TWISTED TOOLS | RICHARD DEVINE
ANALOGUE MICROCOSM – INTERVIEW
Analogue Microcosm was designed by Richard Devine in
conjunction with Twisted Tools. This is Twisted Tools’ ?rst
commercial sample pack and will include a custom Reaktor sampler
along with kits for Battery, EXS24MKII and more. Look for the
release during Christmas week, 2010 at twistedtools.com
TT: Tell us a little about yourself and your involvement with
Twisted Tools.
RD: I am a producer and sound designer from Atlanta GA. I
have worked doing sound design and patch programming for
many audio companies over the last 12 years. I love creating
new interesting sounds that hopefully inspire people to make
new music.
I have always liked innovative new tools that inspire new ideas
and sounds. This is what lead me to the Twisted Tools
instruments. I really love their approach and ideology.
I have helped design sounds and presets for many of the
Twisted Tools releases. I have also collaborated with Igor
Shilov on our GrainCube Lemur project earlier this year. It was
great fun working together on this and I look forward to
working on many more projects in the future.
TT: Tell us about the Analogue Microcosm sample pack, what
you set out to do and what people can expect.
twistedtools.com
RD: I wanted to design a set of sounds that were completely
designed from analogue modular synthesis. All the sounds in
this collection where patched and created from scratch. My
goal was to design a set of sounds that had a unique
character to them. I was inspired by my recent work using my
Doepfer Euro Rack modular system. I have spent the last 5
years building up this rather large system of specific modules.
I had carefully planned and organized over 6 cases of
modules that would become the system I have today. I had
acquired many new interesting modules over the last two
years that really made the system come alive. I spend hours
and hours patching different configurations, and nested
environments. It is almost like working with a live organism
that constantly changes and mutates, never repeating the
same sounds or sequences. I had become really inspired
by this idea of organic regeneration and creation of sound
through electricity. This collection is a result of those
experiments and recordings. I tried to make these sounds very
fluid and expressive. Alien and and organic come to mind. I
wanted to design these sounds without the use of computer
software or plug-ins.
TT: Walk us through some of the sounds and gear used.
RD: There was so much stuff I had to downsize a lot of the
sounds I recorded. Some of my favorites in this collection
were the Analogue Sub Bass sounds. I created these with the
Cwejman S1 synthesizer. The S1 is a semi modular analogue
synth which has a very warm powerful sound. I had always
wanted a set of good solid bass tones to rock the sub woofer’s
out there. The Cwejman has the purest and cleanest tones
I have ever heard. Some other favorites I liked were some of the sounds in the
‘FX Long’ categories. I used a wide variety of different
oscillators for this collection. I used the Harvestman Hertz
Donut, and Piston Honda pretty extensively here. For the
Creature Swells, and Crystal Trinkles sounds I used the
Synthesis Technology E350 morphing terrarium, and E340
cloud generator. I love how organic these two oscillators can
get.
For the Delay Elevator and Evate category I used two old
Doepfer BBD modules. The BBD, also called bucket brigade
device module, has been used to delay audio signals before
digital delays. I ran two of these into each other running all
sorts of strange control voltage signals to get really interesting
karplus/strong synthesis type sounds.
For some of the Evate Shimmer sounds I used a Cwejman
VCO2-RM oscillator with the cwejman MMF-1 filter. The
control voltage setup to get these sounds was using one
“Maths” module from Make Noise, and the Cwejman CTG-VC
envelope generator.
I created a good majority of the pure tone sounds from
using the Cyndustries Zeroscillator, Doepfer a-107 multitype
morphing filter, and TipTop-Z-DSP. The tiptop Z-DSP is a open
source digital sound processing module. Its a stereo DSP
processor, with 24-bit sampling, 15khz of bandwidth, voltage
controlled parameters, and has the ability to be programmed
with a powerful assembly language. It was used quite
extensively on lots of the sounds.
Some of the sequencers I used to create some of the unusual
timbres were the MakeNoise Rene sequencer. It’s the worlds
first “cartesian sequencer,” “geometric sequencer,” “planular
sequencer,” “axis sequencer,” and finally, in Buchla-speak,
“non-linear sequential tuned voltage map.”
“René,”, named for the French philosopher & mathematician
René Descartes, uses his cartesian coordinate system
to unlock the analog step sequencer from the shackles of
linearity. I was able to control these modules in very unique
ways, and combinations.
I also recorded complete analogue percussion kits that could
be used with these sounds. I wanted everyone to have a fun
set of sounds to make entire tracks with or just sprinkle in
these sounds as accents to work as sound effects.
TT: Any closing thoughts Richard?
RD: I want to thank anyone who buys this sample pack, and I
hope it inspires everyone to make some cool music with it.
Thanks.
