This week we have  fairly standard moog style lead, inspired by the Magic Moog Refill you can get for free from the Propellerheads web site. This is a particularly expressive patch, and I can see using it on ballads or up tempo electronica.

I've been a little lax with the sounds of the week lately - it's been more like the sound of the month. That's what happens when you have to figure life into your life - PLUS I'm working on some really cool new projects. 

Since the gigging season is starting soon (as least for me) I thought I would share some patches for tunes that I'm learning in the pop/cover band I'm in. 

We are playing 'Last Name' by Carrie Underwood, and I'll be covering a banjo and fiddle. On the recording, the fiddle player does a lot with double stops, so I layered in another violin a perfect fourth below the main one. The second violin is only triggered when velocity (translated as attack strength on the EWI) is above 108.

The bottom part of the range is a banjo, just for fun. 

Next time you play a country tune, you can break out the fiddle and banjo! Fun stuff!

The other advantage as a horn player, is that I don't have to lay out this tune, since there are no horns on it. That keeps me musically relevant in the band.

I'm working on a new project and have been creating some breath controlled NN-XT patches. Sometimes there are many layers in one patch - for example, a brass section with trumpets, trombone, and a few saxes.

What I found was I wanted to work on one zone (say the Tenor sax) without hearing the other zones (trumpets and trombones) and the NN-XT doesn't have a 'mute zone' button. The best you can do is turn the Volume down on the zone you don't want to hear, which is inconvenient to say the least.

Here is a technique that I started using when working on NN-XT sounds, especially one with a lot of layers.

Well, we are still playing around with that basic Thor patch. I'm working on a new project and creating a little library of variations on this basic sound. This  patch uses two state variable filters for that distinctive Oberheim sound. 

Remember, you can beef up this sound with a Scream 4. Try the 'HalfInch' Scream 4 patch found in the Reason Factory Sound Bank (Scream 4 Patches -> Warm Saturation). Try some reverb, too, and have fun.

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.

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.