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Step 1. Create an audio track
Step 2. The fx bus settings:
Bus Send 1 = Wah Distortion Delay @ 99%
Dry Level 0%
Bus Return 10%
Time: 0.1ms
Feedback, Attack, Release, Sensotivity, all @ 0%
Drive: 100%
Bus Send 2 = Plate Reverb @ 71% (Optional)
Dry Level 0%
Bus Return 9%
Decay, Diffusion 100%
Density 35%
Damping 30%
Be careful when setting this up as you will likely clip the internal circuit or your speakers if all the settings aren’t in yet. Pay attention to bus return levels.
Step 4. Plug your guitar into the Alesis Fusion’s audio in OR through an external amp FIRST (recommended).
Here are the settings on my practice amp which leads into the Alesis Fusion via Headphone-Out:
Input Gain 100%
Treble 100%
Mids: variable (50%)
Bass: 100%
Overdrive: ON
Adjust the output volume accordingly
After all this setup you will get a live guitar FX processor out of the Alesis fusion, and a patch that sounds AWESOME.
Its like Overdrived Metal-Wah from hell. Great for solos and some chords.
Also check out his upcoming Divius (TR-808 clone)!
From Create Digital Music
if you’re a user of Digidesign and M-Audio products and looking to use current operating systems, very often you’re out of luck.
I think that totally sucks. I’ve had this happen to me with an m-audio USB midi interface. They just never updated the driver on the switch from OS9 to OS X. All it was is a USB midi module. I had to sell it and switch to an anchient MOTU unicorn midi interface. Just go with MOTU. Their support is way better than both of these companies that are basically releasing gobs of products and not paying any attention to them at a later date.
Be careful who you buy from when you are getting computer-specific gear, even if it is USB, or plug and play.
]]>Many laptop-based Mac OS X users are experiencing significant audio issues on Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard. On Tiger, the culprit appears to be the AirPort Extreme Update 2008-001 released earlier this spring. One workaround on Tiger is to simply turn off AirPort.
From CDM
Do you think that Apple’s software and hardware quality have gone way down?? Every update they release seems untested nowadays. Programs also seem to crash more often, even with an increased overall stability of the system. Airport giving audio problems is insane, and evidence that they aren’t paying attention.
Step by Step instructions on how to Control Ableton Live with your iPhone
Beat Bearing!!!
Controlling a TR-808 with ball bearings! Looks like alot of people saw this one already. Eh, I’m slow.
Keytars and Controllerism From Lx7
Come Celebrate Synthmania’s 4 year anniversary with a Visit to their page on the Electrix Filter Factory!!
Mp3 Demo
Do you need a kick start in your garden?
Features 5 encoders (with button), an additional button and a display. Software is customizable (by me, hahahaha)…..But I use it to command my machinedrum effects over sysex]]>
WIDI Audio to MIDI is a realtime Audio to MIDI conversion plugin. The plugin receives input from an audio channel and performs realtime music recognition.
A “complete” list of Pitch to Midi Convertors can be found Here
Fun:
Midi makes Pictures with MSMidiPix.
Tutorials:
How to record vocals from MixBus
After having the mixed feelings and ultimate sell off an Alesis Fusion HD6, I acquired the Korg TR to see how it stacks up in controlling my studio.
Its alot nicer than it looks in the pictures. People may complain of plastic construction, but thats only the end caps!!!! The front face is black metal & high quality knobs and buttons.
The Korg TR is very solid, but it’s sounds won’t inspire you by itself. You will probably want to connect it to a PC with a larger sound library, or some external gear. This board will serve as the basis for music creation & composition, however. Out of the box the knobs are set to control basic external gear parameters very well, like RES, CUTOFF. These control knobs even worked with Reason without any setup. Any time saved not setting up obscure midi parameters is a good thing. Once you get your channels, and programs set, you can save it as a song template and use it every time you start a new song.
The sounds of the Korg TR leave something to be desired. If your sound is completely electronic or sort like Jean Michael Jarre, then you will like it ALOT. It has amazing organs, and electronic strings, but you will be hard pressed to find any gritty guitars or other sounds onboard. Even through tweaking the rom it can be difficult to make it sound mean, unless you are going to be doing it with a synth program. The category button is set up nicely to find a particular sound you are looking for, although scrolling to select programs inside the sequencer mode is a mixed bag. It doesnt matter however, because you can use the category button inside Sequencer mode. This is unlike the Alesis Fusion’s inability to do so, and its a good thing. The drums are pretty decent for hip hop and some electronic music. As far as rock, they come off as a little cheap. I am not sure Korg has ever been good at drums, so you will be better off loading up something in Reason again. Some of the kicks are very very nice and bassy though. Nothing faboulous, even though the sound quality is very high. The high point of the rom is its synth sounds. They sound better than older yamaha stuff, which always had a catlike meow sound to them. Overall the Korg has more of an “ahhhhh” type of quality to every sound. It is more soothing. I think this has to do with whoever was in charge of creating the rom, however long ago it was.
