Logic - Rewire - Notion (issue)

[Surfwhammy]

About the only thing I don't see are saxophones and I'm willing to bet they are in another library.

Good observation!

The saxophones are in the "Band" section in the "Horns" group . . .

[NOTE: As you can hear in the Kontakt 5 demo songs, the "Band" section has a different focus and is very nice for what one might call "harder" playing styles like Latin, Rhythm and Blues, Big Band, Motown, and so forth, which is nice. When I was in junior high school and high school, I played bass in various musical groups that focused on nightclub gigs, and some of them had horn sections, which is the reason that once I switched to electric guitar I discovered Barre chords, since horn players (primarily trumpets and saxophones) tend to prefer playing in key signatures that are awkward for electric guitar, and the only practical way to deal with it is to use Barre chords, because with Barre chords it does not matter what the key signature happens to be and is the way it works with electric bass and string bass. My strategy was to learn all the Barre chords based on the root note being on the low-pitch "E" or low-pitch "A" strings, which I call "low Barre" and "middle Barre" chords, respectively, although there are a different set of four-note chords that are played on the middle four strings ("A", "D", "g", "b"), which I call "middle" chords; and there are four-note chords for the four highest-pitch strings ("D", "g", "b", "e"), which I call "high" chords, and there are other types of chords, as well. I do not know the names of all the chords, but I key on the root note, which from playing electric and string bass is all I need to know, where the way I usually compose a song begins with defining the rhythm guitar chord pattern, which takes a while, but once I have the rhythm guitar chords, everything else is easy, and I can do it with either (a) real instruments or (b) music notation and virtual instruments in NOTION 4, where the following are some but not all of the rhythm guitar chords for "Starlight" . . . ]


"Starlight" Rhythm Guitar Chords ~ Verse


"Starlight" Rhythm Guitar Chords ~ Transition

[NOTE: There are more chords than fit in the display area, but you can view them in Firefox by right-clicking on the image and selecting "View Image". And instead of knowing the music theory names of the chords, I name them based on the song where I first heard them, where as an example the first chord in the bridge is what I call the "Tighten Up" chord, based on its being used in "Tighten Up" (Archie Bell & The Drells), which is a bit odd, but it works for me and is one of the more practical advantages of learning to "play by ear", at least with respect to being able to compose songs easily . . . ]

"Tighten Up" (Archie Bell & The Drells) -- YouTube music video


"Starlight" Rhythm Guitar Chords ~ Bridge

"Starlight" (The Surf Whammys) -- Rhythm Guitar Chords -- MP3



These are the high-level folders for the "Choirs" and "World" sections . . .



Lots of FUN!

[hselburn]

You know, if it's possible to replicate the sound of the Chicago horn section using the band sounds, that would be really cool!

[Surfwhammy]

You know, if it's possible to replicate the sound of the Chicago horn section using the band sounds, that would be really cool!

I think it's possible . . .

Listen to the 10th demo song ("Funk Band") at the Kontakt 5 "All Media" page . . .

Kontakt 5: All Media (Native Instruments)

I am intrigued by the "Cuba" collection for Kontakt 5, and it has a different style of trumpet, as well as Latin percussion that I like, so I am pondering the idea of getting it while it is on sale . . .

"Cuba" Collection for Kontakt 5 (Native Instruments)

"Cuba" ~ Instruments Detail (Native Instruments)

Lots of FUN!

P. S. You can download the various Kontakt 5 user guides and documentation at this link, where you will find the "Library Documentation" that lists all the instruments and their control surfaces . . .

Kontakt 5 Downloads and PDF Documentation (Native Instruments)

[hselburn]

Ok, can I write something in notion, have it play the track through kontact and have it then record in Logic Pro x? Would that workflow work?

[Surfwhammy]

Ok, can I write something in notion, have it play the track through kontact and have it then record in Logic Pro x? Would that workflow work?

Yes! And it is not difficult to do on the Mac . . .

Kontakt 5 is the engine, and it comes with a library of sampled sounds, but for use with NOTION 4 the primary strategy is to use the VSTi virtual instrument flavor of Kontakt 5, which you specify as the instrument source for NOTION 4 staff, and then there you are . . .

[NOTE: There is a standalone version of Kontakt 5, but there also are embedded flavors, all of which are part of the product called "Kontakt 5", so everything is included. When you do your NOTION 4 Score Setup, you specify Kontakt 5 as the provider for a virtual instrument, and NOTION 4 handles the connectivity, but you need to select the specific instrument via the Kontakt 5 user interface, which is shown in NOTION 4 Score Setup once you click on the Kontakt 5 button . . .]



