Another in my series of live studio jams. The idea being to capture the raw groove of a song in realtime. All these songs will be further edited, overdubbed and generally mangled to form either an EP or an album, but I thought it would be interesting to post the initial song sketch as it happened.

This is also the first video to feature the Dave Smith Tempest drum machine, not in a huge capacity, but the real analogue drums really add something.

Dave Smith Tempest: Drums (through 1176 compressor)
Korg ER-1: Drums
Moog Little Phatty: Epic bass!
DSI Evolver: Melody 1
Suzuki SX-500: Melody 2
Eurorack Modular: Bleepy melody
Eventide Space: Reverb
Eventide TimeFactor: Delay
Kurzweil Mangler: Distortion

All recorded via the Soundtracs Topaz to Presonus Studio One. Some minor tweaks and a couple of edits after recording.

Another live jam from the lab.

Korg ER-1: Drums (through 1176 compressor)
Moog Little Phatty: Bass
Suzuki SX-500: Melody 1
Yamaha TG-33: Melody 2
DSI Evolver: Melody 3
Eurorack Modular: Crazy blip sequences
Eventide Space: Reverb
Eventide TimeFactor: Delay
Kurzweil Mangler: Big dubby falling delay

All recorded via the Soundtracs Topaz to Presonus Studio One. Some minor tweaks and a couple of edits after recording.

I still haven’t found a better camera angle.

Getting away from the Mac/PC to make music is a joy. In the last year or so I’ve been making gear purchases with the goal of writing electronic music ‘live’, with the computer doing nothing except acting as a glorified tape recorder. The whole rig is based around a Sequentix P3 sequencer which provides a gloriously stable midi clock as well as midi sequences. The nice thing about the P3 is it can do generative sequencing in quite a controlled manner, which suits my repetitive yet evolving music style.

My various synths and effect boxes are hooked up to a Soundtracs Topaz 24 track mixer, which allows me to do dub-style ‘playing the mixer’, riding faders and jamming with effects sends, feedback loops etc. The cast list is pretty much this:

- Sequentix P3
- Suzuki SX-500 (poly analog)
- Kurzweil PC3
- Moog Little Phatty
- Dave Smith Evolver
- Eurorack Modular
- Korg ER-1
- Kurzweil Mangler
- Eventide TimeFactor
- Eventide Space
- hand built dual 1176 compressor clone
- Golden Age Pre-73 Mic pre-amp

The video is really my first attempt at using all this together and performing a song live. It uses pretty much everything on the list above except the Kurzweil PC3 and the Evolver. The modular is doing the melody, the ER1 is on drums (going through the Pre-73 and the 1176 to give it some balls), the SX500 is doing chords and the Moog I play live. The Eventide Space is doing all the reverb work. I used Presonus’s Studio One 2 to record everything to separate audio tracks and then did some basic mix tweaking. No additional effects were used. I’m new to Studio One and I’m impressed so far, I haven’t had to look at the manual once, which means they got it right. It also feels solid and hasn’t crashed once.

This experiment was proof of concept really, I have a Dave Smith Tempest on the way which will make drum performances a lot more fun and dynamic. I also need to use Parts on the Sequentix more in order to make more structured changes in the song progression. A better camera angle might not go amiss either.

Expect more live jams soon :)

Clear Notice came about almost entirely through Twitter. Kieron James, the man behind Clear Notice, organized the whole release online. Not only are the artists discovered through Twitter, but the album mastering and artwork were done by Twitter contacts and, just for added value, Keiron organized a video for each song on the album (through Twitter again!). Check this stunning example for Tricil’s track “The Emancipation” by Burning Head.

The music itself is all important of course and it is a great album. There are some exceptional tunes here. David McSherry’s “U?+”, alka’s “sOMn ambulance”, tricil’s “The Emancipation”, rktic’s “nordic walking” and Tapage’s “Wounds” were all highlights for me and could easily be mistaken for songs by artists such as Chemical Brothers, Plaid, Orbital or Aphex Twin.

So if you want to support music and artists at grass roots, grab a copy of Enter Calico. It’s £7.99 from Bandcamp and should be available on iTunes within a few days. I recommend.

I really must hook this baby into the Rozzular :)

DCAM Synth Squad is right around the corner. It’s been in development for something like 8 years, not in the form it is now of course, but the underlying technology (DCAM – Discrete Component Analog Modeling) has, and it’s culmination is about to be unleashed on the software world. I’m excited. Really.

The reason I’m excited is because it’s a kick arse product. I’ve always felt that software synthesizers lacked a certain character, a wildness that real analog synths have in spades. They did the job of course, but using a virtual synthesizer always felt a bit like drinking instant coffee. It does the job, but it’s no Jamaican Blue Mountain. (EDIT: Damn, that sounded pretentious!)

Synth Squad is different. Really.