Sequencing is solid & very easy. You will be able to start making songs in no time. Loop features are very nice to set up. Menus are easy to navigate once you get the hang of it. It is a good compromise between touch screen, and an even smaller menu based screen. Combis are also flawlessly easy to put into sequencer mode!! You could probably create a keyboard split of all your gear, save it as a combi, then import it into sequencer mode and have easy control. With the TR88, this would be ideal!!
EFX: They sound amazing, but you only get a single effect to apply to ALL of the tracks. Not even per-track, so choose wisely. Let me specify this: You can only have one effect, and then have the ability to turn that effect off or on for each track. You also get mastering effects, but thats applied to your entire mix. SO if you want to add amp distortion to one sound, then add reverb to another…you cant. It is hard to change the quality of the onboard sounds too much, but most of them sound acceptable, and can be tweaked with the RES, HPF, and cutoff functions to make them blend in you mix. I think judging this board based on what effects it has is not a good idea since it does have assignable outs, and you can just set up something in your computer during monitor/mixing to apply effects.
The build of the board is way higher than it looks in any picture. Its actually very nice, and the buttons are nicer than I expected. The keys are a little nicer than an Alesis fusion, but are nothing special.
Overall this is an amazing piece of equipment to use in your studio for composing and controlling all your gear!! The USB to PC also makes it a good midi controller. I would recommend this board if you found it used and the price was right. Make sure you get an SD card (it has no internal memory for songs). You can use this to trigger samples on your computer, so if you don’t gig, then the lack of sampling features is no big deal….even then the sampling upgrade option could be applied later if you feel you really need it.
Conclusion: Average sounds except for Synths & Organs, easy integration into your studio, and its fun to play. Great as a controller & techno machine. Worth the money.
Sound Quality: 9
Musical Expression & Voices: 6.5
Build: 8
Key Action: 6
Sequencer / Menus: 8
Parts List
LCD Planar Touchscreen $300 - This one is kind of ugly due to the white frame, but the price is right for a 15 inch. Getting a good touchscreen / LCD with enough screen space for the right price would be pretty important. This Planar one goes for $440 and could be a hell of a lot better.
A small Midi keyboard Keypad for only $44. I’m not going to bank on the construction quality of this one, but it looks really Neko-ish. If you added a small, in-car-style 8-10 inch size touch screen, which are even cheaper than the ones I mentioned it might be really cute. Other than that you’d be best to go with a USB midi keyboard for whatever you can get on ebay. Even better if it was one of those keyboards that had the audio interface built in.
This might be the grandaddy solution for picking out your computer…
intel imac with touchscreen or ibook touchscreen. On the intel mac, you could have your choice of running both windows and Mac OS X with the latest chip architecture. If you went with an iBook, you could carefully dissassemble it and mount it inside your case with the keyboard midi controller you picked out. Having the computer, Keypad / touchscreen all at the same time would be effecient, as then you wouldn’t have to worry about power supplies for each. I don’t know how much that costs to add on.
And then your audio interface, if you didn’t have it built in to your keyboard, probably get an Edirol self powered USB unit. That one is a little expensive at $240. You would probably want the built in audio interface type of midi controller, with knobs.
As you can see, I didn’t address the problems of having multiple power supplies…but if your like me, you’d just have the bundled cords wrapped up out the back and buy a power-squid. Maybe with enough space, you could shove the power-squid up inside the keyboard box, to trick people, like you actually know how to run all of that stuff off the same voltage.
Chip Collection Version 1.
Version 1:
Cost Estimate: $1,150 ish
(LCD Touchscreen, Cheap Prodikeys Midi Controller, Intel mac mini, Edirol USB/MIDI Audio interface, random case parts)
Version 2:
Cost Estimate: 1,900 ish? ($1,500 Apple iBook bought on ebay with modified touchscreen by Troll Systems, $300 Midi keyboard with audio interface built in, $100 worth of random parts)
This could version be flat and rectangular looking more like an Elektron machine. The flatscreen would be attached at the far left end, with various components inside the box underneath, then having the keyboard tacked on its side. You could also have the flatscreen attached like version one above if you didn’t like looking down.
Doing a keyboard like this would be an awesome project, and I bet you could do it for under 2000 dollars and have a pretty nice result. If you were able to use clear plexiglass as a box, you could even do etching across it and light it up from inside. Extra modifications would be knobs & such for midi control. Even sillier would be to add speakers. If you played on stage, it might be cool to have a mini lcds attached to your keyboard, facing the crowd, so you could put some kind of weird video on it. Also, no, this keyboard isn’t the solution I was talking about for my previous article.
]]>Now, when your using your computer and the various midi keyboards / modules that you own, they are usually spread out in different places in your studio. You will have a midi controller in front of your computer screen, some modules or fx over to the side, and maybe a keyboard or two that you need to physically move away to from your chair to use. It is this movement causes a major split in work-flow for most people. I call this learned computer schizophrenia. You might think that you are only balancing two different interfaces /concepts in your brain to make your music: The computer sequencer (hitting record), and then your keyboard performance. The fact is that your actually balancing many more concepts simultaneously, while trying to be creative and get some music out. It is not an efficient setup for musical creativity. Learned computer schizophrenia is not only physical, but mental. I will talk more about these extra concepts in the next paragraph that have convinced the “modern” computer will become obsolete in the recording environment.
