Titles available for download: Copyrights 1990 thru 2005 Michael Elliott, Opporknockity Tunes Studios, Uninked (A division of Cybernetic Necromancers, Discorporated)
Just a few bits of my music. Most are pretty heavily compressed to fit, and some are just snippets of songs too big to fit in only a few MB of webspace. Have fun! The Music: Orchestrations of Love (new instruments mix) Dragon's Head (Work In Progress) Ethic (Work In Progress) Tattered Restraints (with vocals) (Work In Progress) Sayane (Work In Progress) Grand Stomps (Work In Progress) ILP (Work In Progress) By the Name of a Love Never Found DinosaurHunter Dream on a Dark Ocean Eloquence Fox & Wolf Jennifer, Parts 1&2 Jungle Life (30sec.snip) Merge Millenial Moment Pyanfar The Truth Is Out There (30sec.snip) Deadmanswitch (35sec.snip1) Deadmanswitch (45sec.snip2) Interesting.Loop.Practice.test Light Thru.The.Gate.(Trashed) Twilight's.Dawn |
I've been asked about how I make my music, so I'll keep putting information here, as kind of a running conversation, question-and-answer sort of thing. I've not quoted names in the questions, though I will credit you if you asked the question wanted your name on it. Question: "Cool stuff! Sounds like you've been inspired by film composers. Are you mainly composing for the CD format, or are you into film scoring as well?" Answer: I wish I was scoring for film. I intend to eventually do the music for my local SF club's video project, if I can. I'm definitely inpsired by film composers--Jerry Goldsmith probably more than any other, but John Barry, David Arnold (for Stargate, more than anything), Danny Elfman, Yoko Kanno, Yuki Kajiura, and Jo Hisaishi (Fujisawa Mamoru). There are others, but those are all the names I can remember right now. I'm sure you've heard of all the ones up to the last three, but since you haven't likely heard of those three, here's a page with info on them: http://www.animeacademy.com/composers.php . No matter what you think of anime, you should get hold of some of their music and listen.... I also have to add Ludovico Einaudi for the music to the PBS version of Dr. Zhivago, which I am currently watching--I think I will likely do something like what I have heard.... I'm also inspired by people like Yanni (especially Keys to Imagination, the first album of his I ever heard), Ray Lynch (primarily No Blue Thing and Deep Breakfast), Patrick O'Hearn, Kitaro, Suzanne Ciani, Enya, Wendy/Walter Carlos (doesn't everyone love at least Tron?), Pink Floyd, The Eurythmics, Yes, and so many others, including some friends of mine that used to be a local Phoenix, AZ band called "The Narrow Way", that were frequently Pink-Floydish, in their own not-really-so-narrow way. I compose for myself, really, since what I play has grown too complicated for me to actually play live anymore, and what I can still play live is not wanted anywhere around here anymore (in the coffeehouses, etc, that still allow performers). I started out playing at the local SciFi conventions like Leprecon & Coppercon, first in the hallways and on the hotel lawns, and somehow people liked my crappy excuse for music (if you don't believe it, I'll post an MP3 of an old cassette tape :evil: ) enough to set me up a perpetual space in the ConSuite, where everyone eventually goes to for snacks, refreshment, and conversation, and I began to be pestered for tapes, so eventually I made the Uncommon Ground cd in 1996, which was a personal financial disaster, but a great success with most anyone that heard it. I still have too much music and too little time to polish it, so I just let it go when it's roughly like I heard it in my head. Although it used to be the other way around, nowadays sometimes the muse wakes me and I awaken the computer to compose, but most things I just load up sounds and hear something in them, which is one of the great things about forte--you can stack as many synths as you like, and layer them in some crazy ways--I used to do it with hardware like my Ensoniq EPS16+ and ASR88, and my old Yamaha TG-33, with an Alesis Midiverb III, thru a MOTU MidiMixer7s, and now I much more easily and quickly do this in forte, and can 're-wire' the whole thing with a couple of clicks to load up a new rack (instead of taking an hour to physically do it and reload all the sounds and such). Boy, I rambled a lot, didn't I? Question: "So, what all do you do besides watch anime?" Answer: My hobbies are too numerous to remember, but the current ones (which have lasted for at least a decade now) are composing 'music', 3d modelling and design, and a new one I'm starting to learn is digital photography (not just the editing, which I've done for others for years, but actually taking the pictures, which is MUCH harder!). I've also been a sketcher in pencils for my whole life, as far as I know (well, I think I used crayons the first 3 years Question: "I think guitar is actually easier for someone to learn without formal music training. I did learn guitar myself, but of course I had a bit of piano theory to help me along. For learning piano, you will have to learn formally in some way or you'll really mess up stuff like fingering or keys unless you work really really hard." Answer: That must be why I'm terrible Actually, I'm the only musician in the family...but I'm the only one that has never had any training whatsoever--everyone else learned some instrument while growing up, but abandoned it as soon as they were allowed to. I on the other hand never had any interest that I recall until I was about 14 or 15 (a bit more than twenty years ago! Gosh, how time flies!) and I heard this little keyboard playing Greensleeves by itself. Man was it doinky, but I got it anyway, and a couple years later I think it was I spent most of summer vacation working for a friend to pay for a better one, then when I was out of DeVry and had real money I started getting seriously into it, editing on an Amiga500.... But I never got any training, and I'm sure that I'd be a lot better now if I had (I'm too spoiled and lazy now to do anything about it at this point I guess the reason I find the piano/keyboard easier is that every note is exposed right there, and you can pick out anything you want from it with only one finger if you have to (although you'll need a computer or multitrack tape deck to record or edit music that way). But on a guitar, you must use multiple fingers on at least one hand to play virtually anything at all, due to the way notes are created. Since I'm so discombobulated when it comes to moving my body around, that means guitar is practically out Question: "Music -- I LOOOOOOOOOVE listening to music, but, alas, I am tonedeaf." Answer: I'm not sure that I'm not tonedeaf myself. I don't sing because I can't carry a tune in a locked steel box... I can play a piano that is totally out of tune (and I mean TOTALLY) after a few minutes I will adjust to the way it sounds and not even notice (while anyone in sonic range is crawling around trying to hold their ears and reach their guns at the same time). I have a *terrible* time finding wrong notes and chords in my music when I've played it in, if I do it just by listening--I have to look at the relative notes and figure out on screen what I meant to be playing, and remove or fix extraneous notes.... Question: "Wow, that must be very difficult. I don't have good pitch myself, but I did fine-tune it a lot with playing (and tuning) my guitar. Oh, and I later took some basic ear-training lessons so I could transcribe music. Believe me, it's difficult and took years before I actually got some proficiency in it." Answer: It can be difficult, especially since I know so little music theory. I just play what sounds right--which does not always mean that it is But I digress Question: "Just say it's jazz " Answer: hehe... I usually call it 'ambient', since it frequently is, for my live playing (I'm so uncoordinated I tend to play very slow pieces live, although some sound much faster because I tend to use delay effects that ping-pong percussive notes from center to right to left, and I use that as counterpoint to my actual melody. One great example of that on my Uncommon Ground cd is "Play Guitar", where not only do I have several guitars playing off of each other, I use the delay to keep time as well as the counterpoint. Of course I didn't intend it that way, it just 'happens'. After I did that a while, I started listening to Ray Lynch's music, starting with Deep Breakfast, and found he does the same thing, except he's much more a master of it than I. Question: "Basically I like to play improvisational stuff, and this whole recording (about 1.77 Mb - Low Quality) was piano improv on the spot with a short "theme" running throughout the piece. It's a raw recording, so there's some noticeable static/noise, and my unedited playing is rather messy (didn't really think the piece through). You'll also notice that I tend to bang the keys really hard - it's a habit I picked up from years of practice on real piano keys (which are heavy and quite tiring after a while) and so I tend to play a bit too hard when I use my synth." Answer: All that I do is improv, although I may change a piece substantially within the computer while editing it down, and structure it very strictly or even use the improv as the basis for clips or loops for riffs to base a different song on, rather than ever completing the original tune. As for banging the keys, that's the reason I got the ASR88, it has weighted-action and is 88 keys, so is a lot more dynamic than the EPS16+ (and others) I had had before that, and although it is more tiring to play, it also is easier to control dynamics of playing with (although I learned on 'toy' keyboards by Casio and Yamaha rather than having ever played a real piano, except at hotels while at SciFi conventions). It's not as heavy as a real grand piano, for example, but it's about the same as many small uprights. Not thinking the piece thru is also typical of most things I create, since I usually just have an idea or a sound I am after, and I do not "write music" per se; I'm not even really sure 'compose' is right either but it's the closest besides 'sonically sculpt' which doesn't really make sense to a lot of people. That's why I use the computer, to edit all the stuff I make. Many times what I play is what I wanted, but I made a lot of mistakes, so I delete those notes that were oopses, and do minor edits like velocity changes on things that were not quite played loud enough or were too loud, etc. Question: "Just what am I hearing? They're certainly not midi instruments, so er...are those your synthesizer instrument banks or something? And what software do you use to mix and all that?" Answer: They actually *are* 'midi instruments', in that they are sounds played by software (and hardware) instruments controlled by midi. Some of them are even sounds from cheezy soundcard midi synths, or the software synth Windows itself has built in, although I usually use those with a lot of effects processing, because I'm after a very specific sound or something. (Millenial Moment has a couple of those). More on the routing stuff below, and exact details will follow if anyone asks. I used to sit for hours or days trying to find the right sound in the ASR88 itself, before I used the PC for editing and such. That was before I even recorded a note. Fox&Wolf, Merge, several songs on the site are from that era. I'd find a sound that would then inspire a song, and sometimes they'd be full songs, sometimes snippets, most often junk. Then I'd record a track in the ASR88's own 8-track sequencer, usually quantize it to 1/8th notes, then record another to that. Most of the time I had a digital delay as I described before to keep my timing and to give me some fake counterpoint. I might or might not turn the delay off when making the final song, sometimes it just got in the way of the music! Track after track I'd do that, but I was always limited to 8 different sounds at once, and that is a big limitation for some music, so I started doing it in the PC so I could record those 8 in as midi and audio, then go to the next ones. Then I got sounds in the PC too, with soundfonts in an old AWE64gold, then the SBlive, and now in software inside Sonar. Well, the way I usually do it all now is this: 1-wake up with idea in head, unable to sleep 2-roll over to side of bed with workstation at it (the side I am facing in the picture thread, meaning of course you can't see the workstation--I should post that pic, too, actually) 3-pull out the keyboard drawer (no, not the PC keyboard, the one I built for the ASR88 sampler 4-Usually I just use the Steinway Piano sound I typically keep loaded up in it, and pick out the notes I hear, till I have them right, sometimes I have to pick a sound that's close to what I hear or else I can't play it.... 5-load up a template for what I want to do in Cakewalk's Sonar program, of which I have a few different ones, but one main one to start with, and record in the main track of sound as Midi notes. 6-If there's more, I'll repeat the recording on new tracks for each part, assuming I have any idea what I want to play 7-Start trimming the midi clips full of notes to cut out the parts I no longer want to hear, or those I totally screwed up, and either then open the Piano Roll View, and drag-edit the notes around in time or note position or even length and velocity, or else rerecord the bad parts, depending on my mood and frustration levels.... 8-Now I start loading up software samplers and/or synths within Sonar to get the sounds I want for particular tracks, and may even split out individual note sections to different tracks for different sounds to be played (like using Cello for the deeper string notes but having Violins play the higher notes of the same melody or chord lines, stuff like that) 9-Start assigning specific patches within the samplers/synths to get the sound I'm after, maybe trim the notes feeding them to match the sounds. 10-start adding realtime effects (delay, reverb, equalizers, compressors, distortion, etc) where needed to create the feel of the song. 11-(remember, everything should go to eleven) figure out where volumes need to be changed to make this all mix together, and add envelopes to the tracks or clips as needed that will automate the volume changes (to fade things in and out, or make crescendos/etc, stuff like that), pan things as needed, and start setting the whole project's levels so that there will be max sound out without clipping. Those steps aren't set in stone, and pretty often I'l be using steps 8 and 9 even before I record anything, because I want to use sounds my hardware sampler (Ensoniq ASR88) simply does not have, or I want to 'stack' it's sounds along with those in the PC. If you want more specific details on the steps to setup projects, I can give you those, but I may have to find out how much you know about Midi setups first (levels of explanation vary a lot between different Midiots like me). When I'm done (*if* I'm ever done) with a project, I'll mix it down with Sonar's built in functions to do so to a stereo wave file, and also to an MP3 and a set of WMA files of various bitrates, too (in case I need them for really small places like my website). Fairly often I'll do the wave file just to get it to cdr so I can listen to the projects on other people's stereos, so that I can get a better idea of how it will sound outside my own setup (this is a very important step to do, because if you only make your final mixes on your own setup, you'll find them lacking someplace when other people play it on their setup). To really make things sound right, you also need to make yourself used to your own speakers and setup by playing your favorite artist's cd's that have songs like you want the ones you're doing to sound, and compare between the two to hear where you may need to cut or boost different sets of instruments or whatever. That part can take forever to learn, and I'm still not good at it. Some can do it really easy, some can't do it at all. I'm kinda in the middle. But this is the last thing you would want to worry about... literally Question: "*Vaguely confused* ... Yeah, they taught us how to play a Recorder in 5th-grade music class. Kind of. ... Well I couldn't just let two people *own* this thread..." Answer: I also never learned much, if anything, about music then (I wasnt' interested *at all*). Question: "Back on topic...tell me about that CD of yours" Answer: Hmmm. I suppose it depends on what you want to know. I'll start with the basics: It was made for special release on Valentine's Day, 1996; mostly because many of the songs on it were angsty complaints to the universe that I was an utter failure in actually attracting those women I really liked. Fortunately, I not only can't carry a tune in a locked steel box, but also can only write really bad poetry and my lyrics tend to be on a par with the worst whiny country music Wink So there aren't any words. Although some were imagined for some songs, none were ever recorded, so be thankful... There's 22 songs, 72.5 minutes total. Would've been the 74 minute max allowed but I couldn't find anything quite short enough to fit, and couldnt' trim any more seconds from the rest of it to fit the only close one... It was a hot seller at the Gallifrey One convention in '96 where it premiered, selling 96 (coincidence?) copies, out of the 400 or so members of the con, I got about 1/4 sold on it. But it didn't do very well anywhere else, despite the long waiting list I had been making for people who kept wanting a recording of my stuff--when it came down to actually buying one, hardly anyone wanted to do so. So I happened to sell only about that same amount over the last several years, in total. Yuck. I've given away many more (300? More?) as advertising and such, trying to get into music-houses, etc. Like me, it's one of those things that either someone really really likes, or just kinda thinks "bleh" and goes on by. Most people of course follow the second choice, which is typical, since usually only 10% of a group will like any particular thing you present to that group. Sometimes a lot less. ramblerambleramble Anyway, many of the songs I put up at my two sites are from that cd: By the Name of a Love Never Found Dream on a Dark Ocean Eloquence Fox & Wolf Jennifer, Parts 1&2 Jungle Life (30sec.snip) Merge Pyanfar The Truth Is Out There (30sec.snip) Light The others on