Colin OOOD
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Posts posted by Colin OOOD
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I'd say Cubase (but then I'm biassed) - Sonar is a little young and clunky. Your hardware MIDI interface will probably give you a little better timing than a USB one (esp. if your USB buss is doing other things as well) but probably not really noticeable with your Sony. You need as much RAM as your laptop can handle.
Colin
PS Tracks please!
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Why peace OR freedom? Seems to me it's a totally illogical up question implying you can only have one or the other but not both. As in:
"What would you prefer, if you could only have one of the following:
a) your heart beating, or
being able to breathe"Peace and freedom are both attainable on a personal level for EVERYONE, RIGHT NOW. All you have to do is make the change in your perceptions and thereby your actions (ok, maybe it's not quite that simple but you know what I mean).
For example, imagine if everyone thought this way...
PEACE: I try my hardest to act towards others as I would like them act towards me. I realise I cannot always succeed, but when I fail I do all in my power to show the other person that it was not meant personally, and make good my failing. As my life progresses I know I will fail less and less often, as my experience and wisdom increases. A person who attacks me - whatever form that attack takes - does not know me (or they'd know I was no threat to them), and so their attack should not be taken personally. Retaliation serves no purpose other than to perpetuate bad shit.
FREEDOM: My actions are constrained only by my desire to act, my confidence in the success of my actions, and my desire for peace. I accept responsibility for the results of my actions. As the Beatles said, "There's nowhere you can be that you're not meant to be" - If I obey a stop-sign it's because I don't want to cause an accident, not because I've been told to stop. My dealings with people are all in good faith, thereby eliminating fear and paranoia.
The above is a very poor statement of what I believe, and I realise it sounds idealistic, but I think it shows that peace and freedom are in no way mutually exclusive, but two sides of the same coin.
Wars will end when soldiers (who are, after all, people like you and me) refuse to fight.
Read a bit of Robert Anton Wilson (especially the Cosmic Trigger series) for more information on changing your reality.
Colin
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Autopan needs to be used on a stereo track or it won't work right.
Colin
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Timestretching. Lots of it.
Colin
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I'd be interested in joining a future project. Not yet though, I want to wait until I have broadband, which should be relatively soon.
Colin
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Anyone using copyright material (eg samples of speech or music, lyrics, melodies, etc) in their own work must, by law, be granted a license to do so by the owners of that copyright. But most people in psy trance don't bother.
Colin
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Yes mate, JAPAN... specifically Tokyo, specifically Akihabara and Shibuya. Japanese-made equipment can be bought for about half the price you can get it in in Europe. There are also places (if you can find them) that sell second-hand stuff even cheaper. There are some incredible shops with MOUNTAINS of vintage analog - ever seen 7 Prophet 5s in a row on a shelf?
Be aware that new equipment bought in Japan will be 110V - you will need to spend extra on a power transformer which is often not cheap.
Colin
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Oh yes... and compress the fuck out of it, too.
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Yeah, Reactor rocks in terms of what it can do; it's just that I prefer to spend my time making music rather than programming! I also have some slight compatibilty issues with my system - I've lost work cos of Reactor and that's made me a bit wary. Mainly though it's the time out from writing; it is certainly one of the deepest and most powerful pieces of software I've used.
Colin
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The program is in your head, dude.
Colin
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No, you're thinking of Real World, another imaginary concept.
Colin
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My system is 90% virtual; the only hardware I use at the moment is a Korg Karma. My PC is a PIII 600, 512 MB with a Yamaha DS2416 card (which I rate very highly, despite having too high latency to play live virtual synths - boo!). I too have a rack full of hardware that I now use solely to impress girls with (only joking, Sheila!). Softsynths I use include Battery, Pro 52, Absynth, Pentagon, Beast, Delay Lama, PPG 2.V; 90% of my effects are Waves. I post-produce myself but always keep un-mastered versions for professional mastering (as and when
So there.I think that some softsynths are easily up to the same quality as good hardware (particularly Absynth, Pro 52 - even Pentagon makes a great noise) - after all, the only difference between digital hardware and software these days is that with VSTi's the processing takes place inside your PC rather than a separate box. The one area where hardware DEFINITELY scores is accessability; zero latency and knobbage are essential if you want to spend more time making music than programming.
Analog is a different matter; you have to work quite hard sometimes to warm up even the best VSTi. A good way to go in my opinion is to get 1 good multi-purpose digital synth (eg Karma, in my case) with a keyboard, 1 or 2 bits of quality analog - you can't go wrong with Roland, Korg made some good synths but stay away from all but the BIGGEST of Yamaha analog synths, unless you're shit-hot with a soldering iron - and the fastest PC your money will buy. Oh yes, and some decent monitors!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! After all, they are the only thing you actually listen to. Get some shitty ones, too, and alternate listening to them. A decent mic will go a long way to make your music and sounds more original too.
Then, once you've got your kit together (I forgot to mention a good mixer) spend as much time as you can spare getting to know each piece inside oout (although if you just dive in to make tunes this will happen over time anyway, if you have half a brain).
Colin
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DEFINITELY RVerb for natural (!) reverb... although convolving reverbs like Acoustic Mirror should theoretically be more accurate. I just find the RCerb makes my mixes come alive!
