Crystalized Intelligence

Unsurprisingly, the need to catch up on my schoolwork following the terminal diagnosis of my long-suffering Toshiba Portege has left me with little fun time.  Additional cycles have been commandeered by the learning curve inherent in two new OSs (Mac OSX and iOS).  Of course, they are living up to their reputation for being intuitive, but I suspect they would be intuitiver if it were not for all the years I spent forcing my intuition into the mold that Microsoft engineers insisted it should fit.  Nonetheless, there have been a few moments here and there during which I have been able to futz around with my current project.

As I mentioned in my last post, one of the first things I needed to do following the port to Mac was to come up with an alternative to ZynAddSubFX, an extraordinary VST plugin that I was using for several key voices.  With some searching, I was able to find another free softsynth compatible with my DAW that, although it is qualitatively a different beast from ZynAddSubFX, it was nonetheless designed to be a fairly sophisticated sound generator:  it's called Crystal.  The good news is that it is capable of some pretty impressive noises and there is an iOS version too, so I can take it with me and play with it away from my desktop.  Unfortunately, however, all of the presets, while being very creative and interesting, are out of character for what I've been working on.  Further, its interface is not exactly intuitive (not that ZynAddSubFX is), so it's taken some time for me to get a sense of which end to blow in. 

Despite my student status, I am of an age at which learning curves present steeper slopes than they once did and between OSX, iOS, and Crystal (not to mention iWorks and a handful of other partially and completely new friends), I feel like I've done more than my share of climbing of late.  That said, I have had a few minutes here and there to mess around with the project and I feel like I'm pretty close to where I left off when the Toshiba started showing signs of byting the dust.  The semester will be over in a week or so (whether I'm ready for it to end or not) so I hope to have some real playtime in early- to mid-May and to get this long overdue project polished and posted.