Alchemy available in logic now

[B_Stone]

Thank you for explaining his impressive credentials. Sounds like a talented, experienced sound designer.

Still, I've spent the past day crawling through this document looking over each area of improvement. My personal, objective opinion is that these are quite useful changes. Its definitely incremental in areas, which is awesome! I know that talking about how good something sounds is kind of boring, so here are some concrete observations which you may or may not share..

Spectral
Adding something like support for stereo spectral synthesis may seem insignificant to some, but IMO makes a big difference. I was just doing some sound design with loops in the audio domain and bounced a stereo file. It played back beautifully, even time stretched/pitch shifted several octaves. Yesterday, I was playing with the spectral engine with drum loops and it sounded really clear and punchy. This was another thing that was mentioned "clearer transients". I have to say, I found these small incremental improvements pretty awesome.

Granular
Adding multiple taps for granular with stereo spread was a lot of fun too. I imported some voices samples from Alchemy's sample library. They sound a lot like the Dream Voices source audio files. I bought that for 1.5 and loved it. Anyhow, I imported a voice and used the multiple taps. It produced some really impressive results. Especially with the stereo spread on. It takes a mono audio recording and made a shockingly beautiful voice cloud. I was able to get similar results in 1.5, but with multiple taps I think it sounds good pulling bits from all over the file simultaneously. Another incremental change, but holy cow, I thought it was impressive sounding.

Formant
I am a bit foggy about this in 1.5. I think this was a filter menu option before. Now its an entire category. While making my way through the feature list and trying stuff out, I got hung up on this feature for a long while.. maybe an hour or so creating crazy vocalizations and bizarre transformations. When used as part of resynthesis, it provides a lot of control over the formant (tonal/filter) characteristics of the source material. You can do the simple stuff like making a woman sound like a man, but for me, I love the opportunity to get those lovely tiny vocal effects. It sounds lovely, especially playing into the delay/reverb. The synthesized formants are maybe even more unusual. I was able to get some very 'vocal' sounding wobble sounds. Lovely stuff and if you are messing about with Alchemy I recommend checking this out with MSEG. I was able to use the MSEG to drive the formant controls to get some wacky vocalization effects. Again, this is a huge sound design tool. Its hard to imagine why anyone wouldn't like this.

Morphing
I have to admit, I'm still messing about with this, but I was trying out the white paper I posted earlier. One of the processes outlined there is about morphing two drum loops. I got really hung up on this for a while because its so easy to make totally new and strangely awesome new loops that sound kind of like the source material but really different. I swear I was hearing stuff that wasn't in either loop. I have no idea why, but the whole thing was inspiring and a lot of fun. With all of the amazing loops in the library and my own collection, I feel like I have a new process for creating unique performances. I was going to get into morphing some melodic material next. Anyhow, my point is. I couldn't do this at all in 1.5, and again seems pretty sweet. Definitely worth a go if you have Logic 10.2.

Virtual Analog
This is a welcome change. I always found the VA as a sub-feature of Additive a bit odd. Good news is that they left the feature in the additive engine and there are somethings it can do that the new separate VA can't do. For me, the highlights are the Sync control, which is just awesome. You can get totally new sounds that I believe were impossible before. One thing that I thought was a nice touch is they added a dedicated noise control. It has more or less what you might expect, white, pink, brown noise.. good for all those filtered noise tones.. but they also have vinyl noise, and carpet, liquid, radio static, and a bunch of others. I was not expecting that. Its something that you could have done in the past, but would have taken wasting an entire source just to add noise. Now you have a dedicated noise generator build in. Its a small, incremental change, but again, provides bump that is inspiring. The vinyl noise gives sounds a boards of canada vibe. This also is small but they now show the shape of the wave. I found it useful because as I step through the various waves I could see how complex it was immediately. Not critical, but a welcome addition.

Arpeggiator
This was the first thing I played with. I really love how you can have one per source. That's actually pretty useful and changes the scope of what's possible in Alchemy. There's a new editor called Multi that makes it easier to program multiple attributes of the arp within a single page. Definitely worth checking out. One thing they mentioned in list of new features, which I haven't used yet, is the option to modulate the pattern control. This means you could theoretically, come up with multiple variations of patterns, and then use a Random hold LFO to add random variation to the arp so it does't always repeat the same way. Seems like the kind of thing bands like Autechre would use to great effect. I will return to this later to see if I can make something worthy of the potential. There's also two modulation outputs per arpeggiator that can be used to control other parameters. I was having fun using this with the source filters. Its like having an arp which can have unique filter states per step. I feel like I am only unlocking the potential for this one now. I'm sure someone like Sampleconstruct could do an even better job of finding a use for it.

Effects
So, there are a few new effects, and they are fine. Convolution reverb is sweet! But, I think there are three things I love most about the update.
1. I can reorder the effects. It almost seems insane you couldn't do this in 1.5.
2. I can use as many of each effect as I need. If I want to have 3 Acoustic Reverbs to create big messy drones, I can. Before, I believe I was limited to only one. So, having the limits removed is a big deal.
3. I never saw this as a limitation in 1.5, but now that I have this feature, I find it impossible to think I'd ever not want this. You can have separate effects racks for each source. This means 4 routing paths, and then the output of these is fed to a final 'master' output rack. This means that I can use the final output rack for mastering, compression/eq, etc and then use the individual source racks for more specialized processing. Reverb on one source, delay on another, dry and compressed on another.

I think the changes to the effects are pretty awesome.

