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.

So my post count has been way down of late, mainly because I’ve been taking a massive hiatus from my computer, at least in a musical sense. In this time a few interesting pieces have come into the studio. The first of them is this:

The Kurzweil K2661. Kurzweils are somewhat of an anomaly in the keyboard workstation world. Whilst other manufacturers bring out new and updated keyboards every couple of years, Kurzweil have pretty much sat on their VAST based line of keyboards for nearly 20 years. There have been revisions of course, but nothing like the cash cow onslaught of other companies. As someone who has owned and made good use of many worstation keyboards over the years, I think this is because Kurzweil got it right in the first place.

The good points? – The sound should be top of the list. Although many of the preset sounds are a bit dated now (who the hell spends £1700 on a keyboard to use the presets anyway?), a little programming goes a long way, and I was quickly making bang-up-to-date sounds from big Hollywood strings to downright evil distorted DnB basses in no time. Points should also be awarded for KDFX, Kurzweil’s multi-FX system. I’d heard good things about this, but it exceeded my expectations by a long way in both its flexibility and its sound.

Any bad points? – Well the depth of the instrument can sometimes be daunting. I read somewhere that no two Kurzweils are ever the same and I can see why. The flexibility, not only of sound creation, but also of the control you can have, means that the Kurz can be setup to fit into your studio setup in ways you probably haven’t even considered, and whilst this is a good point, it does mean that you can feel a little alone because every Kurzweil ends up different, and as such, it makes it harder to connect with other Kurzweil users in a ‘support and share’ kind of way (although the Sonikmatter forums go along way to help).

My new (ever changing) studio is almost complete. The major new addition is a Mackie D8B (cracked plastic side panels kindly supplied by the courier company – grr!). I don’t quite know where I can put the Mackie Control now, so it might have to go. Still, with all the new channels I have on the D8B, perhaps I won’t miss it so much.

Click the pictrure for a larger photo, or if you want to fish about and see what’s what, click here.

I saw this bad boy on ebay and couldn’t resist. I’ve owned a mono evolver desktop for some time, and had struggled to get on with it. It sounded amazing but somehow trying to navigate round that little programming matrix whilst playing your patch on a master keyboard just didn’t feel right. So I thought I’d gamble on the keyboard version, and I think it payed off.

Finally the Evolver feels like the uber-synth it really is. Having dedicated knobs for almost all parameters makes it easy to program. The keyboard is great quality and has the nicest aftertouch response I’ve ever used. The only real downside I can see is that I’ll be lusting after a poly version now!

This month has been quite fun for new gear. Apart from a Mackie Control and a Line 6 Variax 500, I’ve just taken delivery of this handbuilt Universal Audio 1176LN clone, and boy does it sound SWEET. Anyone who tells you that software plugins can sound just as good as hardware needs their head (or more probably their ears) checking. You can’t go wrong with it, even at extreme settings it just adds warmth, punch and that indescribable analog magic. I might stick some audio examples up if anyone cares for it.

Gotta love the blue VU meters too!

Here are some audio examples. In each of these you will hear a dry loop for 8 bars, then light compression for 8 bars, then heavy compression for 8 bars.

Pop Drums
Electronic
Percussion

I’m loving my new mpc2500. Its got alot of great qualities including the rock solid midi timing, the legendary swing, the build quality (apart from that plastic data wheel), but what impresses me most is the workflow. Its so easy to get around the system that you just can’t help but make music. Its simple, but that’s great… it forces you to focus on the music.

I can think of a few improvement I’d like to have. Auditioning samples from disk whilst your track is playing would be handy, some better tools for editing multiple Pads perhaps, and to be able to play more than one sequence at once in a song. Akai have quite a good reputation for releasing nice extra features in free updates to their operating systems, so maybe some of these will appear one day!

Bottom line, I can’t imagine anyone who enjoys creative sequencing, beat making, producing or remixing would be anything but impressed. I sold my favourite synth to get some cash for this thing, and so far, I’m not regretting it at all :D

I can feel some hip-hop comin’ on…