Category: Studio Diary (Page 22 of 23)

Yesterday I bit the bullet and installed MIDIQuest 9.0 on the DAW. I’ve been a regular follower of Sound Quest’s universal editor/librarian since about version 6.0 but I never really managed to leverage it. I don’t think I even installed 8.0.

Well – given my recent paranoia about my older synths breaking down or resetting and losing their memory, you’d think I would have done this earlier, but I’ve always found the process of configuring the software to recognise the different instruments, and figuring out how to save the patch banks to disk to be daunting.

9.0 has been given a UI overhaul which seems to have improved things a lot. It’s still daunting, though. It seems to me that there is a market for a kind of “getting started” user guide that would be helpful for people in my position.

Due credit to SoundQuest, the manual is actually pretty good, and if I read it twice from cover to cover I’d probably be a lot better off. I’m sure the information I need is in there, and if it isn’t, it’s only because the number of different instruments they support is so big that there are going to be some gaps no matter what.

Anyway, yesterday things were going really well. MidiQuest 9.0 actually has support for every peice of equipment I own, including the GSP-21, J-Station, and Line6 POD 2.0.

I backed up the patch and combination memory banks of the Korg M1, Alesis D4, and Korg TR-Rack, but when I got to the TR-Rack “multi” configuration, I got a blue screen of death. This would be my first one since switching to Windows XP a year ago.

This is kind of sad, things were going so well. And I must bear in mind that “things aren’t backed up until you’ve proved you can restore”.

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Walter.

Something has been bothering me for the last couple of days, and last night I finally decided to do something about it. Basically, the problem is this. My “trusty” Korg M1 keyboard hasn’t really earned the nickname, because I hardly ever use it and it never goes anywhere. I acquired it in August 1989 – which means that it is 14 years old! This wouldn’t normally bother me, after all, old keyboards eventually die and are replaced by more capable machines. But the M1 was the last synth my brother and I really tweaked and programmed new patches into, and some of them are completely vital to some of the music we wrote. A couple of these pieces of music have been “on the shelf” for several years, waiting for me to go back to them and polish them up.

Again, this wouldn’t normally be a problem. These days, when working on music projects on the computer, I tend to “print” an audio track of each instrument/voice, so that I don’t have to be concerned with coming back after a period of time and putting a lot of effort into reconstructing the particular patch used.

Well – some of the music that relies on the customised M1 patches doesn’t exist in multi-track audio format. In fact, when I went back through my backups, I realised that not only did I not have digital backups of the multi-track (I was recording to 1/4″ tape at the time, cut me some slack here), but I was going to have to restore the MIDI sequence data from some of the first CD-R discs I ever burned! Yes, these are gold CD-R discs made back in the dim dark ages when every second CD you made was a coaster. Although I verified I could read them at the time, I hadn’t actually tried to read data from these disks for 10 years.

So I was little nervous… anyway, it turned out there was no trouble reading them even after all this time, and I have started building a new multi-track project in Sonar – with separate audio tracks for the M1 patches, for future use.

The Korg M1 worked as well as ever. No sign of aging other than the cheezy piano sample.

I have been working a little on music, hampered somewhat by hardware adjustments. I retired my Pentium III 500 MHz music workstation, Maestro, and moved the audio interface card and second hard drive into my more capable Pentium 4 2 GHz machine, Pollux. After re-installing Sonar, CoolEdit, and all the other bits and pieces, it all seems to be working.

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.