Category: Studio Diary (Page 13 of 23)

Last weekend I did what I promised myself I wouldn’t do, and went back and tweaked a previously “finished” song:

The clavinet in Playing with the Big Boys now shares time with a Rhodes electric piano.
Both instruments are provided by the superb PianoTeq Play v.3 VST.

Time for an update. Since finishing up Solo Flight, I’ve turned my attention to the next track, “Strange But True”. There’s not a lot I wanted to change in this piece. As per my usual habit, it’s already been re-recorded a couple of times, but in accordance with my master plan, I wanted to replace the electric guitar with the Gibson L6-S, and go over the acoustic guitar tracks to see if there were any glitches I wanted to clean up. Oh, and also I wanted to replace the sampled Doumbek with a “live” recorded track, and the drum loops with XLN Addictive drums, again played “live” on my SPD-20, with sticks.

So, actually quite a lot of work needed doing.

Whilst re-recording the nylon acoustic guitar tracks, I noticed an unexpected problem. Since I’ve started using Dad’s Zoom H2 for recording the Ovation steel, I’ve realized that I am not happy with the sound of the Godin. I can no longer get a recorded sound that I’m happy with, either from a microphone or from the piezo pickups, or in any combination. I guess my tastes have changed.

Well that brings me to the next post. A new addition to the arsenal comes to the rescue!

In a fit of energy I re-arranged the layout of the studio slightly. Keyboard against the wall; desk facing the window. The custom-designed-and-built studio furniture unit is unchanged positionally except for sliding a foot to the right.

Reflections from the window are reduced. Mission accomplished. On the other hand, when I’m working at home in day-job-mode I now have my back to the door which is not great. On the gripping hand, I can look out the window as I daydream work.

I had some family stuff to deal with over the last couple of months, but I’ve been enjoying the new A-80 keyboard. A very comfortable play.

I’ve completed the tracking on Painting Abstracts some months ago, and moved on to finishing up Untitled (which now has a title – more later) and Solo Flight, which is turning out to be pretty epic.

I feel like I’m on target for an August 2012 completion of volume 1.

Here’s something I’ve wanted for a while. Having lost my eBay virginity recently, it seemed like a no-brainer to bid on this:

It’s a Roland A-80 master MIDI controller keyboard, circa 1989-95, with 88 piano-weighted keys and polyphonic aftertouch. Some cosmetic dings from its earlier life in a smoke-free studio, but all in working order.

One of the other nice features of this board is that it offers both sprung pitch-bend stick, and independent (non-spring) pitch and modulation wheels. For some reason (economy?) it is very rare to find both types of controllers in one instrument, yet there are many situations where you need one or the other. It is impossible to do realistic manual vibrato using a wheel (in my opinion), but on the other hand, some software instruments (Garritan Personal Orchestra for example) the mod wheel is used to control volume. The springy pitch/mod joystick is useless for that. (Clavia/Nord gets this right.)

Having lugged it into my room, minor problem: It was 1.5 inches too wide for my custom-built studio desk, but the nice thing about furniture that you’ve made yourself is that you have no qualms performing a quick mod to provide a work-around. Here it is newly installed:

Can’t even see the joins.

The feel of the keyboard is pretty good. More resistance than I’m used to, and doesn’t really feel like a true piano (the escapement mechanism isn’t quite the same) but the keys have a nice solidity and thunk to them, and the OS allows various response curves to be selected and a lot of tweaking options.

I’ve located a copy of the service manual, which is good to have, because the default aftertouch sensitivity on this board is, well, rather insensitive unless you’re the Incredible Hulk. Fortunately, there’s a hardware mod you can do to adjust this, and I expect at some point I will give it a go.

I was so excited by the feature set and demo videos of Presonus’ Studio One v.2.0 that I went onto the online store and ordered the wrong upgrade package.

Fortunately it is now sorted out…

I’m a long-time Cakewalk SONAR user, but earlier this year I took advantage of a $20 license of the “Artist” edition of Studio One 1.6. After reading about the Project Mastering window in the Pro version, I soon upgraded, and have been using Studio One Pro for mastering my CD compilations for the last few months.

v 2.0 of Studio One, announced a couple of days ago, might just be the best update ever. It seems to address pretty much all the concerns I had about potentially switching to the Studio One platform from SONAR, and the upgrade price was very attractive.

Given my dissatisfaction with the development path of Cakewalk SONAR X1, there’s nothing to prevent me from switching except perhaps inertia. I have a new project that I’m ready to start… and no excuses for not giving it a whirl in Studio One 2.0.