This is an old entry that I haven’t published until now…

I’m facing extremely irritating problems with my DAW at the moment. Nothing really works, at all, sort of.

Motu have finally released the new firewire driver for Windows 7 so I could, for the first time ever, use my Motu 828mkII under Windows 7. My Windows 7 installation hasn’t crashed a single time (since February) until now – when I’ve applied this driver. I’m not using Windows 7 to produce music since I haven’t had a functioning sound card (no – the crap on my mainboard is nothing remotely close to a sound card even though it can produce sound). So I’ve been using Windows Vista (64 bit Ultimate edition) which have been a solid platform. Cubase 4 have always had its little bugs and quirks but have been marching on rather good still. I bought Native Instruments Komplete 5 when it was on a big sale last summer and that’s when things started to happen. Absynth can take down everything upon loading. It’s actually a gamble using it and that’s why I haven’t explored it as much as I would. Reaktor, Kontakt, Massive and FM8 works nice though, so that’s what I’m using the most at the moment. I thought about upgrading to Komplete 6 but there’s no point when the shit doesn’t work - is there? And that’s in Vista. It works like a charm on my newly purchased MacBook Pro.

Back to Windows 7. After the driver for the Motu 828mkII have been installed the system is anything but stable. It can crash when I hit play in Winamp, then the screen-saver starts or when the login prompt is shown. Motu won’t acknowledge the problem and my only solution is not to use Windows 7, which I’m luckily only has a free trial version of.

But, I’ve managed to produce two remixes for the Little Boots remix competition. One co-produced with Patrik and one on my own.

Patrik’s own, Gearsluts remix, can be found here:
Little Boots - “Earthquake (Gearsluts Shaky 16th Remix)”

Neither of them got to the finals, but we’re still very pleased with them anyway.

I’ve also produced a remix for “My Despair” by In Strict Confidence and that competition will be decided in March. Fingers crossed!

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!