I’ve been spending some time recently creating Max For Live controllers for all my hardware. The beauty of this is you can program a dedicated editor, with patch browsing, in whatever configuration suits you and have all parameters available for automation within Live. It means you can forget about what midi controller number does what on your synth and concentrate on making music. Read more…

The Innerclock Sync-Lock is a small box that provides a solution. Getting rock solid midi clock & din sync from your DAW.

The problem is that PCs and MACs have notoriously shakey midi timing. If you’ve never noticed this, you probably don’t need a Sync Lock, but if you’ve ever been frustrated by the midi clock coming out of your DAW then read on. Read more…

Ever since I packed up my Atari ST and bought a PC, I’ve had this nagging feeling that the midi on my PC/Mac/DAW has been sloppy. I packed up that Atari over 10 years ago, and I’ve owned many PCs and Macs since then, not to mention many different midi interfaces and external synthesizers, drum machines, samplers and sequencers. They ALL exhibited the same custard-like timing. Read more…

Months ago, my good friend Oli from Groove Criminals sent me this rather charming circuit bent Realistic Reverb unit. I completely forgot to post it here, and it serves as a good tester for embedding youtube clips into the blog, which I’m amazed I haven’t done before. Read more…

It arrived!

I haven’t had a great deal of time to play yet, but initial thoughts are that it oozes analogue character. The oscillators have an insane range (something like 15 octaves). The filters are clean, but very nice sounding. The envelopes could be a little longer, and I can’t for the life of me work out how you reset LFOs, but hell – I’m on a learning curve and it’s all good. Read more…

I’ve just bought a dream item. An Analogue Systems modular synthesizer. To say I’m excited is a huge understatement. It’s like 10 Christmases all at once. Read more…

For about 2 years now, my prized Mono Evolver Keyboard has been dying.

One encoder after another started misbehaving. They would jump wildly to different values, or pin to the maximum value without moving. First the filter cutoff encoder went, then the Distortion encoder, and after that more. Read more…

I’ve been a Cubase user for something like 15 years (anyone else remember this)?

Over that time I’ve been frustrated and/or curious enough to try out different hosts. Never has anything even nearly tempted me to switch from using Cubase. It’s not that I think Cubase is amazing, far from it, but familiarity is everything, and somehow nothing I ever tried was different enough to warrant a switch. All hosts were, in my humble opinion, fairly equal.

Read more…

So about a month ago I decided to upgrade the Kurzweil K2661 to the latest & greatest PC3 model. I’d had a bit of a love/hate thing going on with the K2661 for a while, and, whilst it was definitely more love than hate, I’d been considering selling it for something a little more modern sounding, maybe a Yamaha Motif.

The problem was I wasn’t convinced by the Motif either. It’s got a certain ‘plasticy’ sound that might cut through mixes well, but it doesn’t stun you with depth or realism. In my line of work though (I mainly do music for television) a good ROMpler is essential and the K2661 was sounding pretty dated.

So anyway, the PC3 arrives. I was expecting some improvements to the way you can program it. I was expecting some new up-to-date keymaps. I was expecting more power for more FX.

What I really wasn’t expecting is the warmth and realism of almost every patch. To my ears this board wipes the floor with the likes of the Motif (I made sure I had a long play on the Motif when I was at Musikmesse last week just to make sure). There are some weak spots, but overall I’m extremely glad I stuck with Kurzweil. I can’t wait to see what expansion boards Kurzweil comes out with.

I think you could me a fanboy! Check out some of the PC3 demo sounds here.

For some reason, I’ve totally overlooked Yamaha’s Studio Connections until now. Being a fairly heavy weight Cubase user, you’d think I would have come across it before, perhaps discussed at cubase.net or nuendo.com. Or perhaps mensioned on other forums. But it seems that Studio Connections is a dark secret. Very few people even seem to know what it does.

I’ve been exploring the “Recall” side of things, which is essentially a sysex librarian. It’s easy to see why nobody understands this because Yamaha’s website doesn’t even mension the word sysex.

What happens is, the Studio Manager (pictured above) allows you to request sysex dumps from your external gear, and stores it until you next want to send that back. This is integrated into Cubase, so you can store sysex dumps within a Cubase song file. There is a standalone version for non-Cubendo users too. The great news is that it genuinely seems to work and it’s a more elegant solution than recording sysex dumps at the beginning of your song.

It’s pretty easy, if you know a little about sysex, to come up with working templates (they’re called GTRC templates – Generic Total Recall Component!). In a week or so I’ve written templates for the Evolver, Korg Karma and Eventide Eclipse. Plus I’m using the excellent Kurzweil K2600 template made by Jason. I’ll put these online soon.