This is just a plug for the Magic Moog Refill available for free on the Propellerheads free refill page.

For some reason I overlooked this before but it is a great little refill. There are a ton of Moog style patches, but the best part is the included pdf. The pdf has a nice history of Moog synthesizers and a tutorial on how the patches were made.

If you are just getting into sound design, this is a great place to start learning about the father of all synths, and why things are they way they are on Tho If you are experienced with Thor, the history alone is worth the download.

Happy Moog-ing!

The band I am in is starting rehearsals to get ready for the summer wedding season and I thought I would take a second look at my current batch of patches that I use. 

I thought my 'go to' brass patch could use an upgrade, so I found something in the Reason Factory Sound Bank and converted it to use breath control. 

You can use this sound with your EWI-USB, EWI4000s, WX7-5-11 or whatever wind controller you happen to have and, of course Reason. 

Next week, I'll have some time to beef it up with some effects and put it in a combinator. 

The sound of the week is the dual malstrom from the tutorial earlier this week. To find out all about it, read the tutorial.

In the first part of this series, we talked about using the Combinator to route BC to any parameter in any device. In this installment, we will use CV.

Even though Breath is supported in Reason as one of the standard performance controllers along with expression and after touch different devices have varying levels of support for it. In this tutorial I'll discuss a technique you can use to route your breath control information as CV to any device. 

Let's dive in. 

Let's run down what we can control 'out of the box' with the various Reason devices. We'll examine the parameters directly accessible via BC from the front panel:
Subtractor: Filter 1 Frequency, LFO 1, Amp, FM
NN-19: Filter Frequency, LFO, Amp
NN-XT: Filter Frequency, Mod Decay, LFO1 Amt, Filter Resonance, Level, LFO1 Rate.
Malstrom: Nothing
Thor: Anything (via Mod Routing)

This is not a bad list at all, and you can, in fact, make tons of great patches with just the front panel controls, except for Malstrom, which has no BC front panel controls. 

But what if... you want breath to control Subtractor's noise oscillator, or the filter resonance on NN-19, or anything on Malstrom? Or even control parameters on a Scream 4 distortion?

Unique to the RPG-8 Arpeggiator are CV Performance Conrol outputs including Breath! That means we can put the RPG-8 in a Combinator, get our Breath data as CV and route  it to other devices.