On this remix I took the liberty of doing some impromptu guest vocals.  Check out a preview  mp3 here. 

Our remix appears exclusively on the limited Japanese edition of their album.  Order it here from Deathwatch Asia. 

My MF101 review was straight forward, the only surprise being the shitty décor. An lpf is just that, and if you don’t understand the concept, do me a favour and go neuter yourself with rusty hedge clippers, or at least promise never to reproduce. Seriously, I bet you know what a guitar pickup is, so why not a low pass filter??? I really need to stop sharing my music tech news with coworkers…

The Freqbox is an entirely different. Even to someone who owns a machine that can synch to its own oscillators, it doesn’t compare. A modular with external input and a synchable vco yadadadada, maybe, but if I don’t have enough money for that, I’m going to hate on anyone else who does…

I’m not going to bore you with a rundown of the freqbox functions. First of all, I don’t really understand the mechanics of it, and am not especially interested in learning such things. Second, saying the “the fm knob increases the amount of frequency modulation applied to the oscillator” doesn’t mean dick if you can’t actually hear it (and I’m far too lazy to make audio samples, they are easy enough to find). Third, you might try moogmusic.com, just a thought.

Instead, I’m going to describe the first couple of days of freqbox bonding. The bonding was a little traumatic, seeing as I got a new audio interface the same day (fuck you to hell you fucking dickfuck programmers at MOTU… to be continued). Once things settled down on that side of things, I was able to sit down and spend some serious luuuuv time.

I was a little misguided as to what to expect here. I have used sync a bit with VA stuff, and never really been a fan. That said, it has always been the usual sync osc1 to osc2 or vice versa, usually for that big rising monotone lead that seems to rise without changing pitch, you know the one… or you could get the rusty hedge clippers. This isn’t nearly the kind of versatility the freqbox offers. I had done a bit of youtubing, buy mostly it was just wankers crooning about the worlds first ‘guitar synth’. Other reviews were good, I wanted another moogerfooger, phasers are for beatnicks… and so, shazam, I have a freqbox.

The misguided part was thinking it would follow anything more than the simplest inputs. I was working on a Shiv-r tune. I had a nice toy piano patch going for the intro of the song which I had already recorded from my Virus through my mf-101. I ran it to the freqbox… and damn did it sound horrible. When I say toy piano patch, I mean a few high pitched oscs, a little detuned and a lot of release. I bet your laughing saying “well duh, of course there wasn’t usable sync”, to which I say… try balancing new gear with the pressure of getting tunes done in a timely fashion and you will understand… I bet your wall sized modular doesn’t compensate for the complete lack of interest any label ever has paid to your tunes ever… anyway…

So I tried sending a simple patch to it and snap! the ever so voodoo magical tracking abilities mf-107 is famous come into play. Ok, I think the toy piano misdemeanor was some magical fluke of new gear teething, and in reality all is well. I go about my patch making business getting all kinds of joy by pushing the mf’s vco into all kinds of scratchy psy-ish goodness. Then, through scholarly interest, I tried pulling the mf osc out of mdma-land and back into just regular tracking of the input… and I get more scratchy goodness, but this time I don’t want scratchy goodness, so let’s call it scratchy badness (and yes, there is still tunes in need of finishing while I waste time on the twiddle stick). “fuckity fuck fuck” methinks, “perhaps the sync rocker is fucked” (to regress from not wanting to explain the functionality of knobs and switches, the 107 has a switch which alternates between the osc tracking the pitch of the input and the osc pitch responding to the amplitude of the incoming signal). I am seriously stumped. I turn it off and on again (digital logic applied to analog machine??). I watch more videos on the internet and wonder why my ‘thing’ isn’t the same as some other guy’s ‘thing’, then I had to go to work and try not to worry about my ‘thing’ for the remainder of the day.

Returning from work, I try a new patch and it is tracking well again. I fuck about with the patch again, and get the same problem again. Instead of reverse engineering whatever I did with the mf, this time I reverse what I did with patch, and it tracks well again. Since most of what I do is either out of the discernable pitch variety or stupidly de-tuned variety, there was a valuable lesson to be learned in this…

The mf tracks simple inputs well, add a second oscillator to the input and it gets a little unpredictable, add a third and you can kiss it all goodbye. Second to that, it won’t track anything too high pitched (it says in the manual the input should be lower pitched than what you want to the mf to put out, but at this point the manual was still in the box… where it belongs). Third, take a simple sound and run it through a hpf before sending it to the 107, weakening the fundamental frequency too much, and it won’t track.

