Hi All

Today I did a demo of Cystal using the new soundbanks. Have a listen..may not be as good as some your guys stuff, but it gives you an idea of what Crystal can do.

What follows are my notes and where it is.
If you would like to hear my other MP3, you can go to my music page on my site. ( see sig way below:-) I mostly use algorithmic stuff in my music, so you might find it interesting.

Tim

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Crystal Nebulae 3MB


http://www.artsong.org/cnf/Warehouse/17172757_crystal_nebulae.mp3

This piece uses the Crystal Softsynth exclusivly as well as my custom set of patches for it. A blend of techno meets Klaus Shultz.
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Crystal Softsynth by Glenn Olander
http://www.greenoak.com/vst.html

Bank1

http://tamw.atari-users.net/TimsCrystalBank.zip

Bank 2

http://tamw.atari-users.net/TimsCrystalBank2.zip
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Notes and comments

The piece opens up with a set of patches: Chaos Theory (from bank 1)and Outer Spheres( bank2)this glides into the rythm section created with the special Motif creation part of Crystal.

To create the rythms I had 3 instances of Crystal using Orion as host. All of them used a different motif. ( Quasar, Tasty and Spiral point from bank2) With 3 instances, the CPU never got more then 45% with 1 note, which is pretty good! I played them realtime.

Then did a lead/pad track consisting first of the patch PolyeStar (bank2) which leads into Velvet Strings (bank1). These strings create a haunting melody in the fashion of Klaus Shultz. Then Moog Space ( bank1) and two other analog type patches. One of them had a spiraling modulation effect which goes off into space.

The piece closes with ORB2 from bank2.

All of this was recorded onto my trusty 4 track cassette and mixed to PC using sound Forge. Then converted to Mp3 using Music match.

Had a lot of fun and also learned from from creating this short piece.

Tim Conrardy
9-17-03

This sounds great Tim. really nice and squelchy. I can really hear the Klaus Schultz influence. You've done some great work lately. And I listened to some of the stuff from your page. Pretty spacey!
just one question:

Quote:

All of this was recorded onto my trusty 4 track cassette and mixed to PC using sound Forge. Then converted to Mp3 using Music match.

Why did you do all this?

I like this a lot. I have but one question (rare for me):

Did you use a sequencer for this? Or does Crystal come with one?

bluedad wrote:

This sounds great Tim. really nice and squelchy. I can really hear the Klaus Schultz influence. You've done some great work lately. And I listened to some of the stuff from your page. Pretty spacey!

Thanks...the atari stuff can be pretty cool, and when you combine it with all this new stuff, it gets pretty interesting.

Quote:

All of this was recorded onto my trusty 4 track cassette and mixed to PC using sound Forge. Then converted to Mp3 using Music match.

Why did you do all this?[/quote]

Well...I guess I could record bits and pieces as waves and put it together on the PC, but using an external 4 track is more intuitive and allows me better flow and hands on( real knobs). I suppose the next Toy could be an external digital recorder, but for now...this works fine. I use cool edit pro to dehiss it however, and it sounds pretty clean. Does it sound like I used a $150.00 4 track cassette for this piece?

well, it sounds fine, but why didn't you mix and render from orion?
(just out of curiosity)

Mo Verdigast wrote:

I like this a lot. I have but one question (rare for me): Did you use a sequencer for this? Or does Crystal come with one?

Hi...no...a sequencer was not used for this piece( although I guess I could have) Its basically 2 tracks, 2 channels each on the 4 track cassette.

I first recorded the motif stuff ( which is like 3 sequences going at the same time) to 2 tracks stereo on the 4 channel.: Live.

Then did the pad/lead stuff on the other two tracks , while recording stereo, as some of the leads and patches were very stereo. Basically I paused the recorder, switched to a new sound in Crystal, then took it off pause, and kept playing, pausing, select a new sound, and start again.ect.

I think this would have been very difficult to do on a sequencer and would have bogged the CPU down heavily. How do you guys do it?

oh, I see your logic now..

Quote:

I think this would have been very difficult to do on a sequencer and would have bogged the CPU down heavily. How do you guys do it?

When things get too heavy, I render a track or two to wav and plug it in as an audio track.

Hi Tim thanks I enjoyed the tune a lot

Quote:

I think this would have been very difficult to do on a sequencer and would have bogged the CPU down heavily. How do you guys do it?

Start a new track with another instance of the VSTi on it with the
new patch, then start the recording at the end of the previous track.

Opening a new instance of the VSTi will raise the CPU a tad but if
the insances are not playing simultainously the CPU raise should
be negligable

very nice work Tim. from the Klaus period around Mirage and Timewind -- that subtle lead line about midway and then i could almost predict when the pan pipes should be coming in.

that fellow influenced a lot of e-musicians -- when most e-music was new age wallpaper, Klaus had a very driving moving sense. It's nice for me to hear this sort of tribute in song and your presets, esp. the motif work.

even your way of working 'live' to tape follows in that tradition. it's one way of getting around cpu overload problems, but not everyone can actually play well enough to do that, so us fumbly fingered types set up track sequences and too often get wrapped up in a lot of polishing. I'm kind of glad I run into cpu problems when I get too ambitious. It doesn't hurt me yet to simplify.

again very nice work.