the sites are all newer, although Dinosaur Hunter is from the same era it wasn't completed till over a year later, maybe more. Most of what's on the cd was made from 92 thru 96. I have probably a couple dozen hours of music total, maybe two or three of that actually in WAV form on the computer (some only exists as sequences in the keyboard or Cakewalk because it's not worth recording or is not a complete piece). Most of the stuff is from 94 thru 98, I have been so busy in 99 and 2000 that I tapered off a lot, and since then I've had so many emotional and physical ups and downs I haven't made much else in any of my arts, although you'd think the emotions would make great food for building into music (like my angst did before). ramblerambleramble Anyway, back to the cd itself, I did all the artwork on it, my mom actually inspired the OT hand-note logo ("why not someone knocking on a tune?") which I then madly sketched in and scanned and edited on the pc. The 'eye' on the back cover art (which is not yet on the sites, but will be there below the cd front cover art that already is) contains the cd itself (which is designed to look like the iris of the eye); the wolf in the back art was originally done with stippling on MacPaint on my old Macintosh Plus (which is now a pumpkin). The wolf photo was altered from one that was so striking to me that I couldn't *not* use it, with three wolves playing together and one just laid back hoping not to get run over by the rest of them (I tried to reach the photographer thru a couple of agencies I found that had dealt with the person, but never got any response at all, and finally ran out of time and had to just use it anyway). The clouds are handpainted in the pc, and are of various starships, although I don't remember which were which now for all of them, someplace I had a file with labels on it so I'd know All of the instruments for every song were played via the Ensoniq ASR88, except for The Truth Is Out There, which had so many simultaneous sounds I had to use my Ensoniq EPS16+ and Yamaha TG33 as well, and I think there were some of the synthier sounds on a few songs that were the TG33 again. (Dream on a Dark Ocean definitely used some string sounds from it and had originally been composed entirely using sounds from the TG33, but sounded so much more wonderful with the ASR88's sounds). As the liner notes say, it was (almost) all composed one track at a time, then edited for glaring mistakes and such, primarily in Cakewalk Professional for Windows, v3.01; only By the Name of a Love Never Found was actually written (well, drawn with a mouse) entirely in the computer, except for a single track that I played live over it in mostly bass notes, to give it at least a little life. At the time I knew nothing about EQ, compression, or any other mastering techniques, and was absolutely convinced I did not want anyone to touch the sound I had created before it went to cd, so I told DiscMakers (where I had them made for a ridiculous price, but I was stupid then) not to perform the mastering steps--I was wavering on letting them do it anyway after they actually called me and said it needed it, but they said it'd take at least a couple of weeks and I *had* to have them for the convention, which would've been impossible then, so I skipped it. I've regretted that ever since... But hey, it's my music, on a real silver cd shrinkwrapped and everything There's a lot of other detail I glossed over or skipped, such as info about each song, etc., if I haven't already bored you to sleep then ask whatever questions you want to! Question: "Talking about playing live - how do you do it? What do you use to play the other tracks, and usually how do you play the live parts?" Answer: When I play live, I 'stack' several sounds, usually, typically a percussive sound like Piano or Guitar, with some wispy vox-synthy sound under it at less than 1/2 the volume of the first sound. I may patch in strings (sometimes several layers of different ones) and brass as I start building up to some bigger musical bits, depending on mood, environment, and audience. Sometimes I do just play piano, and thats where pieces like Jennifer come from (although it has at least 3 tracks of piano parts in it, since I can't play the whole thing at once). Both the primary tracks in Eloquence were actually stacked together as identical midi notes, each feeding a different sound: Piano and Flute, I think. There were edits and other things added too, but that was the original primary part, you can still hear it that way. I play live stuff slowly, because I have little choice, and frequently quietly. I do not usually have any percussion or drum tracks, any rhythm is generated by using a delay on the percussive type instruments of Guitar or Piano, or sometimes synths, for examples of how those sound just listen to Play Guitar when I get it up there, or Zeeq, for a synthy delayed-sound. I can describe in more technical detail how to setup the delays and instruments and such, if you want. Do you have delay effects available in the Korg? If you have a stereo delay available, set it to 450ms on the right side, and 600ms on the left. Play staccato or marcato style at about 99bpm and try to keep your notes in sync with the rest of the piece, don't change chords all the time, and keep successive chords within the range of previous ones because the delayed previous notes will be out of harmony with what is now starting if you don't. I often use some percussive variation on Oberheim sounds, like a common sound from an OB-8 that gets sampled into a lot of keyboards, you may even have it in your Korg. Question: "I was just wondering what kind of mixing effects you use in the end to make it sound less...er...MIDI-ish." Answer: Well, that's where you have to make a couple of choices, and they're going to be based primarily on whether or not you can get a low enough latency out of your SBLive without crackles or pops (noises in your sound output) or dropouts (where playback/recording just stops outright). Unless you intend to use the Korg's (hereafter just "K") sounds and it's own internal effects, or soundfonts in the SBLive (hereafter just "SB") and the SB's own internal effects (which can be quite good), in which case there's virtually no noticeable latency. If you are going to use all the nifty effects within Sonar3 (hereafter "S3") itself, and you want to use them live, while you are playing/recording in the music either as midi or audio, *then* you have to deal with the slight delay the SB will introduce. Remember the technobabble section in a previous post? Well, here's a bit of replay with some of the explanations chopped out--just refer to the previous post if you need those (or ask again). This time it's assuming you will be using Synths or Soundfonts in DXi's/VST's as your soundsource, as opposed to the Korg or the SB's internal midi device(s): _______________________________ In S3, choose Options and then Audio: General Tab: --Playback and record timing masters= SBlive. --Audio Driver bit depth= 16 --Default Settings for New Projects; Sample Rate =44100 --File Bit Depth leave at 16. --Buffers in Playback Queue= 2. If you get lots of crackles then =3 or 4 --Buffer Sixe= 20ms. If you get lots of crackles then =30ms. Then OK to that and the settings are applied. If it says to, restart S3. Now, quickie lesson on setting up a template project for DXi use: --Open S3, leaving just the default 4 track project open. For clarity's sake, make yourself a completely blank project by selecting all the tracks and deleting them as follows: --You'll see a Track Number at the left end of each track, near the name of the track (which are in yellowish and green boxes). The track numbers are also 'buttons' to select the tracks with. Leftclick and hold on the first track number, then drag down until you have all 4 tracks selected. --Rightclick on any of the 4 track numbers, and choose Delete Track. They will all vanish with no confirmation dialog. --File - SaveAs, browse to whereever you are saving your files (default is C:\Cakewalk Projects\), and create yourself a folder "0- Templates". The reason for the "0-" in front of it is so it is always at the top of your folder list no matter how many projects you have in the folder, unless of course you start *their* names with 0's Razz ). Open that folder and save your blank file now, as something like "One VSC Synth Template 0001", as type "normal". The reason for the 0001 is that you can then increment that number each time you SaveAs and keep as many versions of a project as you want or need, without having to deal with much beyond that increment every time. You don't have to do this, but it's a good habit to start--there are times when very complex files like the ones Sonar or other music programs create get corrupted, and then they won't open anymore. When that happens, you just lost all the work in that file. SAD SAD day. Happens not often but is evil if you have no backup! Also you might decide you liked an old version of a song, but if you save over the old file all the time, you won't be able to do that. SaveAs is your FRIEND! Razz In fact, if you're willing to trust me on that, then do this right now (you can change it later if you don't like it): --Options - Keybindings (this is a really cool feature!) --On the left, there's a column of key names, with Ctrl+A selected. Scroll down until you get to Ctrl+S (save, by default), then click once on Ctrl+S to select it. --On the right, there's a list of functions, saying "no function assigned". Scroll down that list till you find "File | Save As" and click once on that to select it. --Click the Bind button at the far right, or doubleclick on "File | Save As". --Make sure "Save changes for Next Session" is checked, at the bottom left. Then click OK. You've now setup S3 so that when you press the usual Ctrl+S to save a file (which in almost all programs just saves over the top of the previous version of a file you have open), you will get the dialog for SaveAs instead, and you can still save over it if you want, but what is better is to hit the End key once, then backspace, then type the next incremental number, then Enter. At least, usually that's all that's needed if you have viewing extensions turned off in Windows Explorer (which is the default). Not much slower to save your work, and much safer since you're never destroying previous file versions. Back to the main lesson: --Up near the top center in the toolbars, there's a button that has DX in it's icon, just to the right of a button that looks like 3 mixer sliders. Click the DX button. The window will probably be small near the upper left corner of your screen, you can move or resize it to your fancy. --In that "Synth Rack" window, click the New button, the left most one (looks like the typical "LEO sparkle" from Love Hina Smile ), then choose "DXi Synth", then "Edirol VSC". The sounds in this synth are really cheezy but they get the idea across very easily because it's GM and there's no setup required. --In the Insert DXi Synth Options panel that comes up, you can just have the first two checkboxes checked, for MIDI Source Track and First Synth Output (Audio). Synth Property Page is ok to leave checked as well (that just brings up the synth's main window). I'd always leave the Ask This Every Time checked. You've now "inserted a synth" into S3. You can close the DXI (synth rack) window now, but before you do, basic description of what you're seeing on that green bar is: --Synth number --"Disable/Archive" control (looks like a chain link). Click it and it 'breaks' the synth out of the chain, which reduces cpu load but also mutes all output from it. Click again and it reconnects it. --Location of effect: If the black symbol looks like a square with lines off to the right, it's the source of an audio track. If it's a square with lines to both sides, it's in the "Fx bin", which means that it can modify audio passing through it from the track. There are some synths that are also audio effects that can be midi controlled, and this is where those go. Don't worry about that yet Smile --Name of the synth and which number it is. --Preset chooser, if you create presets for a synth you can pick one here. Not the same as patches and banks (which is probably what your