Schemawound

For many years my website has been a Tumblr blog, Bandcamp site and URL all held together with sticky tape and rust. Earlier this week I launched a new revised website.

This launch symbolizes the death of the Tumblr blog. The old blog will stay live for the moment but will feature no new posts. All new material will be posted at https://schemawound.com/ . Old posts that still contain some relevance will slowly be converted over to the new site.

While trying to open an old project file I ran into an issue.

Since Monark is an Ensemble provided by Native Instruments as part of Komplete I was surprised. I was even more surprised to find the file in the exact path.

Trying to select the file revealed what the real problem is. "This file was saved with a newer version of Reaktor"

My project file was saved using Reaktor version 5 but my version of Monark was eventually updated to be compatible with Reaktor 6. Since Native Instruments treats Reaktor 5 and Reaktor 6 as two separate plugins that can be installed side-by-side this presents a challenge.

My DAW has no way to know to retry to load the file using Reaktor 6 since they are viewed as two different plugins. This now means every project I have referencing Monark from Reaktor 5 is unrecoverable. I cannot add a new instance of Monark because it would not know what my saved settings were. My only option at this point would generally be to roll back to an earlier version of Monark.

Luckily, Renoise uses a human readable save file format. The XRNS file is actually a zip file that can be opened in any zip program.

Once inside you will find all the information in your song file inside of Song.xml. I am using Visual Studio Code to get nice syntax highlighting and XML tools but you can open it inside any text editor. Searching for the name of the instrument in question brings us to the proper part of the document and then I scroll down until I find the tags related to the plugin.

It would be reasonable to assume you could change all instances of "Reaktor5" to "Reaktor6" but this would be a mistake because Native Instruments is not reasonable.

Between versions the plugin name added a space because... reasons. Save your changes and the file now loads perfectly.

Unfortunately I see this situation all two often with music software where the ability to load old projects is not taken into consideration. At the moment it seems like the best way to protect yourself for when Native Instruments inevitability comes out with a new version of Reaktor is to save preset files for each track when archiving songs.

Realized my album "Heart Removal Kit" was not available on Youtube. Currently making visuals for each track. First up "The Redemption In Her Arms / The Light At The End Of Her Tunnel (Video Version)"

Schemawound · In an Abundance of Caution [Disquiet0485]

Disquiet Junto Project 0485: Strange Weather

The Assignment: Remix the pure sounds of Chris Kallmyer’s traveling wind chimes to your own musical purposes.

This is the second of two projects in a row we’re doing with artist Chris Kallmyer. You needn’t have participated in the previous one to do this one. First, some background: Kallmyer’s “Two hearts are better than one” is a pair of wind chimes, one of which is depicted in this week’s cover image, crisscrossing Los Angeles at the height of the pandemic. Installed at homes for week-long listening sessions, the chimes formed a duet across a city and provided intimate experiences with sound for 16 families sheltering at home. (More at chriskallmyer.com.)

Step 1: Chris has provided us with a recording of the wind chimes, a little over five minutes long. The audio was cleaned up by Alex Hawthorn to maximize the clarity of the chimes themselves, removing much of the background sound, thus situating the chimes in what might be thought of as a platonic space. Access the wav file at dropbox.com.

Step 2: Do what you wish this the chimes. Remix them to your musical heart’s content. The one request is that at least once in your recording, let the source audio be heard clearly.

My most recently released album "Six Tones for Sleep (or Death)" is now available for streaming on Spotify: