Delays as Cabinet & Room Emulation

Here is a quick tip: Add several short delays to your sound to fake a mic’ed guitar cabinet sound. The delays must be very tight to emulate small room and speaker reflections (1-110ms). Try two short delays (nearby objects), and one long (back wall). Also you could look at impulse responses, and guess the time and amplitude (amount) and set your delays time and amplitude to each spike to fake a sound. Also don’t forget that filters are basically EQ control and can be adjusted to fake different sound responses. Tuned feedback and Resonance can fake the natural resonance of a speaker, room or mic. The more you listen the better and fatter your results will be. These techniques will make your bass patch less boring. You will also use less CPU power.

Using Oscilliscopes to Emulate Analog Gear in Reason

This tip can work with any software or hardware. The point of this tutorial is to learn how to use an oscilloscope for the first time and experiment by making matching waveforms.

1. Download Smexoscope a free oscilloscope plugin for Mac and PC.

2. Open your DAW

3. Create an input for your hardware synth, and add Smexoscope on it.

4. Create a software synth track and add another copy of Smexoscope. (you can use Subtractor and Rewire or any plugin you can think of)

5. Choose which will be the source and which will be the target. (hard or soft synth)

6. Play the same note on each synth. Loop it.

7. Adjust the timing knob. Hit freeze mode on the target track in Smexoscope. (the one you want to copy)

8. Now play with waveshaping and synthesis in your software, like reason over rewire, or any plugin and match the pictures you see. You will want to experiment a lot to get similiar shapes, and you may not get it exactly.

Tip: Start with the basic shape on one OSC, then add modifying OSCs and filters. If your software uses subtractive synthesis (like reason Subtractor) you can get pretty close to the basic wave shape.

Now you can use both your eyes and your ears to get similiar sounds in your plugins and patches.

Mix in 5 Channel “Super Prologic” With Leftover Home Amplifiers

Got an extra home amplifier that use Dolby Prologic? What about three?

The human ear can easily tell where sound is coming from. With only two (stereo) or three (prologic) front speakers, we haven’t yet gone far enough to trick the brain into believing we are in a natural sound field. We need five front speakers! When digital surround standards added more rear channels, they were neglecting our front-ward listening abilities. Thankfully its still possible to enjoy this setup with a only a stereo source (mixer, keyboard, dvd, cd, or workstation) and common analog dolby prologic amplifiers.

Goal: To use three Dolby Prologic home amplifiers to spread an audio signal across five front speakers for improved sound imaging

You Need:

-Three Amplifiers With Dolby Prologic Mode (Two with discrete RCA outputs)

-RCA Cable & Speaker Cables

-Five Speakers (Left, Mid Left, Center, Mid Right, and Right)

Note: if you have surround speakers & sub, you can hook those up normally for 8 or 9 channel dolby prologic.

Tutorial: Installing Windows On Partitioned Mac Without Bootcamp

In case you have got an intel mac, and already have your drive partitioned in Mac OS X, here is a guide to add a new windows partition without deleting any of your data or using a backup drive. These are tricks that go beyond Apple’s Bootcamp utility, which wouldn’t work in this situation anyway. For people into music, windows on a mac gives access to many audio tools and drivers.

This is an overview of what you need to do and not a step by step tutorial. I am only providing this information because Apple won’t and many people on the internet have no clue how to do this. Do not ask me for support. Make sure you have all this stuff before you get started.

You need:

-An Intel Mac

-A Functioning Windows Install Disc

-Up to date intel versions of both iPartition and iDefrag on a boot cd (Coriolis CDmaker software lets you create a custom boot cd).

-Boot Camp drivers from apple’s website, so when you do get windows running it finds all your hardware.

-Mac OS X drives that are already partitioned. This tutorial is NOT for people with a single partition (who should use regular bootcamp instructions).

-Know how to hold Option on your keyboard when restarting to select boot CDs.

Always backup your important data before messing with drive formatting…

1. Make sure Mac OS X’s hard drive partition map is using GUID . iPartition (Mac OS X), on a boot cd, can convert it to GUID if it happens to be by apple. Oddly the “Apple” partition map is out of date and no longer used by apple. This happened to me, and I found iPartition is the only software that can change it.

2. In Disk Utility, select the partition you want to chop in half. Create a Fat (MS-DOS) version. It will do this nondestructively and your data will stay intact. Make sure you have enough GB for the windows install and software you might want to use later. Note: It is likely that when you get to this step that DiskUtil will fail. This may be because your disk is too fragmented with large files. If that is the case then do this:

Run iDefrag, choose the “Compact” algorithm, to free up space. This will allow DiskUtil or iPartition to make the partition without running into weird errors. You don’t have to do this if the partition was created okay.

Once you have an MS Dos partition created, without bootcamp I might add, you might think you can just load your windows install CD on startup. NO! The problem lies with the Windows installer. It won’t be able to see the new partition you made. It is possible to destroy your drive in the windows CD installer if it is only showing your one hard drive.

