Sound of the Week - Whistle Bottle 05/04/2011
 I'm messing around some more with the Bottle waveform on the Malstrom. This sound is not breathy, but clean. It has something of whistling sound to it, but also a vocal quality. It's still a light, airy sound. I was inspired by the subtle sound of the blown bottles in Pat Metheny's Orchestrion, which you should definitely check out. 
Add Comment Sound of the Week - Breathy Bottle 04/21/2011
 This is a sound that uses two malstroms to produce a breathy, bottle kind of a sound. You can experiment with the mix between the 'pure' blown bottle and the breath noise in the Line Mixer that is in the combinator. Don't forget to add reverb!
Route BC Anywhere - Part 3 03/03/2011
This is the final installment of the Route Breath Control Anywhere series, and this time we are using Thor to route our Breath Control. We are going to take our breath data stream, send it to the CV outs on the back of Thor, and from there, to our devices. Finally, I will show you a technique to control the amount of breath data that is sent to each output, and control this via the front panel knobs on the combinator. Technique Number 3: Thor Routing Thor can be used as it was intended - a great synth. However, I have no intention of using it as it was intended! Thor is also an insane data processing unit, and we will use some of those capabilities here. In this case the data we want to process is our incoming breath data.
Sound of the week - Dual Malstrom 02/04/2011
 The sound of the week is the dual malstrom from the tutorial earlier this week. To find out all about it, read the tutorial.
Route Breath Control Anywhere - Part 2 02/01/2011
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. Getting StartedLet'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? Technique Number 2 - RPG-8 Arpeggiator Technique  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.
Tutorial - Route BC Anywhere part 1. 01/03/2011
In this two part tutorial we will dive deep into how many parameters we can control using just Breath control. When we blow into a wind controller (ANY wind controller) The breath pressure is converted to a continuous stream of MIDI data in the range of 0 - 127. 0 means we are not blowing at all, 127 means we are blowing pretty hard - hard enough to max out the sensor. When we buy a wind controller, this is really what we are buying - a way to use our breath (and horn fingerings) to control the sound coming from some sound source, either a synth or sampler, or some combination thereof. Getting StartedLet'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? Let's dive in. Technique Number 1: Combinator to the RescueIf you create a combinator and put a device into it, you can use the Combinator Programmer to control any parameter on that device. In this example we'll work with Malstrom, because presumably, you can't use BC (Breath Control) with it.  Initialized Combinator with a Malstrom. This is a Combinator with a Malstrom in it, and nothing is set up in the Modulation Routing section. Did you know that Breath is a valid Source in the Modulation Routing section?  Reason 5 Combi Source Parameters Here are the parameters I have available in Reason 5. I'll just select Breath and route it to what I want, in this case the Master Level on Malstrom, but it could be any parameter on any device.  Breath Controlling Master Level Voila! Instant Breath control over the output volume. I can even scale this so that the volume change isn't so drastic. I'll set it to 64-100. Now when Reason receives my Breath data in the range of 0-127, it will be linearly mapped to 64-100. The really sweet thing about using the combinator this way is that I can swap out the Malstrom patch and the Combinator routing holds - so any Malstrom patch I load into this thing will automagically be breath enabled. The other great thing about this technique is that mapped knobs and controls actually move when you blow. This gives you a visual indication as to how you are controlling the sound. Tips and Tricks
 Breath controlling Master Level and Mod Wheel Finishing UpAs I mentioned above, you can load any Malstrom patch into the Malstrom in the Combinator you just created and will instantly gain some degree of breath control. Check out the Malstrom patches in the Reason Factory Sound Bank. Or, you can get tons of Malstrom patches in the free refills section of Propellerheads web site. I highly recommend 'eXode - Massive Synthesis ReFill', which contains all of the other eXode ReFills on the page, plus some previously released commercial ReFills. If you scroll way down the page you will find '1001 Malstrom Refill' which is just what it says. It's a little more electic, but there are some useful patches if you dig around. In part two we will convert Breath data to CV and see what we can do with that. Happy Malstrom-ing! Announcing the Cyclone ReFill 08/16/2010
After months of programming and tweaking, I'm pleased to announce our first commercial ReFill - the Cyclone Wind Synthesizer for Reason. I wanted to create a Combinator that is a tool kit for Reason for wind controllers. The main idea is to load any sound into a Combinator and have it gain a great degree of breath response without having to reprogram each and every sound. I've largely succeeded with this ReFill, and you get 50 presets and an extensive user guide to get you started. I think you're really going to like it. Learn more at the product page.  | Reason ReFills
Rotator Volume 1 and Rotator Volume 2 Released!
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