K calls presets). --Mute button --Solo button (meaning all other non-soloed audio tracks and synths are muted as long as this one is soloed--the midi tracks feeding this synth however will *not* be muted--they're soloed with it. Called Smart Solo.) Ok, close the rack Now you have the main S3 window, and the VSC window. The VSC 'floats' and will stay on top all the time. You can turn that off in it's upper left menu with "disable floating", but it's frequently handy. While you are on *any* effects or synth windows, a lot of the keys for S3 don't work--like W for rewind, Spacebar for playback start/stop, and such. You have to click back on the main window (like it's titlebar or something) or Ctrl-Tab back to it first. Annoying, but not really any way around that unless you do some keybindings, which for now I recommend you don't... --That VSC window looks interesting, and has a lot of stuff on it. Ignore it and close it's window. Wink --Now you have two minimized tracks in the Track View (hereafter TV). The top is the DXi track (1), the bottom is the midi track (2) feeding it. Restore them both by clicking the doublebox at the far right end of each track just before the splitter bar. those two buttons work just like the Windows versions. --If you can't see all the controls on a track, grab the divider between it and the next track at the very bottom of the track you want to resize, and drag the window vertically to show them all. That size will be remembered as the new 'restore' size for that track, just like it would for a window in Windows. Minimze and Maximize buttons do just about what you think they would. --In the Midi track, see the button just to the right of MSR? Looks like a sonar ping, sort of. That is "Input Monitor" (IM). Click it, it will glow green. You are now monitoring the input of the midi track, feeding the input to that track's output along with anything recorded on that track. IM is per-track, so you can do lots of routing stuff just with this, that's pretty handy when you start setting up your templates for sounds and stuff. Notice that when you clicked IM on, the "I" field near the top of the midi track automatically changed from None to whatever your default midi input is? As long as that is where you have your K plugged in, you will now be able to press keys on the K and play notes in VSC! You can change it to whatever you want, but this is normally all you have to do. --In the CH (midi channel) field, choose 1 (VSC GM2) --In the Bank field, choose the first one (something like "15888 VSC GM2 bank 0", I think) --In the patch field below that, choose a sound from the dropdown list. Piano1 is fine for now. File - SaveAs, then increment that number! You're saving your template now theoretically setup to play music. If you can't hear anything out of the computer speakers while you are playing notes on the K right now, tell me, so we can figure out what's wrong. These sounds are dorky. Now what do I do? Razz --In track 1, the DXi track, right click in the Fx bin's open area under the word "none". --Choose Audio Effects, then Cakewalk, then FxReverb. --In the new window that opens, see the Preset dropdown at the top left: Choose "Piano - Bright Concert Hall". The sliders will reset to those preset positions. You can play with the sliders while playing notes and adjust the reverb to your liking. Most of the time I end up changing the Mix slider at the far right down to about 25% (default is 40-60% on most presets, which is a little heavy for me on a lot of pieces). --When it sounds the way you want it to, type a name in the Preset box and then click Save button (floppy disk icon). Now that preset is saved in your registry, so you don't have to write down the settings to use them again, just call it up there. Don't worry if when you load a song you don't see a name there, it didn't lose the settings you had, it just doesn't display the preset's *name* there. It's a windows limitation as far as I know. You have now added a nice reverb to that dorky piano, and it probably doesn't sound half bad now. SaveAs again.... Don't forget to do that a LOT! You will never be sorry you saved something. But you will be sorry you didn't! Here's another thing to try: --Click the IM button on Track2 to turn it off. Minimize Track2 --Right click in the blank space below track 2, and choose Insert Midi Track. --Restore Track3. --Turn IM on Track3 --In the O (output, square box icon) field, 2nd long field down, choose "#-EDIROL VSC 1" --In the CH (midi channel) field, choose 2 (VSC GM2) --In the Bank field, choose the first one (something like "15888 VSC GM2 bank 0", I think) --In the patch field below that, choose Contrabass from the dropdown list. --In Track 1's Fx Bin again, right click and choose Audio Effects - Cakewalk - FxDelay. --In the red window that comes up, there are four sliders on the left, with the blue light on the first one lit just below the green lights. First thing is to click the green lights on the righthand pair, which turns off the last two delays--you won't need them for this. --in the Delay (MS) at the top, use the slider to change that to 600.00 coarse and 0.00 fine. (600ms total) --In the Feedback change it to 12. --In the Pan, change it to -1.00 (full left) --Click the red button on Voice 2, below the lit green one. --in the Delay (MS) at the top, use the slider to change that to 440.00 coarse and 10.00 fine. (450ms total) --In the Feedback change it to 12. --In the Pan, change it to 1.00 (full right) --Change the Mix level at top right to about 0.25. --type a name like "left-right bounce 450-600" in the Presets box and click the floppy icon to save it. Play some notes in the ranges above C3 or C4 on the K, you should hear an echoey sound that's kind of neat, useful for several kinds of music.... One of my favority sounds to play with. If you play to a beat of about 99 BPM, you will be able to make your own interesting counterpoint to what you are playing, if you use mostly single-note or legato-style playing. Don't use full chords and lots of left-hand work with the delay, it will just be all mushy yucky sounding. Question: "Oh, and what are the soundfonts and how do I use them. Are they freely available?" Answer: Soundfonts (hereafter SF2) are sampled soundbanks, basically. Using them is dependent on whether you will be using the SF2 support in the SB or using a DXi/VST to play them. Each DXi/VST has it's own ways of loading and using them, so we'll have to go thru that when we figure out exactly which one you're going to use. If you are using the SB SF2 support, S3 has built-in support for that, too. I strongly recommend using the SF2 DXi/VST approach; it's a lot more flexible later on, and it won't matter if you have an SB or not to reopen the projects later on; if you use the SB SF2 support you pretty much have to have that card in your machine and working normally to be able to open projects previously saved that were using it's support, or else you will have to manually recreate the sound setup and effects from scratch. The easiest one to use is LiveSynthPro DXI (hereafter LSP). There's a trial version that came with S3 but it's not installed by default, but it's no longer available as a purchasable product (company is gone byebye) Some free synths that play SF2's are: http://www.greenoak.com/crystal/download.html http://www.rgcaudio.com/sfz.htm There are a few SF2's that came with your SB, if they're not installed on the system you can probably find them on its install cd's. There are a few on the S3 cd's, again probably not installed by default. There are SF2 sites on the web with free downloads, but keep in mind that a large portion of them are really cruddy homemade SF2's, a few are real gems though, like any of the Cadenza Strings series. A lot of the good sites like http://www.thesoundsite.net and http://www.hammersounds.net appear to be down. Still up is http://www.soundfontsamples.com/freesoundfonts.asp which is the free section of a place that sells very good SF2 sets, some of which I have parts of as demo's from various things. They have links to other places here: http://www.soundfontsamples.com/links.asp Using Vsampler (hereafter VS3) that comes with S3, you can also use a whole lot of other sampled soundbanks like Akai and Gigasampler (GIG). There are some VERY good GIG sounds out there for free, but they are very large, usually. I have a lot of those, too, also will be on your cd's. VS3 is pretty wierd in how it works, and there's no manual in the program itself--you have to download the manual from http://www.vsampler.com as they write it. 6 months after it's release they just made the first part of the manual available.... but that would be enough for a start Smile I still don't understand it well enough to use it properly, it's just....wierd...in how it works. Not like other programs. Not necessarily bad in that, just different. I used it for ALL the sounds in GrandStomps. If there are questions I can't answer or whatever, a good place to learn about a lot of this stuff is also here: http://www.digifreq.com/ Question: "Did you try out my project file? Any comments so far?" Answer: I did notice you didn't set any channels in the trackstrips (the control sections of the each track); or any banks or patches either. How much do you know about MIDI? In practice it's easy to use, but it gets complicated pretty quick if you do much more than just record data in and play it back to the same place you recorded it from (sometimes even *that* is a pain). I'll make the assumption you know *something* or you woudn't have been making midi files of anime songs. Since you're routing all 3 tracks to the same synth (presumably your K), then you have to remember to set the channel on each track to a different channel, with the (sometimes) exception of drums. Drums can (and sometimes have to) be an exception depending on how the synth you are sending to deals with what is often called a percussion bank or pool. SF2's *always* have two 'pools'. Melodic, which will *only* play on channels 1-9 and 11-16, and Percussive, which will *only* play on channel 10. Why? Because they were following (I think) a Roland GM standard of the time. Seemed like a good idea I suppose, although it makes things awfully confusing for newbies to MIDI.... Like me when I started (I think that's where half my hair went). To further confuse the issue, you can assign an instrument within an SF2 (in an editor like Vienna that comes with your SB) to *both* the percussive and melodic pools. The *only* effect that has on the instrument is that it can then be played on *all* 16 channels, instead of either 1-9/11-16 *or* 10. When you start using SF2's, you will find that some of them will only play drum sounds (or *any* sound!) if you set the output channel of the track to 10. That means those sounds (instruments) are assigned to the percussive pool. You can fix that in Vienna and save as a new SF2 file, if you want to. Some you will find will not make any sound at all unless you set the output to a channel *other* than 10. That means those instruments are assigned to the melodic pool. You can fix that as well. Why would you care if you can only send to channel 10 for drums? Well, that's where it gets a little complex. In your current project.cwp file, neither of your drum tracks is set to a particular channel. But lets suppose for a moment that you want to use an SF2 in your SB's synth to play the drums back with, and that the SF2 you want to use for it's super cool sounds is only set to percussive pool, and therefore only plays notes sent on channel 10. Now you have to set both drum tracks to channel 10. Ok, we do that. Wow, now we find that the drums are not at the volumes we had set in the respective trackstrips! Why? because your Drum Beat track is sending volume 72 to channel 10, and at the same time (actually just an instant later) your Drum Rolls track is sending volume 101 to channel 10, the same channel on the same synth. So it leaves it set as 101, and all your drums are louder than you meant them to be, not just the Rolls! If you could send the Rolls to channel 11, with the Beat on 10, you would not have to worry about that, the volumes would be totally independent. But if your drum SF2 is only percussive, and only plays notes on channel 10, you cannot do this until you edit the SF2 in Vienna and put all the instruments in the SF2 into both percussive *and* melodic pools. Not hard to do but you will find you have to do this sometimes. There is however one more way around this. Using LSP (the software synth "DXi" I talked about before) or one of the others like it, you can simply load a new instance (add a new one in Synth Rack View) which gives you a totally new and separate set of 16 channels to send data to. You just have to tell each track which synth it is supposed to send to, and if they're all sending to different synths, it doesn't matter if all the channel numbers are the same. If any of this isn't quite making sense, tell me and I'll try a diagram for better clarity, because that's what it took to make *me* understand it when I started doing all this back in the stone age. Question: "Well, if it helps, I know absolutely *nothing* about MIDI, or setting up the project. What I did so far was for me to familiarize myself with the functions like recording, editing and the piano roll thingy. I haven't learned about any setting up bits yet so that's why I sent the project file to you." Answer: Ok. Then I suppose I'll start with the super-basics and you can tell me if I'm starting TOO basic. MIDI has a few main concepts: Most controls and such start at 0, and run up to 127, because originally MIDI was all 7-bit ASCII serial data. It has been added to and modified a few times since it's inception. Knowing the numbers and ranges of things may help you some later on, and there is info in the Cakewalk help and manuals that will give you some assistance in this, but there's probably even more on the internet. And of course you can ask me, as long as you want the two-dollar answer instead of the nickel one! A Synth, which basically means any 'black box' that plays sounds controlled by midi. It actually doesn't even have to play sounds but for this discussion that's all we mean A Patch or Instrument, which is a single 'sound' that a Synth plays. This 'sound' can actually be a collection of many actual sounds, but the point of a Patch is that these sounds are mapped out to one (or more) of the 128 possible notes that can be sent via MIDI, from G0 to C8, I think it is. If you select a Patch that doesn't exist in a synth/bank, then most synths will keep playing the last selected one instead. By default, most synths will play Patch 0 if you didn't select one yet. Some don't play anything at all until you select one. A Bank, which is a 'set' of instruments. Typically there are 128 possible instruments in a Bank, although not all of them have to be used, and they dont' have to be sequential. So you could use Bank0, then skip to Bank3, and if you select Bank2 on a synth that doesn't have that one, most are setup so they just select the next lower existing bank. Some stay with whatever the last selected bank was (which is Bank0 if you didn't select one yet), and some always select Bank0 if the bank you tried to select doesn't exist. There are 16 channels (1-16) that you can send data on to any synth, but not every synth responds to all channels. There are a few that only respond to channel 1. Most respond to all. Samplers (like my Ensoniq, or LSP or VS3) are different than synthezisers/romplers (like your Korg, or Dreamstation or VSC) in that there are no pre-set banks or patches, and so until you setup the synth with sounds (loading them from disk, usually), samplers don't really have *any* response to any channels, while synthesizers/romplers usually by default respond to each incoming channel separately. Most times, this is called Omni or Multi mode, and you'll hardly ever have to worry about changing that or setting it up. If things don't work like you expect, *then* worry, but not until then. The channel thing is important, because it is where you will end up with the most confusion, and the most problems with things not playing back like you intended them to. Just because you have a different TRACK of data doesn't mean it's being sent to a different channel, you have to explicitly set the channel differently between two different tracks to send them to two different places. You can imagine the channels as separate synths within a single Synth. They're there even if you don't use them, like blank slots. Assuming an imaginary synth, if you set Track 1 to Channel 1, then set the Bank to 0, and the Patch to Piano, then set Track 2 to Channel 10, set it's bank to 0, and Patch to Room Drums, you've now got two channels out of 16 used on that synth. You could in theory use 14 more totally different tracls with different instruments (Patches) on that same synth all at one time, with different data going to each one, totally separated, as long as on each track you have set the Channel to a different one from all other tracks. Now, if you have a *second* Synth in the same project, you can then use all 16 channels on *that* synth totally different from what you are using the 16 channels on the first synth for. Even though it's still Channel 1, as long as you are sending to a different Synth (port), you are not mixing the data up. Is this making sense? I'll draw those diagrams if you need them. Question: "I know it sounds silly that I have a 10 year old synth, but I know nothing about MIDI and all that." Answer: Not silly at all. I didn't learn about midi for...several years after I started playing keyboards, because I just recorded it live to cassette tape, then reel-to-reel (for better quality). Finally I decided that I would never play any better and it sucked, people would kill me if that was all they had to listen to from me, and I needed a way to edit it. Splicing tape was *not* an option. When I got my Amiga500 was when I started learning a little about it, but I didn't know much at all until a few years after that. I kind of learned in tiny doses, as I needed it, with some sudden gestalt-leaps now and then, so I don't remember when I learned what anymore. I'm no expert, but I get by. Question: "" Answer: Question: "" Answer: Question: "" Answer: Question: "" Answer: Question: "" Answer: Question: "" Answer: Question: "" Answer: |
