Does anybody here listen to Richard Devine?

flowersniffer7 · Joined: Nov 17, 2006 Posts: 53 Location: Allentown PA

I was wondering if anybody here has read the article on the reaktor website about richard devine and the manner in which he composes/performs... seems like a pretty tedious process... One which I would like to learn more about.
I have had occassion to talk to him about it, though we were both quite drunk at the time so much of the tech talk was lost in alcohol babble. Pretty cool guy though I must say.
Anyway, does anybody have more information about his music construction process?

ontology · Joined: Jan 31, 2007 Posts: 4 Location: Santa Fe, NM

elektro80 · Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 6:04 am Post subject:

I googled the guy. I think I found his homepage. Pretty cool stuff. Well done.

flowersniffer7 · Joined: Nov 17, 2006 Posts: 53 Location: Allentown PA

play · Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 2:18 pm Post subject:

I was quite into Devine at one time. Then I went to a symposium held by the digital media studies department here at DU. Devine did a thing about Absynth that was basically one long commercial. Then he spoke about how to commercialize your music. It made me feel kind of dirty and I started to listen to his tunes more and realized that it was sort of intentionless. Lots of amazingly crafted sounds but not a lot of emotion. Not that there is anything wrong with that. If you like the sound that's all that matters but sometimes having a negative experience of the artist can color the music from then on. Incidentally, Jushua Kit Clayton presented at the same symposium. He is a great musician and also one of the programmers of max/msp which was the topic of his presentation. Fascinating stuff.

flowersniffer7 · Joined: Nov 17, 2006 Posts: 53 Location: Allentown PA

play · Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 4:01 pm Post subject:

I wasn't really making a character judgment. I'm sure he's a nice and cool guy. I guess I'm just easily put off by any type of commercialism even it's benign.

He is quite an amazing sound designer. From what I've gathered just reading and also watching him work in Absynth, he uses a huge amount of samples and layers or morphs them and probably controls sample selection based on various algorithms. That reminds me of a tool I saw on the princeton soundlab page: http://soundlab.cs.princeton.edu/research/mosievius/
I haven't been able to play with it since the UI is OSX only but the concept is really interesting and it sounds like it would give you the power to do some things live that would normally be a tedious noodling process.

Also, just from listeneing to the sounds I think devine has a very finely tuned ear in the sense of textures not in the traditional musical sense and his technical knowledge is such that he is able to imagine new sounds by combining other sounds with various techniques without having to actually do it. Sort of like how skilled composers can imagine a complex score. The rest of us have to just noodle around :)

It would be interesting to try and categorize that process so that it could be practiced.

erich · Joined: Jan 08, 2007 Posts: 58 Location: US Audio files: 1

I know he uses CDP, Kyma, and Symbolic composer. I am looking for info on symbolic composer myself, all I found though was stuff the company put out. There isn't alot of info on it. Anyone know of any?

IanBuzz · Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 11:51 am Post subject:

I meet the guy and he jammed out with our techno rave ensemble at Berklee last year... He had some bad ass hacked 303s and just a ton of cool gear, he came off as a real nice guy... not my style of music but I RESPECT what he dose 100%