Durk Kooistra

Oskilator – Collision EP (Adapted Records) Summer 2012

Durk — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:43:40 +0000

Adapted Records is making a stir with recent releases from Ford, Blatwax and Kursa. My collaboration wit Bart Knol called Oskilator recently finsihed up work on our first EP. We felt Adapted would be a good place for this release, and hope you guys enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it.

Preview!

Music and Sound Design for ONS Commercial

Durk — Thu, 10 May 2012 12:49:41 +0000

Last month I created the music and sound design for a commercial by Crooked Line. It’s an infographics video with the great artwork and style that we know from crookedline.

Crooked Line was asked to create a video explaining the new tax collection and tax management system used by the municipality of the city of Rotterdam.

Client: Gemeente Belastingen Rotterdam (GBR)
Commisioned by: MCR (http://www.mcr-bv.nl/home.html)

Multi Touch & Music pt 2

Durk — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 15:12:38 +0000

So, multitouch is finally maturing as a controller. Way back, in 2009 I wrote an article about it (which sadly enough is mentioned as a source on Wikipedia’s main multitouch page, showing the lack of interest for the subject so far, since I am far from an expert in this field to say the least!). Windows never really pushed any touch stuff like they innitially proposed with WIN7, and seem to claim this will all change in WIN8. It became deadly silent as only a handful of multitouch products came to the consumer market running on WIN7.

Rebirth on Ipad - Have fun tweaking those knobs...

Apple however came with a product nobody asked for, and now, low and behold, everyone is getting used to touch. Oh well, as long as we get there eventually! We as musicians mostly stand idle by the sideline untill consumer products are affordable and developers start to adapt to new UI’s and workflow.

The I-pad is fun, slick and already great apps have been made for music making. It is however still by far more interesting to work with all the things available to you on your desktop PC or Mac. With OSC you can use the i-pad to control your PC/Mac. Or simply buy a WIN7 enabled MT screen. This is often times a little bit more expensive (for capacative screens) than an I-pad, but most are also 20inch and up)

Stop with the knobs already!

It’s hard to imagine kids working with knobs on a 2d surface for a long time to come. And I think that this is one of the keys(no pun intended) to a new way of working with pitch, expression and timbre.

The importance of development of new instruments is very important for innovation in music. New UI’s can spark new creative waves within a musicians mind, but on a macro level; in a community. That community being globalizing for the past decade, we are in a for a ride!

The Haken Continuum is one example of “new” ways of controlling sounds. It uses midi to send pitch + vibrato information over the X and Y axis respectably. Or any other set up your midi mapping allows.

Rather than building upon physical acoustic instruments, we can now use a 2d surface as an instrument. Besides the Haken, we can go much further! And it seems things are just getting started.

Kivy.

Stumbling upon a Ableton template for touch screen, I also found this other video by the Dev (see below). The earlier mentioned Continuum instrument has been recreated on the Ivy platofrm. this open source project allows users to create touch programs fast and easy. The good thing is, there is a free project available of the Continuum right here.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4NRu7mBXtA

Kivy is 100% free to use, under LGPL 3 licence. The toolkit is professionnally developed, backed and used. You can use it in a product and sell your product. The framework is stable and has a documented API, plus a programming guide to help for in the first step.

Kivy is running on Linux, Windows, MacOSX, Android and IOS. You can run the same code on all supported platforms. It can use natively most inputs protocols and devices like WM_Touch, WM_Pen, Mac OS X Trackpad and Magic Mouse, Mtdev, Linux Kernel HID, TUIO. A multi-touch mouse simulator is included.

Together with Usine, this seems to be a great addition to the fast growing amount of projects utilizing touch. More more and more standards are becoming adapted, developers opening up their software via API’s . The best thing is, we can now start to imagine and MAKE of our own Continuums!

Polysure “Gentle Giants” video selected for SXSW Festival (Texas, USA)

Durk — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 17:16:41 +0000

I did a collaboration with Gerrit Elbrink and Uwe Schweer at the end of 2011. The video got featured on the vimeo homepage and was selected to be featured on the popular music festival SXSW.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfL5xvj4sdk

FPS Control – Shellshock

Durk — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 21:36:31 +0000

Last year I worked on a nice project where I created an exclusive kit of sounds for a game engine demo game called Shellshock.