Modulation
Admittedly, I've not gotten that into it yet, but.. There are a few things that are pretty useful.
1. AHDSR w/ Sync for each phase. Its useful to have the option to control each phase and have it follow the tempo of my song. Controlling filters was a lot of fun. Oh, the graphical editing is also a lot easier for me to work with too. I did fine without it in 1.5, but something about the visual is really convenient.
2. Locked performance controls.. I had wanted this in 1.5 so many times. It was painful sometimes to deal with this limitation. I know its a small detail, but it comes in handy.
3. named remix pads - I haven't created any myself yet, but I noticed something interesting in the library. As I loaded different sounds with names on the pads, it was a lot more intuitive. When I stumbled on a preset with no names and the old 1.5 numbers. It feels like I'm flying blind. This is a small detail, but for me made it more predictable, which is always welcome.
4. Envelope followers.. at first I wasn't sure what this was going to be like.. I used it when I was doing drum loop morphing. Its really fun to use this as a way to had rhythmic feel to your parameters.. I used it on the Xcite distortion effect to find and add edge where the peaks were. Its a bit odd, but sounds cool. Its like a dynamic drive effect.

Drag & Drop
Not sure if this is listed anywhere, but I discovered that you can drag and drop audio files directly onto the sources. This is a really nice convenience. No more opening the import window.

Import window
This is a breath of fresh air too. Its incremental but it works so much better. The drop zone feature is great for brining in multiple files at once, but I used it mostly to drag and drop audio from Finder. I was using the window when i wanted to change from spectral to granular.. or sampler.

Ok, so some of these things may be small to a big time sound designer, but in practice, I found them to be pretty useful. I am already a Logic user and a 1.5 user, so I found the features to be quite helpful.

I definitely recommend you dig into it for yourself.. for some it won't be enough, for others, it will seem radical, but I suspect for a lot of peeps this will feel like a completely new instrument.

[B_Stone]

holy crap, I had no idea I typed so much.. oh well, enjoy my incomplete mini review.. I'm still making my way through some of the features. I'm sure everyone will have a different perspective, but so far, I'm thrilled!

[Sampleconstruct]

Are you being paid to do this?

[B_Stone]

Are you being paid to do this?

No, I'm on too much coffee I think.. I don't think I've ever written so much anywhere.. haha. oh well..

[B_Stone]

I was reading the reply from Neon Breath.. I suppose I was feeling like I had no credibility. So, if I wanted to express my opinion, I'd better be more specific about what I've enjoyed so far. I have a long ways to go with Alchemy, but this update did seem pretty solid to me.

edit: perhaps I'm sensing something like this.. there are a lot of little things, and sometimes that adds up to feeling like a big thing. To me, Logic has been like this. Loads of little things, but when you have enough of them in an update, it feels more significant. For example, my favorite feature in the 10.2 update is the very simple, but oh so useful option which reverses regions. Its something I love to do, but it was some work in the past to reverse a region.

I need to lay off the coffee

[dredd i knight]

Don't worry about it! This is the place to talk a lot, and everybody else does.
Plus it's good to see at least someone have some positive things to say!

[Sampleconstruct]

A first test:

[Sampleconstruct]

Resynthesizing simple sounds in additive mode like the oud pluck in this video works alright, the new features like Stretch/Spread/Beating/Shift/Magnet can yield some interesting timbral things.

[Jace-BeOS]

This makes the $199 cost to go from Logic 9 to X much more palatable. I'm also glad I hadn't invested in Alchemy before (the file browser's lack of file system updates/refreshes was not functional for my working methodology). I was interested in the synth for its abilities, but wasn't enjoying the sample import behavior and creation aspect within it. Someone please tell me the file browser now pays attention to file system changes (without closing and reopening the Alchemy GUI).

Confirmed. The import window is dynamic and automagically updates when you make changes in the finder, like adding or deleting a file. I don't have to reopen alchemy or refresh or anything. It just works.

You can also drag and drop directly from Finder, Loops browser, or project files pane into the sources in the advanced view. It defaults to Spectral + Formant analysis.

Awesome news! Thanks for checking and confirming!

[Aleatoriac]

Alchemy is still really cool. Thanks for posting the videos and sounds!

[Sampleconstruct]

Here is a re-synthesis experiment, using a flute phrase as input source for spectral resynthesis:



So after spending the whole night - like 7 hours - with Alchemy 2 my temporary conclusion is: Using simple and rather short source samples which have a simple overtone structure and slow dynamic transitions yield usable results, but that was the case in version 1 as well. The flute sound above produces only garbled material in additive mode, but worked alright in spectral mode.

The spectral editor is still pretty much unusable, the graphics update very slow, you can't zoom out properly and there is only 1 undo step! Please improve this area asap AppleCamel...but I'm repeating myself again.

[Sampleconstruct]

Alchemy is still really cool. Thanks for posting the videos and sounds!

My pleasure.

[B_Stone]

A first test:

Sounds nice. I heard artifacts similar to what it sounds like when you run low on CPU power. What type of machine, speed of CPU, etc? Also what is your i/o buffer setting? I ask because I had a similar artifact when I was running at 32-64 samples. 128 made it much better for me.

Thanks for making the example!

[Sampleconstruct]

A first test:

Sounds nice. I heard artifacts similar to what it sounds like when you run low on CPU power. What type of machine, speed of CPU, etc? Also what is your i/o buffer setting? I ask because I had a similar artifact when I was running at 32-64 samples. 128 made it much better for me.

Thanks for making the example!

Sure, that was a buffer of 64 samples, I forgot to raise it before the video making and the video app also eats some CPU, and Alchemy was running in Ultra mode. Usually nothing really brings down my new ashtray Mac Pro, but a buffer size of 64 is on the edge. The other videos worked fine with 64 samples, but there was no granular engine with multiple taps involved.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

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