David’s Music Blog

mindXpander have been booked for a new live gig on the 19^th of February.

More info can be found on our Facebook page.

David mindXpander Live, live gig, mindXpander

There’s a preview of a new Ypsilon 5 track uploaded at the Ypsilon 5 Facebook page.

Have a listen and comment if you like, or dislike, it!

David Ypsilon 5 Ypsilon 5

I teamed up with Patrik to do a remix of “Tricky Tricky” by Röyksopp for their remix competitions. Since we joined ventures on this on we also had to give it a great name - “Gearsluts International vs Pretorium Remix”- and that is exactly what it is. Fingers crossed that it goes all the way this time.

Patrik and I have also started to work more seriously on the upcoming mindXpander album.

It’s going to be an interesting autumn - that’s for sure.

David Remix, mindXpander mindXpander, Remix

If you’re a mindXpander fan I urge you to listen to the next episode of Magic Beat on Radio Nova. There will be a Norbergfestival coverage, so tune in.
For real. Do it! Surprises are coming up!

On Friday at 21:00 CET (9pm for 12-hour readers) you should point your browsers to http://www.radionova.no/ and klick “LYTT” up in the left corner. That’s it. The programme is in Norwegian but who cares? The music’s great! ;o)

I also think you should be a fan at our Facebook page.

I’m having a Richard X moment at the office right now. Here’s my Richard X playlist at Spotify.

David mindXpander Jingle, Magic Beat, mindXpander, Norbergfestival, spacesynth

I’ve been a Clavia Nord Modular G2 user/patcher/programmer/tweaker (pick any that applies) for over 4 years, and I’ve been using the ‘classic’ version (a borrowed Nord Micro Modular) for 3 years before the G2 era. It’s an amazing machine and I’ve seen some people doing some “crazy shit” with it. By the way, if you have a lot of spare time you can dig through this.

I got Native Instruments Komplete a week ago but I haven’t had the time to install it until today, and I only installed a few of its components to start with - Absynth and Reaktor. After reading through the first 50, or so, pages of the Reaktor manual - yes, I’m one of the very few who actually reads an Operational Manual - I started building my first synthesizer.

In the Nord Modular you start off by adding an oscillator and connect it to an amplitude envelope generator before connecting the envelope to the outputs. You also need to connect a gate signal cable to the gate input of the envelope generator. That’s an extremely basic, and quite boring, sound. In Reaktor, however, you start by connecting a gate to the an envelope and the envelope to the input of an oscillator. If you only connect the oscillator directly to the output you won’t hear a thing. But if you connect a Nord Modular oscillator directly to the output you’ll hear a drone - an E4 if I’m not mistaken. So Reaktor actually feels a bit backwards, as I wrote in my tweet earlier today. I’ll probably get the hang of it but I must say that I think the Clavia approach is more logical. Besides that, I really love the way Reaktor is structured (pun intended - but you probably need to be a Reaktor user to get it, sorry) with building blocks and macros and so on. That’s something the Nord Modular G2 is lacking. I’ll try to recreate some of my G2 patches next week if I’m too bored with composing new songs. I know they won’t sound the same, but it’ll just be for fun and I might discover something cool to blog about.

The downside of having a powerful tool as Komplete 5 at your hands is that it actually CAN affect your creativity in a negative way. But it’s just sooo darn fun tweaking, patching and fiddling around with all the nifty tools and toys!

Any hint on where I can find some cool graphics to use in my panels?

Happy patching fellow Reaktorians!

David Hardware, Software, Synthesizers Clavia, Hardware, Native Instruments, Nord Modular, Reaktor, Software, Twitter