RiddlerMike’s posterous

...this may be the perfect bit of software.  I've been interested in drum replacement and augmentation for a while - the idea of beefing up a bass drum two weeks after finishing recording kinda appeals to my 'I don't want to spend THAT much money' attitude at the moment, and in the past, it's advice from magazines like Sound on Sound that I've had to follow - excellent advice it was, but quite time consuming.

So on discovering this little gem, I smiled.  It's KTDrumTrigger from Koen Tanghe over at those lovely people @ Smartelectronix (home of some wonderful little gems, but more on that another time).  The simple idea behind it is you get a single plugin page with three separate filters - each capable of High Pass, Band Pass and Low Pass, allowing you to generate up to three distinct MIDI streams from a single, mono channel.  OK, I haven't tried this on anything other than single channel files (for example, a Bass Drum channel :)), so I can't testify for its abilities to separate snares from hi-hats/cymbals, but one plugin per channel seems to work wonders. [more below :)]

It does look rather complicated, but in essense, you choose your filter, set the cutoff and Q to maximes the punch of the hit, boost/cut that point as you require, muck around with Envelope Follower settings,trigger thresholds etc, and bobs your uncle, you've god a MIDI stream that represents the Bass Drum your tracking. Just output that to a midi instrument (a la e-phonic's Drumatic 3) and you're laughing.

Obviously, you need to check for phase problems etc, but really, it seems quite easy (he says, no doubt turning up something horrendous about it in the next couple of days :)).  One issue I had was on actually recording the MIDI channel rather than triggering it live. It seemed to read ahead, actually placing the MIDI hit marginally in front of the Bass Beat. Couldn't understand this, but I assume it's read-ahead vs. latency (as if I know). It only took a minute or two to fix (so, for example, I now know that on our PC, I just shift the MIDI track 'forwards' on the timeline by 107 samples, and it matches).

All in all, a fruitful experience, and I'm really looking forward to mucking around with this for triggered special effects :).  Or perhaps something even more weird and wonderful has popped into the mind. Hmm.. I'll get back to you on that :).

Versions are available for PC VST and Mac PPC VST.

We have a rehearsal tonight - something I'm really looking forward to (there's nothing like playing with fantastic musicians for a few hours), but as we've packed up early to pack the car and get some chores done, I decided I'd take a quick trip over to a friend's to play with some new plugins we/he'd discovered. I'll do another write-up on them later, but they seems pretty pucker.  The upside to this time-wasating is that I've grabbed the chance to fix the one problem I have with my G1; the ringtones.

I hate having little ditzy tunes as ringtones - to be honest, I find them embarassing, even when hearing them on someone elses phone (there is one exception to that, but again, another day). But unfortunately, although the G1 has a classic old bell ringer, and a 70s/80s digital style ring tone, they are stupidly quiet; to hear them, you might as well strap the phone to your head with a belt, speakside plugged firmly to ear-hole, but being honest, that makes answering the phone a nightmare.  But the chance to have an edit of them today was just too tempting, and here are the results.

The screenshots are from the free VST plugins I used - the rather nice Electri-Q poshifopit edition EQ (http://bit.ly/Fs0b), and the BetaBugs free W1 limiter (http://bit.ly/h1ebk)  (a reskin of George Yohng's WAVES L1 Clone - find that at http://bit.ly/1ikW1f).  And I'm pretty pleased with the results.  The Classic Ring suffers from the fact that it really has no low-mid frequencies in it at all - not wanting to completely destroy it, or indeed the G1 speaker, I think we could have been a bit more harsh; but the Digital ringer seems enormous in comparison with the original.

Anyway, if you'd like them, grab them from this post, copy them over to your G1, then download RingDroid from the market. Launch RingDroid, and search for the files - they should be together, and they both have an Album tage of 'G1 Ringtones'. Have a listen to either in RingDroid, and if you like them, click the 'Disk' image at the bottom to save them as a ringtone.  Don't worry too much about shortening or editing them. RingDroid seems to suggest that there is some artifact at the end of each file, but we had a look through with a few Frequency Analysers such as Voxengo Span, and found nothing. Will look into that in a bit more detaillater.

Also, if you fancy a go, you can download the entire G1 System + Ringtones from the Android Community forum(http://bit.ly/1afEeK) - and feel free to ignore what I did. I was just having a go.

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