Thursday, April 29, 2010
Friday, January 8, 2010
New mix coming!
I've been really busy with work the past few weeks, so haven't had time to do any remixes. I have one nearly ready now though, a combination of Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap, and Clocks by Coldplay. I'm really happy with it so far, it has some fairly strong electro basslines in it, but I've added in a bit of live drumming out of Stylus to not make it too electronic.
Due to the fact that may video camera is not here today, I've pulled apart a couple of music videos and used my camera phone to film the rest of it. It's a little bit different, has a few screen grabs showing the plugins I'm using as well - so hopefully everyone will like it!
Due to the fact that may video camera is not here today, I've pulled apart a couple of music videos and used my camera phone to film the rest of it. It's a little bit different, has a few screen grabs showing the plugins I'm using as well - so hopefully everyone will like it!
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Trilian Update
Spectrasonics have just released a patch library update for Trilian. This now adds 500 synth bass sounds, where previously there was only a demo bank. This will be really useful for anyone doing electronic music, at it has a huge amount of massive basses covering everything including Waldorf Pulse, ARP 2600, Minimoog etc. Check out www.spectrasonics.net
Monday, November 23, 2009
Akai LPD8 and BFD
Just made a couple of purchases today, and looking forward to them arriving.
The first one was the BFD drum library. I've used the lite version that comes with ProTools, and it's an incredibly responsive drum module that is perfect for the times when you need natural sounding drums rather than the more electronic drum machine style that you get out of Redrum or something.
The second one was a pad controller. I tossed up between the Akai LPD8 and the Korg Nanopad. I've realised that one thing the APC40 just can't do is play drums. This is unfortunate, as while I can get by without velocity sensitivity, the latency when using it as drum pads just completely rule it out. I've tried all sorts of tricks - even shortening USB cables, putting it on its own buss etc, and it just won't cut it. So I wanted to get a very small set of drum pads that won't take up too much room on my desk. While I really like the Akai MP series of pad machines, they are really just too big for what I'm looking for. This should hopefully fit right in front of the APC40, and give me some live drumming ability.
What really helped me make my decision was the following review, this might be useful too if you're in the market for something similar.
http://www.djtechtools.com/2009/10/27/korg-nano-pad-vs-akai-lpd8/
I have a new remix under construction, but I think I'll wait until the new gear arrives and then put up another video!
The first one was the BFD drum library. I've used the lite version that comes with ProTools, and it's an incredibly responsive drum module that is perfect for the times when you need natural sounding drums rather than the more electronic drum machine style that you get out of Redrum or something.
The second one was a pad controller. I tossed up between the Akai LPD8 and the Korg Nanopad. I've realised that one thing the APC40 just can't do is play drums. This is unfortunate, as while I can get by without velocity sensitivity, the latency when using it as drum pads just completely rule it out. I've tried all sorts of tricks - even shortening USB cables, putting it on its own buss etc, and it just won't cut it. So I wanted to get a very small set of drum pads that won't take up too much room on my desk. While I really like the Akai MP series of pad machines, they are really just too big for what I'm looking for. This should hopefully fit right in front of the APC40, and give me some live drumming ability.
What really helped me make my decision was the following review, this might be useful too if you're in the market for something similar.
http://www.djtechtools.com/2009/10/27/korg-nano-pad-vs-akai-lpd8/
I have a new remix under construction, but I think I'll wait until the new gear arrives and then put up another video!
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
APC40 and Rewire
Finally got a chance to sit down and get some things going today. I tried rewiring Ableton Live through Logic, which seems to work quite well - but you don't get the use of the APC40. Logic has control via Rewire, so the APC just becomes a piece of plastic! I may try rewiring it the other way, so that Live is the controller, and Logic becomes the slave, as I think I'd get full control.
I then tried the same thing in Pro Tools, obviously with the same result. One thing that I did notice since installing Snow Leopard though was that my MC Mix know longer worked with Pro Tools. I installed the latest patch, with still no luck, and after hunting around for ages found a post that said you needed to use the file permissions tool to scan your hard drive for changes. That seemed to fix it, and now I have automated faders again in Pro Tools and Logic, which is great. Only thing I have now is none of the Spectrasonics plugins showing up in Pro Tools, so that will be the nxt job.
I have another remix I'm playing around with at the moment, so might get that one done in the next week or so!
I then tried the same thing in Pro Tools, obviously with the same result. One thing that I did notice since installing Snow Leopard though was that my MC Mix know longer worked with Pro Tools. I installed the latest patch, with still no luck, and after hunting around for ages found a post that said you needed to use the file permissions tool to scan your hard drive for changes. That seemed to fix it, and now I have automated faders again in Pro Tools and Logic, which is great. Only thing I have now is none of the Spectrasonics plugins showing up in Pro Tools, so that will be the nxt job.
I have another remix I'm playing around with at the moment, so might get that one done in the next week or so!
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Spectrasonics Trilian
My copy of Trilian just arrived a few days ago, and I've had a bit of a chance to play with it. For those of you not familiar with it, this is Spectrasonics' new bass synthesizer. It's made up primarily of electric and acoustic basses (upright, chapman stick etc), and sounds incredible. Amazingly well sampled, uses round robin sampling (so that every note doesn't sound the same), and apparently some of the bass sounds have in the order of 21,000 samples! I think it will work really well for more open and acoustic styles, but fantastic to have.
For most of my work I'm actually interested in synthesizer basses, and I must admit that I wasn't expecting it to be so heavily orientated to real bass sounds. That said, they are planning on releasing a giant patch set of synth sounds, so as soon as that comes out I will do a video going through the program and show what it's capable of! You can hear some of it on the Christopher Walken video I did last week.
For most of my work I'm actually interested in synthesizer basses, and I must admit that I wasn't expecting it to be so heavily orientated to real bass sounds. That said, they are planning on releasing a giant patch set of synth sounds, so as soon as that comes out I will do a video going through the program and show what it's capable of! You can hear some of it on the Christopher Walken video I did last week.
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