I had read in an SOS review that claims it manages to find a ‘sympathetic pitch’ with guitar chords, but I have began to lose a little faith in SOS. The fact is, it doesn’t, but I still love it. I have had it for over a month now, so I will tell what I do use it for.

a) beefing up patches. That seems obvious, but not in the way you think. You can’t make a musical patch and send it to the mf thinking it will make it bigger and better, because it won’t track. I make a sound I like, then create a simplified version to send to the mf that is easier to track. Combine the original patch and the new one through the mf and you are in for some serious beefy business.

b) Oddly enough, percussion. I don’t meaning running full beats through it, I mean adding it single percussive noises with synch turned off and letting the volume of the source control the oscillator. I like this especially for bassdrums, though the result is a kind of flappy/clicky bassdrum which is not especially fashionable right now, but I do whats I wants and I likes it.

As for gripes about the box…

1. I got it in whitewash. After getting my 101 in whitewash I knew this was stupid, and my 107 is even worse quality. I had to get them to match, I’m just special that way. I am planning to rack mount them after I get a third (probably the ring modulator, don’t like phasers in any context, the murf seems like a many variations but at heart a one trick pony, as well as following Moog’s recent trend in stupid names for things…and the delay is overpriced, stupidly overpriced, I know bbd chips are hard to come by, but come on…).

2. There is serious colouring of the input signal. Thankfully there is a true bypass on this one, unlike the 101, but with the bypass off and the wet/dry mix set to 100% dry, you would think it would sound something like the original. Instead, it sounds like it’s been run through a low pass filter. Perhaps a necessary evil to help it track properly, but evil it is, nonetheless.

3. As I learned once upon a time as a young man, analog oscillators are always ‘on’ and obviously true for the freqbox vco. This means there is something like a gate that stops the sound of the osc when the input amplitude falls below a certain point (I guess it is a ‘squelch circuit’, I’m not the most educated type). That is all good, but when the env tracker is pushing hard on the vco, that cut off point is marked with a noticeable glitch that is similar to a guitarist muting the sound of the strings. This is inevitable, but the sensitivity of the “gate” needs to be adjustable to cater for differing inputs. I am under the understanding it is adjustable… by opening the back of the unit and adjusting a trim pot. Having a front panel pot to adjust this would have been grand… perhaps replacing the dumb ass stompbox switch. Moog belongs to the synth man, the guitar man can get his own damn hero.

UPS delivered to my door in an obscure little building in the northern outskirts of BKK. What an age we live in. I do wish to whine about import taxes though… damn import tax blows…

Although I’m sure you all know this, it’s a filter in a box. It’s Fairly similar to the original Minimoog filter, and as far as I can tell, identical to the Moog LP filter (sans MIDI triggering or real envelope control etc). It has a 2pole/4pole swtich, and an envelope follower that tracks the input amplitude, but simple is good. I got the whitewash version, and at the risk of starting the bitching to early… the white is not exactly the best. The wood version looked hot enough already, but I just had to be different and get the fancy white one. It turns out this is just very very very badly painted wood. I mean, it looks like a kindergarten project. Moog seems to have gone all out with their crazy range of woods and backlight themes lately, which is very cute, but if they are delivering things like this, I would say stick with the original versions.

I’m in a list mood, so here we go:

Pros:

- Good price. Well not so good if you are thinking of it just as a LPF that takes up a lot of room on the desk. Good considering it sounds just as Moog does, ie. very good. I think back when these were sold as “Big Briar” they were a lot more expensive, but the build quality was better. As long as the insides stayed the same, I’m not too fussed.

- The drive is very satisfying, especially on low frequencies.

- The difference between 2pole and 4pole is very noticeable, as you would expect. Unfortunately, on a lot of other gear including my Virus, switching slopes doesn’t really get the results one could wish for.

- The env follower is very effective on the “fast” setting, even for sounds with a lot of release, it tracks perfectly.

- The resonance is ever so Moogy. There is something about the resonance on Moog filters that is so distinctive, especially on high settings with the filter very open. It adds a kind of nasty hiss that is just, nasty. I’m probably sending myself deaf and killing my speakers with supersonic ribbish.

