After multiple years spent on organization of creative zone, Zuzana wanted to do something different for this year of Pohoda — the biggest music festival in Slovakia. It is by now well known for its excellent organization, huge music diversity and tons of side activities that makes it friendly for families and party-goers alike. She proposed we do Grafofon somewhere on the festival, and we did indeed get spot on smaller experimental stage. I immediately wanted to do something different this time, something that will fit the festival atmosphere, that will feature some beats and will be still very expressive while setting some borders for us to move inside. I was born in Trenčín and lived there for bigger part of my life — statement that is slowly crawling to not be true, so I am always happy to return home with my work.

The light box got upgraded with a LED strip, that annihilated shadows for the camera.

It was one week before festival Pohoda when I plunged into depths of Reaktor — a strange beast of a software.

On one part it is amazing tool for a crazy price, for 200€ you get coding environment with huge possibilities, set of instruments that are very creative and ready to go and on top of that user libraries which are full of great creation extending the value of the product. My second choice would be combo of Ableton and Max for Live, which is painfully costly compared to Reaktor. You don`t get the fluid live environment as with Ableton, but you get powerful tool to sonify your ideas with. Of course it has its downfalls, the CPU drain is crazy, that is why I am dividing it to two instances in Vvvv audio engine. The coding environment feels sluggish and ancient, everything about the interface feels a bit off and working could be extremely tedious, the UI and UX could use a lot of work. It is not the least resistance solution, but I think it is worth checking out.

This diagram show my architecture, the whole thing is controlled from within Vvvv. Its main task is to take care of image processing, routing of midi, routing of sound and housing Reaktor as 2 VST plugins. Huge thanks goes — once again — to tonfilm, for his amazing contribution of audio engine for Vvvv — which made Vvvv even stronger glue that can hold all of your inputs and outputs together, and shape them in the process into anything you want.

Biggest challenge was to make drawing of the beats fun while still retaining big degree of control. Not just for me, but also for Zuzana. She was taking taking care of the hardware part of the Grafofon, and she does not have experience in coding or performing music, so I needed to do a tool that could be used by both of us. For this I made a quantization sequencer — Vvvv is looking for a drawing, when it sees something in the right spot, it turns on flipflop. This flipflop waits for next trigger in sequence. When it is triggered, flipflop turns off, waiting for the next drawing.

In the arrangement above, you can see the direct quantization of the drawing. I can draw longer line to just play every beat, or draw points rhythmically to construct more sparse beat.

This approach allows me huge flexibility in style, I can do anything between quick successions of drums or rhythmical techno beat, layering various samples by drawing and working with sequencer.

This principle is applied to 8 samples with added bonus of ability to set different clock division to every sample, so I can weave in more diverse sequences. Big thanks to Michael Lancaster from Reaktor User Library for posting LaunchPad mini control, which I was able to modify for my purposes and it made my work much easier.

I was also using contact microphone attached to the motor of Grafofon, which is routed through few effects that were controlled on the paper, a feature that is only possible with the whole hardware built and ready. You can make these things really easily.