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.

Painting Abstracts is finished. The L6-S and the Telecaster battled it out and finally agreed to share. Tele on rhythm and “spooky” guitar; L6-S on lead, all the way.

I promise I will get back and finish my series on vocal production as soon as I can. I have to attend to other business for a while, though.