-It also does something odd when the env amount and resonance are set quite high, the cutoff is fairly open and the incoming signal is fairly constant in volume (ie. fast attack, full sustain and no release… I’m not sure if this is making any sense). It adds a strange sizzle that I have not been able to catch since I stopped using the Waldorf D-pole plugin many years ago. In theory, any filter with an amplitude follower should do this, but these are the only two I have found that do it just the way I like it.

Cons

- There are two settings for the env follower, “fast” and “smooth”, on a rocker. Basically it seems to effect the attack time only, or maybe the release as well. I would hardly expect a full ADSR on something in this price range, but having a pot here sweeping the between the two values would have been nice, even if it had increased the price a little.

- Why is there a mix knob? Maybe guitarists using it as a wah wah thing need it… I don’t know, I never wah. I do know I don’t need to mix wet and dry on a filter. Maybe a heavily driven single could be mixed with the dry to add “depth”, but seriously, “depth” would have to be one of my least favourite words. So, I will reiterate, why is there a mix knob on a filter?

- Added to that, when the filter is as low as it can go, ie. more or less silence, and then you turn up the volume high and listen really hard, a little of the dry signal is coming through. Practically, this isn’t important at all, and I reeeeaaalllly shouldn’t be pushing the volume up with the filter at 20hz (the resonance was on zero so my monitors were relatively safe, but anyway)… I expect more than that!

- It would have been a lot nicer, and smaller, if it weren’t doubling as a stompox. Guitarists with their bluesy wails and drunken, clumsy feet don’t rate highly in my world. It also makes patching the cv controls a pain seeing as the jacks are at the back of the unit.

- There is no true bypass. The big ugly stompbox switch will bypass the filter, but not the drive. I don’t really mind, seeing as the drive sounds great anyway, but it makes it difficult to see exactly what the thing is doing to the sound.

- Bob’s grandchildren should be taken off the décor committee.

Make sure you up the resolution to 1080p, and please do share and comment to help spread the word! 
Read more about the filmclip here.

Listen to “Shiv-r - Taste (Reaper remix)” exclusively on the Deathwatch Asia VampireFreaks page. 

Listen to “Shiv-r - Open My Vein (Soman remix)” and “Shiv-r - The End (XP8 remix)” on the Shiv-r myspace page.

This edition of our album comes out on 15 May 2010.  Order it here! 

We remixed their track “Together Against It”, which appears on the 2CD edition of their debut album “The Faults of Humanity” out soon on Alfa Matrix.  Freakangel is a new project featuring Dmitry from Suicidal Romance (Infacted), and Igor from cB (Advoxya). 

Thailand loves a good a protest. Most of it isn’t worth mentioning. Last year (I think) the international airport in BKK was overtaken and held hostage, and parliament was stormed. For me, even living close to the centre of the city, daily life didn’t change. Even when the government or military announces a nighttime curfew, you can still drink beer on a plastic seat by the side of the road until 4am and remain blissfully unaware. I arrived here when the country was under martial law, and, meh, all these words are kind of scary, but the reality is pretty mundane.

So the latest round has had protesters locking down the central business district for nearly two months. Traffic is terrible. The company I work for has been completely ass fucked by it. There have been nasty street battles with grenades and machine guns. All in all, the most serious stuff happening in my three years here. If you want to know the details of it… read about it for yourself, I’m too lazy and vastly under-qualified to have any real opinion. It is kind of surreal to see places I usually go to par-tay blockaded with car tires and sharpened bamboo spears manned by guys with covered faces, or 18 yr old kid soldiers/police in full riot gear.

The current seems to be partly a result of the massive income disparity here and lack of social security, partly along ethnic lines, partly on issues I don’t want to mention, but mostly just greed. I really don’t care much for any of this, except for how it affects me directly, cold motherfucker that I am, and that I’m should really keep abreast of it because of work.

What is interesting is how wired this whole thing is (hence the title of this, except for the sexy part, that just adds some spice). Half of this little hoe-down is taking place in cyberland. Every player has himself a twitter account and a facebook. I don’t mean loud mouth opinionated dickwads, I mean the politicians and riot leaders. Tweets make front lines in national newspapers. When things got really exciting on April 10th, twenty something dead and over 800 injured in a single night of serious party time, I heard it first on twitter, then dusted off the old TV remote (it was under the bed somewhere). This is the one where bombs went off on Khao San road, which, if you have ever traveled to Thailand, I’m sure you went to and wandered around in baggy hippy pants and horribly sunburnt skin, never showing the photos to your rivet head buddies back home.