Colin
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Kicks can often benefit from a cut (maybe -5 to -10 dB) around 300 Hz (1 oct-ish bandwidth) and another, narrower cut around 180 Hz. To manipulate the sub-bass element separately use a narrow cut/boost at around 60-90 Hz (check a spectrum analyser, eg FFT4VST, Spectralab or Waves PAZ Analyser to get the exact frequency). You can find the click element between 1K-3K, and it may be worth putting a steep hi-cut at around 5K.
As for MS20 vs SH101, if EP thinks he can get the same sounds out of an MS20 then this is probably because he DOES get the same sounds; stands to reason (IMHO) that people who say otherwise probably can't program synths as well as he can.
Colin
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I agree, the MS20 is capable of much more than people give it credit for, despite filters that can initially seem weedy. The routing possibilities alone make it more flexible than the SH-101 (although the SH does have a specific sound I like). To fatten up your MS20 try patching the output back into the filter... phat-tastic.
Colin
PS. I don't own an MS20, but I do have an SH101. In case you're interested.
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"Do you like make psytrance on Reason 2.0 ?!"
No, but sometimes I have make pictures...
Colin
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Yamaha DS2416 with AX44 I/O expander - 8 i/o (inc. SPDIF) and headphone out.
I know it's not the most recent card on the market but I am SO happy with it; having full dynamics and 4-band parametric on each of 16 channels rocks. Then there's the 2 FX units on board - a definite plus. Things like that really help when you have a relatively slow PC. Ok, so it's not a Pulsar but still... does me fine, thankyou very much.
Colin
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WARNING: GEAR LUST INCREASING
Drool on the keyboard is NOT good.
Colin
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This is probably not soundcard latency, as most sequencers (and certainly Cubase) automatically compensate for latency when recording. I have heard that SX has problems syncing MIDI recordings with audio, and that this has been fixed in version 1.03 (although I still use VST 5.1), so maybe upgrade?
However, what it could also be is the latency of your hardware MIDI synth. Even with hardware there is a short delay between receiving a MIDI message and the corresponding sound coming out. Pre-VST, this was never a problem as it was the norm and there was no way to compensate for it except by ear; when you can see the waveform you've just recorded, though, it becomes very obvious! By all means, chop off the silence and re-align your audio, but check first that all the audio is out by the same amount. I quite often do this as there is nothing quite as satisfying as kick, bass and snare in sample-accurate sync
Hope this helps.
Colin
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Plus... I can't help feeling that people asking these question are looking in the wrong places. Expecting to be able to produce (and write! Whatever happened to 'writing' music?) good music just by buying a particular piece of equipment is like buying an expensive paintbrush and expecting to be able to paint like Vermeer.
There's more to music than just technique and technology (hence the current debate on where the soul is in much of todays psy-trance). If the scene is to continue to inspire and progress there needs to be much less of an emphasis on what equipment people are using and more though given to writing original music that touches people and expresses something from within the artist, otherwise you're not an artist but just a technician.
Colin
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We've had quite a few tracks professtionally mastered, mostly at the Townhouse in London. The tracks were loaded into a Mac directly off DAT and then processed through a bunch of relatively esotedic kit (the only one I can remember offhand is a Massenburg 5-band parametric eq). The Unconscious Collective stuff definitely came out sounding fatter, tighter and more impressive but I agree, you can do a pretty good job yourself with plugins. However, you'll still benefit from taking it to a mastering house because:
1) They have SHIT HOT speakers and amps in an acoustically designed environment - unlike most psy artists!
2) The engineers train for a long time (years, I think in some cases) to do this specific job
3) Access to ultra-high quality hardware and software
4) Objectivity - you might be in love with your kick drum but is it really just a little too big? I know mine are sometimes.
There's more to mastering than EQ and compression; a good mastering engineer can turn a good track into a great one (but don't expect him to rescue that turd you've been trying to polish yourself for the last two months!)
Hope this helps.
Colin
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What do you mean, 909 won't work with psy?!?
The 909 has one of the best kick drum sounds around; OK it's not exactly like the GMS kick but it's a bloody good place to start!
Colin
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Avi Algranati and Ofer Dikovsky were using Reason on a G4 laptop, last time I saw them... whether they use it only for writing and not for recording/mixing I don't know though.
In terms of quality, both hardware and software are capable of equal quality as its the algorithms used to perform the processing that determine quality. You put a Lexicon reveb algorithm in a VST plugin and you'll have a fucking excellent reverb inside your PC... but your PC woun't have the power for much else! The problem in my mind with Reason is that the effects and instruments are programmed to be economical with PC power rather than to be good quality (although I actually think the Reason reverb is not too shoddy, if not a patch on RVerb).
Colin
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Cubase 5.1 and above _do_ support dual processors (they call it 'advanced multiprocessing') but only on Win2000 and XP; you won't see a hint of it on any dialogs if you're not running a multi-CPU capable OS.
Colin
DC offset
in Music Making and Production/Industry
Posted
The average value of a waveform should be 0 - this means the speaker cone spends equal energy either side of its rest position. DC offset is what you get if there is a constant voltage on top of the waveform - a signal oscillating at 0Hz is effectively a direct current. On a spectrum analyser you can see a DC offeset if the lowest frequency of the graph is at a constant level, or never goes below a certain value. A spectrogram will show a continuous line for the lowest frequency. To get rid of a DC offset, EQ the sample with a low cut filter set to 30Hz or less.
Confused? Sorry.
Colin