If you need help with the ReWire 2 setup and so forth, let me know, but I already have posts on this FORUM with YouTube video examples that explain all the ReWire 2 configuration parameters and so forth . . .

This is an example of using NOTION 4 to add a few MachFive 3 (MOTU) VSTi virtual instrument tracks to "Faster" (Techno Squirrels), which is one of the sample songs for Reason 6.5 and is a personal favorite, but I used Reason 7 (Propellerhead Software) in this instance, where Logic Pro 9 (Apple) is the ReWire 2 host controller and both NOTION 4 and Reason 7 are ReWire 2 slaves, with everything happening in real-time . . .

[NOTE: MachFive 3 is a VSTI virtual instrument engine like Kontakt 5, but there are more sampled sounds available for Kontakt 5. It is easier to do ReWire 2 with Logic Pro X, since some of the configuration parameters are handled automagically in Logic Pro X . . . ]

LP9 N4 R7 ReWire2 64 "Faster" (Techno Squirrels) ~ Surfwhammy Remix ~ YouTube video

Lots of FUN!

[hselburn]

Ok kontakt 5 is on the way. Lots of talk online about the next version. I have been hearing about time stretching. Is that tempo changes? That would be in my music for sure. Hope it's easy to set up and still sounds good I'm getting a Mac mini but say I wanted to try this on our PC before then, will it work on the e6600?

[Surfwhammy]

Ok kontakt 5 is on the way. Lots of talk online about the next version. I have been hearing about time stretching. Is that tempo changes? That would be in my music for sure. Hope it's easy to set up and still sounds good I'm getting a Mac mini but say I wanted to try this on our PC before then, will it work on the e6600?

Excellent!

(1) "Time Stretching" generally refers to fitting a note or series of notes into a longer amount of time, but it also can refer to fitting it into a shorter amount of time. Changing the tempo is one way to do it, but another way is done algorithmically by inserting duplicate snippets of audio or when contracting the duration, by removing snippets of audio . . .

When vinyl records were the popular media, if you had a turntable with several speeds, then you could play a 33 and 1/3 RPM album at 78 RPM and it would over twice as fast, which was a good way to learn electric bass parts, since the electric bass notes at the faster speed would sound like a single-note melody played on an electric guitar, but the strategy for identifying the note of lead guitar solo was the opposite, where you would play the song at a slower speed, which made the lead guitar notes sound like electric bass notes, which is the way I learned how to play electric bass for Beatles songs and lead guitar for Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and KISS songs, where for me the key was first to learn electric bass and then to learn lead guitar, where the key is that once you learn 50 to 100 carefully selected songs for an instrument, you realize that there are not so many patterns, at least for popular music genres, and once I learned the patterns for electric bass, it then was easy to do the lead guitar solo mapping, since (a) by that time I could listen to electric bass at the correct speed and discern the notes and (b) playing a lead guitar solo at half-speed made it sound like an electric bass at normal speed, which makes sense when you think about it for a while . . .

The problem with simply changing the tempo or playing something twice as fast--which are two different activities, since changing the tempo does not change the pitch of the notes, but playing it twice as fast changes both the duration and the pitch of the notes--is that unless the change is very tiny, it affects the way the music and singing sound . . .

One of the more interesting uses for all the variations of time-stretching is fitting music and singing to motion pictures, where as an example initially a scene might run for 20 seconds but sometime later the director and editor decide that it works better if the scene is shortened to 17 seconds, which is easy to do for the visual part, but the composer then has to shorten the music and singing, and there are several ways to do this, which also is the case when a scene is lengthened, and in particular the various music theories, rules, and so forth in the Joseph Schillinger's System of Musical Composition (SoMC) are very useful for composers who do music and singing for motion pictures, since it provides a virtual festival of techniques for transforming a composition in a way that is consistent in every respect but is shorter or longer than the original composition . . .