ShellShock is the first demo created with FPS Control. Not only is the entire setup open to use, change, edit and modify, it’s also a great game! In ShellShock, you enter an abandoned powerplant and find out a way to escape. Weapons include the M9 Beretta and M16 assault rifle. The demo is a perfect example of how FPS Control works, and how to use the various tools to create a story driven game.

I made all the sounds for the game. Check out the demo right here

2012 and retrospective

Durk — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 00:29:01 +0000

Upcoming Project

Hello all, and let me start by wishing you all a happy holidays and best wishes for 2012. A little blurp about my upcoming projects and some reflections about this past year.

This year was a busy one! Focus was on synthesis and SFX & sampling for my upcoming Audiomotif projects (more on that later). I’ve yet again worked so many great people, truly inspiring!. Music also took a more important role, after being in the background for some time.

2012: Sample libs, VST’s and Music

Oskilator (my collab with Bart Knol) will be releasing an EP on a UK Dubstep label. Another more NeuroFunk oriented project called Tachyon is slowly taking shape. More on this in 2012. Polymass is defunkt.

Audiomotif is my outlet for sampling products. I have worked on this for month’s and am keen to share it with the world. Being an utter perfectionist when it comes to sound planning such products is much like predicting the weather. All I can say at this point; It will be a pretty complete bundle for any electronic music producer.

I’m also nearly finished with my first VST freebie. After using modular software to create custom midi routing and advanced synthesis projects I thought it would be nice to share a little plugin I created to help my workflow. I hope it will help you guys out too! For more info on this see this DOA thread.

Juicy Beast Update

Durk — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 19:51:21 +0000

I did some more SFX work for our friends over at Juicy Beast . A sound logo that will be used before the game starts and all the new SFX for Juicy Beast new game, the sequel; Burrito Bison 2. Audiomotif also did the SFX for part 1.

Make sure to keep an eye on their homepage or facebook for the launch of the game (I-phone + Flash, so i guess android too )

Sound logo

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI12es9EoKg

Gentle Giants Video Featured on Vimeo frontpage

Durk — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 03:07:12 +0000

I did a collaboration with Gerrit Elbrink and Uwe Schweer. Gerrit and I composed music and Uwe was kind enough to make some amazing geometrical art video for it! The people over at www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfL5xvj4sdk

More free VST GUI knobs – Freebie Pack Vol 2

Durk — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:24:47 +0000

2 more free GUI knobs

Wrapping up and archiving all the GUI design related files I decided to add a last batch of knobman files on the website. First credits where credits are due; Theordor Kreuger shared some inspiring knobs utilizing various aspects of knobmaker like animated value displays and an animated glowing index ring. And KVR’s Knobman/Skinman thread.

The knobs are loosely based on the design by U-he (Uhbik). Kind of reminiscent of a vault dial. Anyways, hope you guys enjoy! (Freely usable, do not distribute or sell as is)

Download (zip)

Free VST UI knobs and sliders for knobman (& Targa)

Durk — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 23:16:33 +0000

Time for knobs! free ones as a matter of fact. They can be used in VST’s, or programs that let you script your own interface (Max MSP, Reaktor etc). In the free zip you’ll find different sizes of knobs and and a slider. The formats are Targa and knobmans .knob files.

Knobman is a nice free, and easy to use program designed for making stitched images and comes with all the right tools to make a semi realistic knob. There are excellent knobs by a japanese Knobman user called AZ (Moog to 303 style knobs). The knobs I made are a bit futuristic ;)

All the UI elements in the ZIP

The knobs will be used for the update of the very first kontakt instruments I ever made, back in the day for Humanworkshop. Now 2 versions of Kontakt down the line you can use your own images for the parameters.

3 knobman templates
5 rendered Targa files (stitched images incl Alpha)

The knobs are licensed under Creative commons Attribution Share Alike 2.0. You may alter them to your own taste for use in non-commercial projects. For commercial use contact me! Changing colors etc is easy in knobman - since it’s free you don’t have any excuse not downloading it!

.Targa, .knob – KnobMan ver.1.49

Download