Lets, first look at the basic computer controls themselves. Unless you have a midi DAW controller, you might have to resort to some key combinations on your computer keyboard and use them constantly to be in record mode. What if you need to create a new track to record to? Or perhaps add a VST effect which has its own custom controls? In these scenarios you must resort to the computer’s mouse, which involves clicking dialog boxes, and dragging windows. Surprise: These are concepts that do not have anything to do with making music. IBM only created the mouse & windows as a way to keep data visually organized on computers about 25 years ago. Thats older than I am. Why are we still stuck with this method? I don’t have an answer for this except to point out that there is a lack of innovation. Besides being forced to operate your PC & mouse, you must also learn the intricacies of every piece of gear you have. This is the fun part actually and I won’t complain about it too much. However, you must also learn how to use each piece of gear in conjunction with your PC’s Software. This is something that is totally different than just turning on it on and “jamming”. This problem creates a new scenario you must solve for every piece of gear you have. Did you decide if you wanted your groovebox to actually groove or just become a tone module? You must now make the appropriate adjustments in each menu on your gear AND inside your PCs preferences. If you ever wanted to do it differently you must do the same exact process again. Surprise: another concept that has nothing to do with music. While, this is not always a big deal, its not flexibility, which music requires. Music is about change!!! A true musician would rather be listening to their inner voice’s changing musical tastes, thoughts choosing note structure, and how music sounds and feels. Would he/she, the focused musician, like to get up out of their chair and manage their computer’s little windows with mouse for the billionth time? Nah.
Learned computer schizophrenia comes to its epitome when you make digital music. When sitting at the computer, a musician’s goal is only to make amazing audio. The PC is based on physical input (keyboard) with VISUAL output (monitor). This causes a problem for our musician right from the get-go. He/she is looking at a pretty VST interface which is colored, involuntarily changing the perception of his own audio coming from his speakers. Focus is lost. This reminds me as being the equivalent of not using flat sounding monitors and having the EQ be off in a mix. The end result isn’t quite as good as it could be. Some software designers, like Ableton’s realize this color problem and have gone with a neutral grey interface. Still, a lot of VST instruments are guady and I have reason to believe the layout of the controls, or just simply being focused on the computer screen will mess up your music. When its easy to think of audio frequencies as certain colors, your brain is being scrambled by the excessive visual output on the screen, and the placement of its controls. What is funny about this is that you can only “touch” these instruments again, with your 25 year old PC and keyboard mouse.
Music is made up of multiple concepts itself. These age-old concepts are the only thing a musician, composer, and audio engineer should really care about. Mastering the art of music is what gets them a grammy or a mix they are really proud of. These concepts are make it so they are not embarrassed to upload an mp3 to myspace. Hardware and software designers need to realize that using the computer adds layers upon layers of brain cycle wasting processing tasks. We need to get rid of the modern PC as a music creation device.
Tomarrow I will write about “the solution” and also my disappointment with the current Keyboard Workstations that were just released at NAMM 07.
-CEO Sammy Taters
UPDATE: Open Labs upgrades MIKO SE and MIKO LE: Link
From future music blog
UPDATE: Mackie Anounces Control Pro Surfaces: Link
Mackie anounces Tracktion 3!!!! (I love Tracktion’s ease of use and its better mastering plugins)
TAPCO Anounces 4×6 Firewire audio interface for $249: Link
UPDATE: KORG IMAGES on Gearjunkies.com: Link (currently having server issues)
A Stupid Mixer, MINI Kaoss Pad (***AWESOME***), M3 Synth, and R3 (new Darth Vader edition microkorg).
Check back for status and pictures / adds.
If you know anything, please comment!
Most Anticipated / Rumored:
Apple Logic version 8 or 7.5: Unconfirmed
Alesis Master Control Firewire Audio Interface: Confirmed
Alesis Master Control
Nice!! Check out the specs on this audio interface. Its everything you’ve ever dreamed of….6 discrete outs, 5.1 surround. 8 Channels of 44.1-192khz audio in. Motorized Faders, MIDI, 2 Preamps, SPDIF, LCD, Jog wheel, fully editable presets.
New Korg Microkorg called the R3: Leaked Images / Confirmed From Gear Junkies
New Korg Mini Chaos Pad: Leaked Images / Confirmed From Gear Junkies
Roland MV-8800 Sampler Workstation: Confirmed
MV-8800
Roland V-Synth GT: Confirmed
V-Synth GT
Previously Confirmed:
(Coming in March)
Arturia Origin: Origin is the first Arturia Hardware synthesizer. It is a modular system of a new generation opening innovative avenues in sound design.
Loaded with modules extracted from the best synthesizers of all time (Moog Modular, ARP 2600, CS-80, minimoog and Prophet VS). Details Link
(Arturia Origin sounds like it could be really expensive…)
No word yet on Steve Urkel Edition Moog.
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