They explained their new Blocks idea and asked if I would be interested in doing something for it, and I thought ‘yeah!’. “I was working on this modular thing and they were like, ‘wow, this is a great concept and exactly what we are working on!’. “Native Instruments posted on a Reaktor forum asking if anyone had anything interesting, so I sent them what I’d been making,” he says. I really got into it quickly, and a year ago I built some quite interesting things in it.”ĭavid had never considered taking these new developments much further, until he stumbled upon a particular forum post. That’s what attracted me to Reaktor instead of working with a VST and a piano roll, you have more capabilities to rewire and make things into crazy compositions. As an artist I am really interested in blurring the boundary between composition and sound design, so instead of arranging notes you are arranging sounds, cycles and frequencies – it all comes down to the same thing, really. At 16, though, I’d had too much and went off in a completely different direction, getting into making hip hop and dance music, and that became an obsession.”ĭavid turned that obsession into a successful career as a musician and songwriter for several pop acts, travelling between London and LA, but never lost his interest in the low-level nuts and bolts approach to sonic manipulation. So I had this Apple Mac when I was ten and took it apart, and learned to write assembly code and how the 68000 processor worked. “My dad was always into them and got things like the first Apple Mac when it came out, and when he was done with it I ended up inheriting whatever he upgraded. “I started getting into computers at ten,” he recalls. For David Alexander, the man behind Toybox, the opportunity to develop for the platform is one that marries both a passion for music making – he is a successful songwriter and producer – with a long-held obsession with the computer and sound design. Native Instruments has developed several Blocks that emulate traditional synth modules, but developers like Toybox have been drafted in for more out-there Blocks modules. Blocks is a system derived from the open-source world of REAKTOR that embraces the front-panel patching ethos of hardware modular synthesis, with the advantage that software can take it to completely new dimensions. Toybox is a relatively new software developer and releasing some incredible modules for the Blocks platform.
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