Alfador Workstation
In the Spring of 2007 I was lucky enough to enroll in Music 158 at UCB. I had been spending all of my free time sequencing and synthesizing before attending Berkeley and was upset to see that I didn't have many options to continue with that at Cal. However, when I discovered 158 I was pumped! This project is a culmination of my programming in that class and I presented it as my final project at the end of the semester. I ended up fashioning three main patches to make up my mini techno orchestra. The orchestra is made up of one drum machine, one bass machine and one sequencing synth.
The first window that opens is the Master Window. From this window you can monitor the gain of each synth and pan the sounds to either the left or right. You can open each instrument by clicking the button next to the patch. Most importantly you can open the Audio Out window and record your song using the application inside of that window. The best way to record is have your sequences running. While this is happening click the open button. Save your file name and then click record. When you click record it automatically goes to beat one-- there will sound like there is some clipping but it won't come through in the recording. When you are done recording hit the stop button. If you stop the sequencer it will to continue recording until you click stop.
The Sequencer Synth has only one channel and plays up to an octave chromatically. Each sixteenth note can be a 5 different velocities including off. You can store pitch and velocity patterns separately. Make sure it is paused when loading up presets. The harmonic table on the right is real time. Make sure to turn off the interpolator if you are trying to build and save your own wavefoms. The envelope is also realtime. Click and drag to shape it. Shift click deletes dots. Hit play (the spacebar) and experiment.
In the Machines you can load up 8 different sounds by clicking the load button and finding an AIFF drum sound you would like to import. Then you can click the toggles to trigger that sound. To mod the sound use the 3 different velocities, use the knob on the left to adjust pitch&length, the knob on the right for channel volume and the "M" button for mute. There is also an overdrive slider and a bit crushing slider. Both the Bass and Drum Machines have what I named "scorers". I wrote a score using binary messages sent to the toggles to play the demo.