I’m hugely proud to have been involved in the Synth Squad story. You can get a good impression of it by watching the tutorial videos and checking out the demos on synthsquad.com.

If you’re into synths, I think you’re going to love Synth Squad. I know I work for FXpansion, but I’m speaking as Rozzer. And I wouldn’t write anything on this blog that I didn’t mean. Just check em out.

The reason Vegas is so good at this is because it can render these things in real time. In Final Cut, if I decide my video is going to be 720×576, anything I import that is not at that precise resolution must be rendered before it can be viewed. And if I decide to move it to a different location, it must be rendered again. Painful!

So I got to wondering if it might be possible to run Sony Vegas on my Mac. I could setup a dual boot using Bootcamp, but I’d rather not. The only other potential solution is virtualization software such as Parallels or VMware Fusion. Searching around for users running Vegas using either of these applications, you might be forgiven for giving up before even trying them, but here’s the really amazing news. They both work!

OK, they’re unlikely to work on all machines. My CPU is a Quad-core 3Ghz and supports virtualization (I don’t pretend to know the first thing about virtualization so do your homework before trying any of these). Quad and 8-core CPUs are getting more common nowadays, and they definitely have the power to run demanding programs on one OS, from within a completely different OS. Colour me impressed!

In the end I plumped for VMware Fusion, simply because I had a few audio crackles in Parallels, but nothing you couldn’t workaround. I’m pleased as punch to be using Vegas again, which, in my most humble opinion, is much faster and easier to use than Final Cut. Until Sony release a native Mac version (which will be never), I’ll be using VMware Fusion quite happily.

- capture everything on screen
- capture system audio
- capture a separate microphone
- (optional) capture webcam
- edit all together afterwards, add titles and maybe import a few images

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

ScreenFlow ($99)

The only ‘all-in-one’ solution appears to be ScreenFlow, by Telestream. Screenflow shows alot of promise, allowing you to capture, edit and title your tutorial all in the same application, but I had a few issues. Firstly ScreenFlow seems to struggle with multiple-output audio interfaces. This was a bit of a problem for me as I use an M-Audio Profire 2626. Most of the time ScreenFlow simply didn’t record any system audio at all. I did find a workaround eventually, which is to switch the number of ‘active software returns’ to 2 in the ProFire’s Settings panel. This fools ScreenFlow into thinking that the Profire is a dual output soundcard and recording system audio becomes stable. There are still more problems though. You want to record your voiceover AND the system audio at the same time right? ScreenFlow struggled with that too. If I tried to use the Profire for both duties the microphone recording came out distorted and unuseable. I had to dig out an old Mbox soundcard just to handle mic duties.

Apart from the soundcard problems, I also had problems importing videos created with other software. The videos would look blurry as soon as they were imported into ScreenFlow. Telestream’s tech support are currently looking into this.

I don’t want to put anyone off using ScreenFlow. It’s the only piece of software that met all my needs and it’s got some great features. It can record screen, webcam, system audio and microphone audio all at the same time (soundcard problems not withstanding) and once you get into editing your video, the workflow is fast and pleasurable. Zooming into parts of your video is really easy, and there are some nice effects to make your video look more pro such as drop shadow, reflections, rotations, titles etc.

Just make sure you test out the demo with your system first, especially if you’re using pro audio gear.

iShowU ($20)

iShowU, by ShinyWhiteBox, is a capture program only, meaning that you’ll need separate editing software aswell. It will capture screen, system audio and microphone audio into one Quicktime file. The two audio streams are kept separate in the Quicktime file. Of all the software I tried, iShowU seemed to be the most stable and trouble free. It’s basic but it works.

The main problem here is that editing software for the Mac consists of either Final Cut Pro (a cool $1,299), Final Cut Express ($199) or iMovie. The obvious choice here is Final Cut Express, but it’s not an application I’m a big fan of. Doing things like Zooms are not trivial. Whilst it may be a powerful video editing application, it is by no means optimized for screencasting/tutorials.

Snapz Pro X ($69)

Snapz Pro X, by Ambrosia software, is another capture-only utility. I didn’t test it quite as fully as the other two applications here. In the main it seemed to work, although I couldn’t find any option to select which input to record microphone from, so presumably you can only use your Mac’s build in Mic input. I was also put off by the fact that it shouts idiotic gimmick phrases at you, like “Action!” whenever you start recording and “That’s a wrap!” when you export the video. This plus the fact that it’s 3 times the price of iShowU (for no additional features) put me off somewhat. Again, you need your own editing software for this.

In Summary

The choice is limited. The ideal solution for my needs was ScreenFlow, but the technical issues are annoying. I’d love to hear from anyone doing screencasting/tutorials on a Mac. What software do you use? What’s your workflow? Do you use multiple applications? Perhaps there’s some software I’ve overlooked.