OK, first up is the Yamaha Studio Connections Recall template for the Eventide Eclipse. I am NOT going to write extensive documentation on how to install this and get it running. You should be able to figure that out for yourself. 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 Eventide Eclipse template only supports dumping of the current edit buffer. That means that when you send back the dump, the current program will be replaced, but not written to memory. For my purposes that is fine, but you may want to write the program to a user memory location if it’s important to you. The Eclipse’s Setup parameters are not touched.

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

Download the Eventide Eclipse Recall Module.

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.

The K2661 is taking me a long time to get into. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but it’s deep beast and the learning curve is high.

That said, I’ve had some fun programming it, and here are some of the results. 20 patches, all with a very ambient and filmic edge. Read more…

I’ve spent about the last year putting this bank together. Not full time of course, I do have the other things to do occasionally, but this bank represents many late nights nonetheless.

127 brand new sounds for your Evolver Read more…

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).

Oh it’s been aaaaagges since I posted anything. How piss poor. Well, to make amends here’s a fun sample set I made of a circuitbent Speak N Spell. It was my only foray into circuitbending. Quite fun whilst it lasted, and reasonably sucessful too. So here are two sample sets. Read more..

Another bank of Imposcar sounds here. Alot of BOC style plucks, some electro type basses and a few nice pads and sound effects. Read more…

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!

Here is a collection of laid back, soul influenced hip hop, written exclusively on the MPC2500. Read more..