[NOTE: There is more information in the links provided in the wikipedia article, and the Berklee College of Music has Lawrence Berk's notebooks from his studies with Joseph Schillinger available online in the Stan Getz Library. And the two-volume set of Joseph Schillinger's System of Musical Composition was in print and available the last time I checked, but it appears that most of the copies sold, so it is a bit hard to find, and regardless it is expensive in some respects (at least $300 [US]), except that it explains how everything actually works using mathematics and acoustic physics and provides a thoughtful reader with a virtual festival of epiphanies, hence it is a stellar investment if one wants to know the real rules, where the key bit of information is that all other music theories basically are what someone believes or thinks, while Schillinger's System of Musical Composition provides and explains the real rules, which overall makes it the best kept secret in music, in part because by the time formally trained composers discover the Schillinger System of Music Composition they already have been brainwashed to believe a bunch of nonsense and in an oddly cult-like way, they dismiss it, which in some respects is what happens with the "scientists" who become so enamored with Darwin's theories that they forget the definitions of things like "hypothesis", "theory", and "fact" and transform their beliefs into a patently strange type of pseudo-religion; but fortunately this does not happen with physicists, who as a group strive diligently to destroy every existing theory toward the goal of devising even better theories,, which they then test with experiments and proceed depending on how well experimental results match the results that the various currently non-destroyed theories predict. In other words, physicists certainly think that Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were bright fellows, but they want to destroy their theories and to replace them with better theories, which is entirely different from the biologists and all those folks who for all practical purposes worship Charles Darwin. Personally, I think that Darwin had some intriguing ideas and theories, but none of them explain Pee Wee Herman, which is pretty much the same thing as the Higgs boson in the universe of supersymmetry, really . . . ]

Schillinger System of Musical Composition (wikipedia)

Lawrence Berk papers on the Schillinger System (Stan Getz Library, Berklee College of Music)

[NOTE: There are two volumes, and they are large books, so it is important to verify that prices are for both volumes rather than for only one volume. As it was originally printed, each volume is approximately 3" thick, and you need to start with the first volume to be able to make sense of the information in the second volume. The curious aspect of the books is that they explain the information in several ways, so if one is not so good with mathematics, there are examples in music notation, but if one is not so good with music notation and mathematics (an unique type of non-standard algebra), then there are diagrams; and the information is explained in prose, so there are several ways to understand the fundamental principles. For the most part, I have been working on making sense of the first chapter of the first volume for decades, but it all relates, and once a tiny bit of it makes sense, you can look at all the diagrams in both volumes and "get it" at least well enough to use it productively . . . ]

Books by Joseph Schillinger (Amazon.com)

This is an example of a few of the ways one can transform a simple series of notes by doing different types of flips, where the simple set of notes is {G, E, D, C}, which could be {G4, E4, D4, C4}, where C4 is "Middle C" in scientific pitch notation, hence is a C Major triad but with an added D or major second . . .

[NOTE: The numbers inside the dots refer to the fingers used to play the notes on an electric guitar on the high-pitch "e" string and the high-pitch "b" string. The note pattern is shown in the following music notation, but an octave lower, which probably is a bit confusing. Guitar usually is notated on a relative staff, but "Middle C" actually is the note at the 1st fret of the high-pitch "b" string, which also is confusing, but so what . . . ]





If you play the first four notes, it should remind you of George Gershwin or at least the theme song for United Airlines . . .

[NOTE: Change the meter and add some strings and brass, and there you are, all from four notes, where these are the four notes in the phrase that I like, which occurs later but actually appears throughout the full piece . . . ]

United Commercial: Onboard with "Rhapsody in Blue" -- YouTube video

The general strategy is that you start with four notes and then flip them horizontally to make a "V". Next you flip the "V" vertically upward; and then flip the previously flipped "V" vertically downward, and you are back where you started, but these are only a few of the possible flips, which is what makes the SoMC so useful . . .

~ ~ ~ Continued in the next post ~ ~ ~

[Surfwhammy]

~ ~ ~ Continued from the previous post ~ ~ ~

(2) It is not particularly difficult to install and configure Kontakt 5, but Kontakt 5 does a lot of stuff, so it takes a while to understand how it works. If you need help, let me know . . .

(3) Kontakt 5 runs on the Mac and on Windows, but you need to check the license and registration requirements . . .

This is the current license information from the Native Instruments Knowledge Base:

The end user license agreement (EULA) for Native Instruments products allows the simultaneous installation on two computers (three computers for all versions of MASCHINE and KOMPLETE), as long as only one installation is used at any given time.

It is not necessary to "deactivate" an existing installation to activate the product on any further machine, but due to the license agreement it is required to uninstall the product from the previously used computer.

Please note that Native Instruments reserves the right to disable an account or serial number if it has reason to believe that the license agreement is violated.

So, I think it is OK to install it first to your Windows machine and then sometime later to install it to the Mac mini, but avoid using on both machines at the same time . . .

Lots of FUN!

