It involves taking a signal from an Oscillator which is a tone generator and patching it via signal cables to other signal manipulation pieces of electronic hardware.

With the availability and affordability of the modern software sound synthesizer its a whole lot easier to experiment with sound creation these days. 

Some have the ability to manipulate your recorded sound samples.

So here I am in front of the computer again. Combining waveforms, running them through filters and envelopes. Very nice, I don’t have to be limited to the usual sine or saw waves. They have lots of digitally perfect and modified or distorted wave forms to work with.

I am working with the recently released Cakewalk Z3TA+2.1 and some waveforms from the FiSound Dark n Dirty 2.0 library release. I have to say that the filters in Z3TA+2 are crisp (comes with a resonance Boost that cuts) and the ability to adjust the phase of the Oscillators is appreciated.

These few weeks, I’ve been working on sounds that would work nicely, supporting vocals. I had a patch with isolated harmonics through a Formant filter all stacked on top of vintage saw and square wave forms.  Then there is this other one that was based on the what I heard from the Omnisphere softsynth, basically plastering Oscillators an octave below and above, assigning Portamento effect to the lower pitched Oscillator.

Anyway, I’m still a fan of the JP strings sound, and stuff I heard on from Alphaville back then. Still laugh thinking about the 80s when I was in school and my band members were saying how yucky the Juno 106 sounded. Now bring an analog synth to a recording studio and even a rock band would want to track it into the mix. Suddenly, wow! That recording has a new dimension! 

Back to the Z3TA, I must say that the Effects section is cool. I don’t really use the Distortion, but find the Chorus – Phaser – Flange, Delay and Reverb effects a plus for making a bigger sound.

I’ll post some about Camel Audio’s Alchemy sample manipulation soft synth, if I get the chance to experiment with it. Very powerful features there.

Have fun. 

I even spent sometime checking out the machines at the showrooms.

I realized that specs doesn’t really say much about it.

Strangely, the machine of the same specs seem to have some delay tagged to some of them. Well no mentioning of brands here, but it is quite difficult to get put my finger on it. But I have a feeling it has something to do with the machine manufacturer’s main board and chip selection.

Kind of sad to find out that some ‘gaming’ laptops are slower than midrange work and research type of laptop computers. I’m still not too sure about it’s performance in loading the latest DAW software and running external AUDIO/MIDI interfaces.

More later on when I have time to try and get my friends to load some of the heavy software that I want to use on the mobile machines.

Later!

It’s now churning out cool sounds and music tracks.

The soft synth thing is still on going. Why?

I checked out the minimum requirements for the modern soft-synths and they need 2GB RAM. Preferably with 4GB for the Orchestral sounds that I want to put in with the THICK PHAT pads…

Goodness.

More later; I just setup a wireless N network with Gigabit LAN capabilities, and also a rack to hold my two computer screens.

This time, I set up an IBM Lenovo for use as a soft-syth together with the EMU X-Board 61 controller.

It was quite a challenge to all the software and machine running together with the latest drivers, because someone had previously installed imaging and other software on it. Together with unsuccessful installations of hardware and software, the cleanup job was tedious.

Now it’s running Proteus X with the EMU X-Board as a MIDI Controller. I think I’m going to leave it as that. I had to un-install the Steinberg Cubase, because it couldn’t detect the Syncrosoft protection device required to startup the software. Maybe the device is ‘kaput’.

Well, no worries. I’m off now to finish off some other installation stuff and write more music.

Cheers!

But it just must have that full bass and clear highs and warm mids. So that means I’ve been spending time with the signal chain and the pres and powers amps and speakers.

But I finally finished the maintenance bit on my FLUKE multimeter and a number of the guitars passive electronics.

Also did up my connectors for my field recorder to work in stereo XY, using a pair of condenser microphones.

Also got myself a head worn microphone to help with the ‘live’ singing bit.

More updates coming up.

Cheers!

Software. Some time back I was made a post on music notation software.

This time all I can say is that I’ve been looking at the application of software synthesizers.

Lots of new stuff is going into them and have been playing with this Alchemy soft synth by Camel Audio to be interesting. They have an earlier soft synth called the Chameleon. Hope I got all that spelled right.

I just need a performance laptop with a good ADCs and DACs to put out those sounds from my controller keys.

Maybe I might use my Audio Werk 8 out card from the days of Logic Audio? Install Win XP Pro w/SP3 on my Dual Core Box. Wow that’ll be heavy to haul around.

Right! Back to work.

It seems some of them found playing the basic patterns boring. What’s up with that? Don’t most of the best selling music use the same patterns most of the time? I always felt time keeping and laying down a groove with the same basic pattern was cool. Of course fills and variations are good if you can keep good time.

I’m sure going to enjoy playing this bass drum together with my other favorite selected percussions.

Had a pedal with a missing striker and broken spring. So while daddy-o searched for the spring, I went to the shop to get that striker and a new skin for the batter head. 20 inch head, shallow drum, didn’t know how it was going to sound.

After spending some time tuning to batter head I fitted the damping and tuned up the resonant head. Daddy-o actually wanted to really damp down the skin with felt, but I got this thing going for some resonance and a short decay.

Yeah! When I started hitting it along with the snare it felt good, it was good to feel the skin on my legs vibrate along in responce to the bass beats. It’s been like three months of drumming without the bass drum. I must admint that most of the drums that I used to teach out there weren’t fitted with the good stuff and are totally damped down till no tone.

Check out the vid with the audio, maybe you’ll agree that the bass sounds good. But can’t compare it to a 22inch deep drum with oak wood or something like that.

Anyway while at the shop, I was looking at some cool congas and wondering why I don’t see 14-15 inch Timbales being sold these days. Could only find 13-14 and timbalitos those 10-12 kinds. They don’t ring or sustain that well. Well more on that later!

I’ve been busy since September last year.

The music competitions for the schools have kept us all on a hectic schedule.

Finally had the time to do stuff like shoot fun videos of some basic stuff for the percussion instruments.

All sorts of conversions in formats, shot in HD in *.mov format for Quicktime streaming, stepped down to *.wmv then I decided to go back to Flash Video for the smallest video file size. Seems to load the fastest for internet viewing.

Here they are: Bongos, Conga and my favorite warm up pattern for percussions.

Yeah that’s it. See you all soon.

Just wrote this piece down.

The wonders or having music notation software. These days, it plays back what you’ve written down. It saves me the time of going over to the keyboards to play and imagine what it sounds like on the brass or woodwind.

Check out the sound, video from the compact digital camera.

Cool!

Teacher’s day. Yeah!

I really appreciate the effort taken by the kids in preparing the cards.

Thanks to everyone.

Below is the image of one of the cards showing the extra effort it takes to decorate them.

Cover

Extra stickers! I must have been good for more than a week. Thanks!

Words