3. Boot iPartition’s CD on your mac. Run iPartition from the Launcher. Select your MS-DOS partition. Go to the inspector window, then partition. Click “visible in windows.” Click GO This will allow the windows CD installer to see your partition. This also prevents it from destroying all the data on your drive and breaking your Mac OSX install.

4. Run the Windows installer CD. If it sees the partition you created on the C: drive, with the appropriate amount of GB space then you may proceed. If it doesn’t you have to boot back into Mac OS X or iPartition and troubleshoot. At this step you can reformat your drive to NFTS if you want, or leave it at Fat32.

5. Once the Windows installer CD finishes it will restart itself. Unfortuneately it won’t do it properly. It might come up with a missing folder icon and boot you into Mac OS X. If this happens, go to your startup disk preference panel and choose the Windows install CD again. This time it should start to finish the install procedure.

6. When you have windows working, download the appropriate windows (XP/Vista) boot camp driver pack (its an exe) and put it on the desktop of your windows install. Run it. Now you should be able to do things like connect to the internet with airport express etc. TIP: If Apple’s EXE doesn’t run at all, you can make a driver cd in Mac OS X by clicking on the Boot Camp Utility app—->right click—>show package contents—–>Contents—–>Resources—->DiskImage.dmg Mount that image and make a CD copy of it with disc utility. Insert the CD when you’ve booted into windows.

The reason this ends up being so complicated is because Apple does not provide a disk utility that is compatible with its own hacked together drive scheme; it is only currently supported by 3rd party software (iPartition). The original Bootcamp utility works, but only in one narrow situation (a single GUID, HFS+ partition) that forces you to delete everything.

Hopefully this information helped someone. I am just posting it because I didn’t find these tips anywhere on the internet. Now I can run windows audio software on my intel mac (once again).

Frequency Tests For Speakers

If you need to test out your new speakers or get the levels right on an audio system with no input, try these tests.

http://www.burninwave.com/

This free downloadable CD seperates tones on different tracks in case you are equalizing levels one by one:

http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2004/09/audio-test-cd

Roland SP-808ex Synth Engine Demo/Overview Video

This is an overview of the SP-808ex synth fx engine where I play a few patches and talk about the synthesizer editing capabilities. I think the synth engine itself sounds very good and can add a special touch to your mix even when its only monosynth. When you are using the synth engine, make sure you have your midi controller set to ch. 11 and that effects are turned on. If the patch uses the d-beam, then turn on the appropriate button near the d-beam. Press FX INFO or Shift-FX Info to get into the editing features, and use the appropriate knobs for live tweaking.

The SP-808ex has something for everybody. Check out my tutorial on using its vocoder.

SP-808 Vocoder Tutorial

This machine is not always immediate without a manual, but you can get good results. The Vocoder is one of those things that you need to know how to set up. Make sure you don’t have anything connected to input “L” !!! Unplug it (unless your using an externally preamped MIC)

This is not a demonstration of its capabilities, just a tutorial.

Video: 52 Reason Tricks by James Bernard

52 Reason and Record Tips by James Bernard Week 1 from James Bernard on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/9558969

Vintage Sample Archives

Instead of new samples of vintage gear, how about some OLD samples all created and archived before 2001, when this decade went to crap. Some of these directories haven’t been changed since 1995!!!!! It is a miracle they are still available! I imagine files sitting on some old hard drive, in the dark, probably covered with dust, still running. The are owners mummified in the next room and utility companies to big to bother to cut the power. Oh well, free samples!

Netboy “W30″

http://gamelay.usami.com/~netboy/w30/samples/

Obviously a guy, maybe japanese who used a W30. Last modified March 2000. Contains samples created in 1997 etc. Lots of roland, drum machines, and old breakbeats.

Mirror of “Hornet”

http://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/pub/scene.org/mirrors/hornet/music/samples/

Descriptions of these sample packs available on this website which must be the original location (with non-working links).

Internet Trash

Internettrash “sample direct” Probably another mirror with some of same packs and description.

Some of the samples are in .XI format which are capable of being opened in Fast Tracker 2 and Milky Tracker. To open .XI wavs in OS X, Use Milky Tracker load the sample, hit 16 bit, then “NO” when it asks you to convert.

Simple Drum Programming Tips: Samples

This tip will make your drums sound more dynamic and natural will work in software, sampler, or korg/roland grooveboxes.

1. To make single drum samples sound more natural make a random +8 depth pitch mod. Set to random oscillation. This attempts to make multiple hits less predictable.

2. Use accents in your step sequencer.

3. Route the bass and snare to a guitar distortion pedal. Use the EQ and gain to subtley tweak the sound. This works well if your drum sample rom is too clean.

4. Layer multiple snare samples. On accents both samples are triggered; Non-accents a single, main snare sample will suffice.

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