Symbolic Sound Kyma

Have seen an article in Future Music mag on the Symbolic Sound 'Kyma', looks and sounds (audio from the website) pretty special. Does any one use it here or know anyone who does (esp on the psytrance scene)? It costs about $3500 so I guess few people have it. I heard Autechre use it but although my taste is quite eclectic I couldn't stand more than a short time listening to them.

In any case I was just wondering if anyone knew something about it:

www.symbolicsound.com

It sounds like the holy grail of music production, but then I know very little of actually using it. I's used a good deal for movies they say.

Sax James.

 

BT uses it extensively

 

looks really cool......Like Cubase/Logic with a bit of maxMSP bolted on. Which makes me think. Just a quick random off topic sound design question. Any of you use Soundhack for the Mac much? It has a very cool brassage/timestretch thing and I cant find anything as good for the PC. Such a useful little program for sound design, its even fucking FREE, and of course they dont do a PC version. It must be an Apple conspiracy.........

 

:wow:, soundhack looks very sweet. Have dl-ed the other trial programs for Windoze, thanks for the tip. Can't say I know what equivalent vst for the pc to recommend as a substitute, but I would be interesting in knowing if there was one. You would probably have to use a series of plug-ins and kontakt or something for the same effect, not the same thing tho as doing it in one program.

Sax.

 

Synthedit, Reaktor, Infinity, Audiomulch..... a few things that are verrrrrrrrrrry vaguely in this ballpark for pc

I'd have to agree tho - with Max/MSP, Pluggo, Metasynth, supercollider(??) and stuff like that being Mac only, the Mac does seem better equipped with this kind of 'mad scientist' tools.

 

you can get maxMSP for pc.......

 

I did a session with him a while back and he couldn't be arsed to get it out of it's flightcase.

He was pissed off that, despite paying a small fortune for the thing, half the "features" weren't implemented yet and he was waiting for another of the interminable software updates to come through.

My impression was of a geek's gadget that can do amazing things if you can be arsed.

 

jesus ott, how can you so casually mention that you did a session with BT a while back!!?? :o

 

Fair enough! That's the sort of thing I was interested to know. You always think that there's something better out there, but of course they all have their inherent defects and problems. I'll guess I'll stick to what I got and try to get better at it.

Thanks,

Sax.

 

Whats the big deal, who the hell is BT anyway??

 

Hehe

Its funny.... its not cool to like BT with my drumnbass hat on, because he's trance. And its not cool to like BT with my trance hat on, because.... well, he's the wrong sort of trance!

Truth is I love him for his breaks above all... "Tsunami One & BT - hip hop phenomenon" is still arguably the greatest nu breaks track ever. "mad skillz" and "smart bomb" (by BT alone) are also going to feature well up there in any breakbeat chart i'll ever draw up...

:speaker:

IMA I didnt like much and the latest one is "you guys" as hell, but I can always respect the programming/edits/engineering. its insane - some of the best in the business (and yes, i know andy page did some of the trickery on "movement in still life", but still...) Add to that the fact he's capable to scoring and producing a hollywood movie soundtrack, and coming out with top-flight sound design for sample cds... the guy has earned "studio hero" status for me, regardless of the admittedly sometimes dubious merits of his mainstream output

 

Zackly.

Its probably quite fun to be able to morph an opera singer into a cat miaaowing - for the first ten minutes.

Doesn't put food on the table though.

I can remember when samplers first appeared in the '80s and I just had to have one. Eventually I saved up and got a Roland S10. The first three days were spent sampling burps and me saying "bollocks" and playing it up and down the keyboard - and then came the moment when I thought to myself - "Hmm - so what else does it do?"

Sod all as it turned out - 4 seconds sampling time and no synthesis features to speak of. It quickly became just another tool and didn't make me millions of £££ as I'd assumed it would when I bought it.


As for casually name-dropping BT - when you've seen the commercial end of the music biz up close it quickly loses all its glamour and mystique. He's just a geeky boy with too many plugins like the rest of us.

Not untalented, but certainly no more gifted or special than you or me. Poor sod suffers with the most appalling RSI [carpal tunnel disease] from wielding a mouse for 18 hours a day, and laments having to make a living doing Pepsi commercials with some witless twat from PepsiCo leaning over his shoulder going "Can you make it sound a little more.... punchy?"

We had a laff doing the sesion though - I took up all my analogues and we spent 2 hours seeing how many ridiculous farty noises we could make and fitting them into the track.

Then we sent the tape-op out to the shops to buy 32 cans of Coca Cola - which we left lying all round the studio for when the Pepsi man turned up.

I've got better name-drops than that though.

Like the time I had Tim Booth [singer from James] Brian Eno and Sinead O Connor in the vocal booth doing overdubs, and I found myself going "Hmm - sounds a bit lame to be honest. Sinead - back off from the mic a bit and try another take..."

Or the time Brian Eno asked me what I thought of the tune so far, and I said "Sounds great, apart from that awful drum machine, which is so ugly as to carry all before it. Who's idea was that?"

To which Eno replied;

"Erm... mine."

:unsure:

"Ahh. I'll get my coat shall I?"

 

Well, quite. I wasnt meaning :

OMFG WTF!! OMG!! U MET BT ??? I <3 BT !!! OMG!!

its just that it amuses me the way you're such a renegade element in this context, most of us are sat in our bedrooms with a few warez and an mp3 encoder, and you pop up with stories about brian BLOODY eno (!) in the vocal booth

Well, I dont know about that.

There's no way I can do anything even approaching the edits in "mad skillz".

There's no way I could say "yes" if asked to handle a major hollywood score, whether in a composer's or a producer's hat.

There's no way I can get my beats that fat, my programming so tight, my mix so ... erm... punchy :huh: ...

And I'm not prepared to write that off as the benefit of kit. I've got a 32 bit mixing engine, pretty much every dsp plugin known to man if I want it, and a half decent desk at my disposal. no excuses.

Nor even experience. Because I know I wont get that good no matter how long I keep practicing and improving. Thats not a judgement made in a starstruck fanboy way, just realistic. The same way I used to (just about) get through grade 8 piano pieces, but 30 years more practice wouldnt make me evgeny kissin, let alone rachmaninov.

 

Back on topic...

I don't know if this is what you mean, but Cool Edit Pro has an excellent gliding timestretch function that I've not seen on any other application. I keep it installed for this one feature - indispensible for those Fatboy Slim moments (and let's face it, we all have them).

 

How much of that is a pro mastering job though? Get Ott to tell you about what Kevin Metcalfe did to his stuff - or give the pre-master bootlegs of "Hail To The Thief" a listen in comparison to the finished article (quick answer, there is none).

I've made a point of checking out your stuff since I grabbed hold of "The Nightmare Of Cake" about a year or so ago, and I hold your work up as a benchmark to aim for when it comes to how good I should be in terms of engineering before I start sending stuff off.

Plus, if it's not your day job, it's going to take a little longer to get things sounding as good as the pros because you simply don't have as much time to spend on it.

J.