I don’t mean to compare this to the revolution of television and its impact during the Vietnam War. What we have here is more of a refinement and broadening of what happened there. Vietnam was a shock because you could on the ground footage of what war looks like. The Thai situation is mobile phone videos of street riots. We are still only talking video footage, and this is also far cry from total war. The big difference is we’re not talking about professional journalists or embedded lap dogs. This is material from ordinary people on the ground straight on to the internet. Make of that what you will (on a side note, forget the Iraq/Afghan wars, if you want to see some real action check out the Chechen wars).

And so, Youtube is a point of action action action… Just go in and search for “red shirts”… you will get a lot of stuff from previous year’s party times, but if you want to see some really entertaining stuff look for the riots on April 10th at Democracy Monument and the Sala Daeng BTS grenade attack. Here are some random ones:

One from the democracy monument riot. Listen to the music around 00:50 + the funny lights and you will be in Apocalypse Now, the bridge scene…

Just after the Silom grenade attack. The wounded white guy sounds Australian. Damn that accent…

On a more old school note, most groups run their own TV stations and radio stations and do their darnest to fuck up the others by blocking signals or physically attacking the broadcasting buildings. The protesters have even been making propaganda VCDs (a thing of the past really, and they never really caught on in the west) to give away to people.

Given how often my American co-workers are asked by people back in the States “is there running water and electricity in Taiwanland?” (I joke not), this might come as a bit of a surprise. Like I said, this place is one wired up nation. The poorest slums have satellite dishes. The internet might run through cables thrown up in trees, but every mofo, from rich to poor, is a net using mofo. This latest shin ding has really highlighted it.

If you can’t get to a newstand in Germany, we have also done an online interview for Chaos Tune e-zine, which you can read here. 

Additionally, last time Kong and I were in the same country we did a VIDEO INTERVIEW in my home studio wherein we discuss our album and how we work on our productions.  Check it out here. 

For anyone interested enough to be reading this, you all probably know what the Access range is all about, so I will spare you the details. Suffice it to say, these are probably the best sounding DSP machine around, and Total Integration pretty much puts it at the pinnacle of usability, especially for lazy types like me who grew up on welfare cheques and cracked soft synths… anyone who disrespects me for that can take either their trust fund ass, or their born before the 1980s ass, home.

Chances are you live in a city where a slice of Access action is available at every corner shop, but Bangkok is a different matter. It was magical and mysterious journey tracking one of these down. After a lot of phone calls and confused secretaries I finally narrowed things down to two shops (first thing to do is pronounce it Access “Wirus”… if you are ever in the neighbourhood). The first shop didn’t have any in stock, but was willing to order one in at a ridiculously inflated price. The second had just the one in stock, and had been using it as a showroom piece. So the showroom it would be and this lead me to an obscure little shop with blacked out windows next to a smelly canal. A big fat white guy (who used to run the national radio station of Bhutan or Brunei or something… how the fuck do people get these jobs??) explained that he occasionally got them in because he has a friend who works for Access, and probably only sells about one per year.

In the end this was all quite good luck seeing as I got a nice price for it, all be it for a synth that has been sitting  in a glass cabinet for a couple of years and 25% less processing power than the current TI2 line (more about the processing power later). Setup and OS upgrades were absolutely painless and experienced very few of the glitches that earlier versions of the TI concept seem to be notorious for. So far, so good (incidentally, OS updates take a long time, don’t try this ten minutes before you have to go to work), but what kind of review would this be without me making my bones…

The DAW:

First of all, I am a Cubase user and I am using SX 3.1, the minimum DAW requirement. Like Virul3nt, I find other DAWs confusing and infuriating, so don’t you fucking dare suggest I try anything other than what I know. It works quite happily in SX 3.1, but certainly not at its full potential. In Virul3nt’s comments there were issues with external audio inputs not working through the usb connection, which was rectified by upgrading to 3.1, and I can confirm this, mine is working with external inputs just fine. My issue is that it is not possible to route cubase channels back into the Virus. It would be very nice to be able to do this, and I actually have some other stuff permanently plugged into the virus external inputs so I can take advantage of its gorgeous delays etc. I would like to be able to do this with audio tracks in cubase as a virtual route, but as it is the only way I could do this is with physical patching. This seems to be a pity given how well the rest of the synth functions inside the DAW. It is possible to do this is in Cubase 5, but I don’t have any plans to upgrade anytime soon… so I am just going to have a bit of pout now, and move on with my life.