[hselburn]

Yeah, using it on 2 machines at once is not in the works. Just being able to slow down the music where need be is what I want for emotional effect.

[Surfwhammy]

Yeah, using it on 2 machines at once is not in the works. Just being able to slow down the music where need be is what I want for emotional effect.

You can use the NOTION 4 conducting functionality to adjust the tempo, and there are other ways to do it, some of which probably are supported, although I have not experimented with any of them . . .

There are various types of notations that specify different ways to change the tempo either (a) by slowing it or (b) by accelerating it, and two examples are "ritardando" and "accelerando", which specify a particular style of slowing-down or speeding-up, respectively, but I think these are for use only in printed sheet music and you need to add them as text . . .

[NOTE: I have not counted all the variations, but I think there are more specific tempo change terms than there are countries on this planet, which provides a clue to how mind-boggling the different types of tempo marks, indicators, and styles are . . . ]

Tempo (wikipedia)

However, if you know how you want to control the tempo, you can use NTempo to do this, which is the tempo conducting feature of NOTION 4, and it can be done gradually in a smooth way . . .

Another way to control tempo is simply to change the tempo, which you can do at any time by specifying a new tempo. Doing it this way is more abrupt, but it works nicely and you can make it smooth by allowing a bit of silence between tempo changes . . .

Yet another way uses a constant tempo but different rhythm patterns, which is the way that the illusion of tempo change is done in the basic rhythm section for "The Cock-A-Doodle-Oodle Dance" (The Surf Whammys), which a new song I am developing . . .

[NOTE: If you watch the Oscilloscope, which is the wide meter at the top of the screen, it is easy to determine when instruments play at the same time on the same beat, and you can see that the rhythm patterns for the three sections are different even though the overall tempo is constant in terms of beats per minute (BPM) . . . ]

"The Cock-A-Doodle-Oodle Dance" (The Surf Whammys) ~ Basic Rhythm Section ~ YouTube music video

As a bit of follow-up on the Schillinger System of Music Composition (SoMC), this is an example of composing a rhythm pattern by having a drum or cymbal play on each beat of the set {1,2,3,4,5,6,7}, where for example one drum plays only on every third beat, while another drum plays only on every 7th beat, which might appear to be easy intuitively but is very difficult to do on an real drumkit or any other instrument, and once the drumkit parts are composed, you can do the same thing with other instruments to create a chord pattern and bass line, which after you listen to it for a while begins suggesting a melody, counterpoint, and so forth, and then you have a song . . .

And in the same way that you use a simple set of integer numbers to create a rhythm pattern, you also can use a simple set of numbers to define the intervals for a scale from which you can derive chords, melody, counterpoint, harmony, and so forth using a combination of various SoMC techniques and a bit of "by ear" intuition, which once you make sense of the fundamentals tends to map to being able to compose a song by starting with just a handful of measures of integer numbers and an integer-based pitch scale . . .

[NOTE: I did this a few years ago in NOTION 3 using the NOTION 3 native instruments, and I think it has an interesting mood, which at times is a bit mesmerizing . . . ]

1-2-3-4-5-6-7 Rhythm Pattern ~ SoMC Techniques ~ YouTube music video

This is an excellent exercise for a musical group, and when I have a real musical group it is one of the exercises that I have everyone do, because (a) it is enlightening and (b) it is hilarious . . .

Consider that there are five musicians in the musical group . . .

Everyone sits around a table, and each person claps on their assigned beat, where one person claps on "1" (every beat); another person claps on "2" (every other beat); a third person claps on "3" (every third beat); and so forth where you can change the rhythm pattern, since there are many rhythm patterns, for example {1,3,4,5,6}, {2,3,4,5,7}, and so forth, and you can vary it by having two people play something on the same beat, perhaps a hand clap and a kazoo note . . .

The hilarious aspect is that it is very difficult to do unless you really focus on keeping track of your specific beat, so at first people skip beats or clap at the wrong time, and then everyone else gets confused, which happens because musicians naturally listen to what everyone is playing, and it is not so easy to do the counts for some of the numbers, mostly the odd numbers greater than 1 and all the numbers greater than 4, although 1, 2, and 4 are easy beats for most musicians . . .

The mind-boggling aspect is that one can create every rhythm pattern using some combination of the integers 1 through 9, which includes the most complex African and Latin rhythms, and while some of the rhythm patterns can be very difficult for real musicians to play, it is easy to do with music notation in NOTION 4 . . .

Lots of FUN!