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…

Here’s my top 5 current iPhone apps, in no particular order Read more…

OK, let’s get this out of the way right up front. I work for FXpansion so you can take this entire blog post with as big a pinch of salt as you feel is necessary… Read more…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, you can’t have escaped the rise of Spotify. Free, LEGAL music for all. Gotta love that right? Read more..

As my hunt for a good screencasting solution continues, I’ve become painfully aware that to edit video on a Mac you basically HAVE to buy Final Cut, in some form or other. Now I’ve always been Sony Vegas man. Vegas is perfect for editing together multiple sources that are different resolutions, a video screen capture from here, a jpg from there, a video imported from your mobile phone. Read more…

I recently moved to a Mac as my main studio computer. One of the things I have to do regularly is screencasting (I do all of the tutorial videos for FXpansion). My needs are fairly simple: 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.

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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.

Here is a Yamaha Studio Connections Recall template for the Korg Karma. Again, there’s no extensive documentation on how to get this up and running. Assuming you have Studio Connections installed though, you should unrar this download into “C:Program FilesYAMAHASM2GTRCDevices” and then use the GTRC Manager to enable it.

This template supports dumping of the Current Program or Current Combi. I didn’t implement any other settings as that’s all I ever need. It means I can recall whichever Program or Combi I was using in a particular Cubase song. Great! When you send back the dump, the current Program or Combi will be replaced, but not written to memory.

Any problems leave me a comment here and I’ll get back to you.

Download the Korg Karma Recall Module.