The Polyphony:

You will get both sides of this in internet opinion land. While one person will say they have never run out of voices, another will say they kill it after 5 parts. Chances are the former writes simple electro, and the latter writes trance or some kind of shitty new age music. There are plenty of people screaming that Access exaggerates their polyphony count. People don’t seem to be able to except this is NOT some polyphonic analog where you got x number of oscillators and it will be the same under all circumstances, thinking the 80 or so voices Access promises should be available under all circumstances?? Think again, chump. I’m sure with very simple parts you could easily get all 16 possible slots on the virus going simultaneously, but start throwing in unison, hypersaws and fx and this possibility goes out the window, welcome to cpu-ville. I often kill mine after about 5 parts, but then I like my fx and unison and just have to accept it. And if one were thinking in terms of it dying after just 5 parts, the extra power of the TI2 is really only going to buy you one more voice, so I don’t especially feel like I missing anything by having a TI1. To be honest, though, I did expect a little more. I would like to commend Access on how well it handles cpu overloading. Rather than the expected stutters etc., when the cpu overloads a voice cuts out gracefully and doesn’t disturb the others. I would also like to point out that is one were tossing up between the Nord Lead 2x rack and a slightly more expensive Virus Ti Snow… well the Snow a) sounds better b) TI motherfucker!! And c) with a 20 voice polyphony count, the nord will be chocking a lot quicker than the virus.

Snap, Crackle, Pop:

I had heard that it will give will bursts of static/noise fairly randomly when the series was first released. After about 3 months of quite heavy usage, the little bastard has done this to me once or twice, and the machine wasn’t even especially stressed. It seems usually just one patch confuses it, but fortunately it works ok when the offender is solo-ed, and rendering it sorts out the problem. Just to clarify, I am using the BETA version of OS4 at the time of writing this, so I could be making too much of a point with this…

The Default Patch:

When the TI software boots, it automatically goes to clean patch called “init”… and I fucking HATE it. For one, it loads with a 50/50 mix between osc 1 and 2, with osc 2 slightly de-tuned. This gives you a slightly pusling open saw wav, the worst sound in the world. I would ideally like osc 1 straight up, straight up saws being the sound that inspired Adam to bone Eve. I usually start my patches from osc 2 because it has more modulation possibilities, but I can appreciate how silly it sounds to have the default patch outputting just osc2, so I will leave that issue be (though I think osc 1 should have more modulation… yadadada, I will stop with that now). The second issue is that the two filters load with linked cutoffs as low pass – low pass. Noooooooooooo, I want LPF to HPF by default. I’m sure some people feel ever so analog with the current default… but I specialize in scratchy annoying sounds and love my HPF action. I know I could fix all of this by overwriting the init patch, but the next OS update would probably just throw me back to square one.

Total Integration:

This is awesome. I mean just awesome. I am fairly certain that most synth manufacturers will be following Access’s lead on this one and creating vst instrument like software for their hardware machines. I barely know how to use the Virus from its front panel controls at all. My bone is that a lot of the Virus’s functions are, as of yet, are not represented in the vst software. I only actually have one example of this, but I’m going to jump to assumption there are more examples, because that’s just how I roll. When I run an external input into the virus, there doesn’t appear to be any place in the software to control the levels. I searched in vain, and finally discovered that there is a control, tucked away under a few menus on the actual synth’s front panel screen. This required me to stand up and go to the synth and press some buttons, and this filled me with potato baking rage. I want the virus to be a box that I can plug in and then handle entirely from software. On something analog, there is a great deal of pleasure turning knobs and flicking switches, but on something horrendously complex and digital with the masses of multipurpose pots and menu scrolling, there is nothing but pain, confusion and wasted brain power. Thankfully, Access is on the money with their software updates, and as time goes by, I’m sure ‘Total Integration’ will become more ‘Total’.

The Final Word:

This baby can just about do anything you want, but that is a double edge sword. For example, I am not a great fan of wavetable synthesis. In fact, if you were to come to my house with a Nord Wave and offered it to me for free I would shoot you with my grandaddy’s shotgun. I can’t tell you how much I hate wavetable synths, the only sound they do well is drippy hippy pads that belong with whale samples… so it seems kind of stupid to have shelled out for a top of the range synth knowing in advance you’re not really interested in using half of its functions. My argument against that is that I reserve the right to change my opinions about things tomorrow, and hey!! when I decide wavetable synthesis and whale samples are the best things EVER, I have a synth that kicks ass at it.