Ken just posted the tracks from Friday’s jam session to his blog. If you’re interested, go have a listen.

Since he doesn’t have comments enabled, and I wanted to comment :-), I figured I’d do so here. Anyone else with something to say can pile on this post’s comment section.

First off, I want to thank Ken for going through the pain of producing individual tracks from it. I particularly like the name choices. Having names on the tracks almost makes it seem like we intended to do them. 😉

My personal favorites are “Oh Ah”, “Float Me” and “Worst Bar”.

I also think the recording quality is surprisingly good. I clearly would have benefitted from having better amplification, although given how long it’s been since I last played (keyboards) with anyone, I think it’s probably a good thing that I wasn’t too loud.

Yup, they’re blown.

In honour of the last day before the holiday, Steve (electric guitar) and Ken (african percussion) decided to get together to do some jamming yesterday. I had my laptop and a usb keyboard at work, which is all I need to make music, so I figured I’d join them.

Unfortunately, all I had to play through were the Logitech Z-4 speakers from off my desk. Now, these are perfectly reasonable computer speakers — better for gaming and techno music than general listening, but not bad. The thing is, when you’re competing with djembes, dunduns, and killer guitar rifs you have to be loud. And despite being plenty loud enough for my office, the Z-4s just couldn’t compete. Somewhere about twenty minutes into the jam session, I realized that every patch I played sounded like it had a wee bit of extra distortion added; after about an hour, this had progressed to that sound that guitarists lovingly call “crunch”. Yup, they’re blown.

Rather than just replacing the speakers with new ones that would also be destroyed the next time I got an opportunity to play live, I decided to look for something with a bit more oomph. My constraints were:

• no distortion,
• good dynamic range, and
• (with luck) usable for both keyboards and my cello.

I looked around a bit before I found something that seemed like it had potential, which didn’t cost multiple arms and legs: the Behringer K1800FX.

I picked one up from Ottawa Pianos today. So far it seems pretty promising. As usual, Behringer has loaded it up with features for a very nice price (< $400):

• 4 channel input mixer (with mic pre-amp)
• 7 band equalizer
• auto feedback cancellation (excellent for the cello!)
• a reasonable mix of effects

The sound quality is good, but a little “boxy”. Don’t get me wrong, it sounds good, but I guess when you’re used to studio monitors, you get spoiled. It is however, definitely loud.

Hey guys, next time I’ll be ready!

Update: Ah, it’s not feedback cancellation it’s feedback detection. You still have to use the EQ to remove it. Oh well.

As your typical high tech weeny, I basically treat electronic devices as “toys that are cool only till the next big thing happens”. That goes for computers, PDAs, phones and even electronic musical instruments. Heck, I even want to upgrade my cello. 😉

The thing is, to truly master a musical instrument, it takes serious dedication and that kind of focus is hard to maintain in a world where something “better” comes out every few months (whether it’s a software instrument or a new piece of gear).

That’s why I genuinely admire those who work with a single instrument to the point where they have mastered it. One way to make that happen, is to just stop “playing with” everything else; sometimes it leads to the Bach solo cello suites and sometimes it leads to Roger O’Donnell.

For those who don’t know Roger, he was the keyboardist for The Cure from 1987..1990 and from 1995..2005. One of his recent projects is an album recorded entirely on a Moog Voyager synthesizer (+ vocals) called The Truth In Me — bonus video link.

I have so far only heard the demo bits from his website, but I find the pieces starkly beautiful and quite compelling. I’m now hunting the CD. If anyone sees it somewhere, please let me know.

I think the Zune will do very well in the “crass american don’t know usability from ratshit but likes flashy colors” crowd.

I was driving back from the orchestra rehearsal on Thursday night and started thinking about a comment Ken Walker made about my latest musical composition. He didn’t like the fact that I had used “Voice Ahs” as the lead sound. The thing is though, I wasn’t using that sound. I was actually using something quite a bit more subtle/interesting. Unfortunately, all the subtleties were lost in the overall sound of the mix.

One of the things that producers do to fix this kind of problem is to use a parametric EQ to carve out a space in the frequency spectrum for particular sounds, thereby making them more prominent. The problem with this is that it is a manual process.

Suddenly, it hit me: Build an “inverted vocoder”.

