The NOATIKL Driven Ambient Drone Jam

[Jimmy Edwards]

Last night, I'm sitting in front of the computer, wanting to work on some kind of music and waiting for the muse, when I decide to fire up Noatikl inside of my

DAW and fart around for a while. I've had Noatikl for a long time, and I have a love-hate relationship with it. I like using it to generate ideas and "noodles",

but I find it frustrating that its core parameters are so arcane. To me, anyway. I also find it frustrating that there seems to be such a small user-base, that file

-sharing and tip exchange is non-existent. But I digress.

So I have Noatikl fired up, and I reach for Absynth, but change my mind and instead I find myself with Drone-E loaded. I load a few more instances of Drone-
E, and off I go. I was gob-smacked:eek:! Using Noatikl to drive the drones, basically non-musical entities, seemed to free Noatikl from the usual "sameness"

that plague its output. But this, this was very cool indeed. After tweaking some parameters, I had Noatikl spewing out these incredible drones, which I

quickly recorded for future use. I am obviously going to continue working down this path, and I will post a result soon, but I am very encouraged by what

has happened. By freeing it from "musical" constraints, Noatikl has become more musical, and possibly, even useful.

[Toaster]

Noatikl can do neat stuff if you dive into it and tell it what to do-- this track https://soundcloud.com/toaster-1/we-mourned-the-dead-and-drew
is entirely Noatikl driven-- using I think Synplant and a couple of other plugins (one of which was cranked up waaaay too loud, you can hear me turn it down at the beginning). The problem I had with it is that the diving you end up doing is basically the same thing I would end up doing if I just flat out picked a key and started composing-- though the variances can be interesting from time to time. They switched to an 'annual update model' at some point, and I wasn't interested enough in it to pay for updates.

If you're MAX inclined, Karlheinz Essel has written some realtime composition libraries for it that do interesting things (http://www.essl.at/works/rtc.html is the link). I haven't done any generative stuff in a while though, so I am rusty with it.

[aoVI]

And it is on sale for $37.50 'til 3/22 (49.99 reg)

[Thought Experiment]

I've had Noatikl for a while now, but I'm still struggling with it to be honest. I've had some interesting results from it (the 'orchestral' part on my track 'Contemplation' was generated by Noatikl), but I know I'm only scraping the surface of its capabilities. I'll persist with it though because, like a true Yorkshireman, I hate to waste money :D

I agree that the learning resources are very thin on the ground, beyond the absolute basics like setting it up as a plugin within a DAW. The only way I can think of, to get deeper into Noatikl's workings, is to use the included templates (of which there are shedloads) and try to reverse-engineer them. Oh well, it keeps us off the streets...;)