Author: colin (Page 37 of 39)

I’ve been doodling on one of the Piano patches on the Roland Fantom. It’s called “PR-A 002: Contemplative” and it is very expressive, particularly now I’ve hooked up the sustain pedal. My sustain pedal is a big clunky metal thing, with a feel that is very like a real piano damper pedal, and I’ve found that inspiration isn’t far away. Usually I just set SONAR up to record the MIDI notes and then just improvise away for 10 minutes at a time, working on chord sequences and practicing left-hand phrases.

It’s true what they said: Practice helps.

Today I decided to be all about Carpentry and make a couple of “hutches” for the studio side of my room. You see, I have this new second music keyboard and its preferable location is on my desk, with the first one, in some kind of stacked arrangement. Unfortunately, there’s no room. It’s already pretty full with the Korg M1 tucked underneath an existing wooden hutch (built to withstand 2 elephants sitting on it) which supports monitors – both the video and audio speaker varieties.

There’s a guitar piece I’m trying to make work, but first I simply *had* to reconfigure effect chain, making the POD a module in the effect loop of the GSP21. It means I can couple the amp simulation of the POD with the superior reverb models of the GSP which took a couple of hours. Prior to this, I had to decide whether to use the GSP or the POD, and switch the plugs around.

In the process, I discovered that the “effect loop” parameter of the GSP actually has two additional values I didn’t know about: “Stereo Summed” and “Inline Summed”. The GSP is an ancient piece of hardware, I’ve had it for years, but I never knew about these options. As it turns out, this anecdote is kind of silly because it turns out that they weren’t useful for what I wanted to achieve anyway.

I am very happy to announce that the collaborative effort of many frequent readers of the alt.music.yes newsgroup is finally available to the public: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/amycd.