Vocoders work by splitting the frequency spectrum of a signal to be processed into many (say 128 or 256) small bands and then setting the level of each band based on the amount of energy present in that part of the frequency spectrum of a separate modulation signal. When you feed something rich in harmonics, like a ramp wave in as the signal to be processed and use the sound of your voice as the modulation signal, you get that traditional “singing robots” vocoder sound.

But what would happen if you inverted the signal, so that by default all of the frequency bands were “full on” (i.e. not cutting out the sound) and as the energy went up in the modulation signal, it was automatically lowered in signal to be processed? (You would want to be able to control the overall amount of reduction that occurs. Using too much would probably cause the result to be “unnatural”.)

Now imagine, feeding the backing track for your mix in as the signal to be processed and the “lead” line (or whatever it is that you want to make more prominent) as the modulation signal. The result would be to automatically reduce in the backing track the frequencies that contained the most energy in the lead line. Effectively, you would be automatically EQ’ing the track to make the lead line more prominent. (Of course, you still have to mix the original lead signal and the processed backing track to get the final result.)

This is similar to another process used by producers called “ducking”, which lowers the overall level of one signal when another signal is present, but with this mechanism you only remove certain frequencies.

What’s really weird about all this is that, I have never heard of anyone doing it before. If anyone else knows of software (or hardware) that implements this algorithm, please let me know, I’d like to find out if it works.

As unlikely as it is, if it does happen to be a novel idea, remember that I thought of it first. 😉 I’m probably not going to have time to do anything about this myself, but if you decided to try it, I’d appreciate it if you let me know. (And if turns out to be the “next big thing” in studio technology and you start making millions, it would be cool if you sent me one. LOL.)

Back in the good ol’ days when I used a PC to make music, Cubase was my tool of choice. When I got my G5, I tried running the Mac version, but for me at least, Cubase on the Macintosh is just too frustrating. Crashes, incompatibilities, the need to have a USB dongle, bah! The last time I rebuilt my hard drive, I didn’t re-install Cubase, and I don’t miss it.

In fact, I have been using Reason 3.0 for most of the music I’ve made lately. As an all-in-one software studio, it’s almost everything you need. Even though it doesn’t support software plug-ins, what’s there really is quite inspiring. The Combinator, in particular, has made a huge difference in the scope of things you can do with it. Unfortunately, if you want to mix in recorded sound (like a cello ;-)) Reason just won’t cut it. There’s just no way to reasonably (sic) get digital audio tracks into it.

So the obvious thing to do on a Mac is to try Garage Band. As I found, GB actually works quite well. It’s surprisingly powerful, for an essentially free piece of software, with features like commercial-grade software instruments, multi-track recording, the ability to freeze tracks — they call it “locking” –, and pitch correction. It also has an easy to use GUI, with “Mac-like” simplicity at first glance, but lots of flexibility/capability when you need it. I’m sure I could use Garage Band as my main DAW, but it’s missing a few features (like, score creation) that I occasionally need.

In the Macintosh world, the next step up from Garage Band is Logic Express. I had some cash to blow on tech toys (since I just sold my old PowerBook) so I picked up a copy. After playing with it for a day, I can say that it seems like it is what I was looking for, but man what an arcane GUI.

Now, I’m sure there are Logic-heads out there who will tell me that it’s the “one GUI to rule them all”, but it’s obvious that the Apple GUI designers lost the battle when they tried to bring that we-bought-the-company app into the fold. I’m heading out for dinner, so I don’t have time to do a full rant about it, but the capsule summary is “This one makes Cubase look easy to use.” ’nuff said.

It will happily host all of the AU plug-ins you can throw at it. Don’t believe me? Try this on:

synths.mov

Believe it or not, it has:

• 1 ARP 2600 V
• 1 Moog Modular V
• 1 Boesendorfer 290
• 1 Crystal
• 1 Reaktor 5, and
• 2 Absynths

plus a random selection of GarageBand drum loops.

Even with many of the synths playing more than one note, I was still only running at around 70% CPU according to Activity Monitor.

(Ok, so I’m slow, but I get there eventually.)

If you haven’t heard them yet, they’re definitely worth a listen. As always, here’s the best way to get a taste: