

Kontakte

I've been experimenting with a contact mic as a sound source, converting its output in the software domain via an audio-to-MIDI plugin. It's been intriguing to drive softsynths and other sound-generation contraptions from the sparkle and decay of, say, a struck cymbal.

This turned out to be the secret sauce behind a late track swap on Grisaille (upcoming release), I'm delighted with the result.