Monthly Archive for October, 2007

It is very shiny.

The Macbook arrived at work today, and it’s quite the piece of design I must admit.

There was a slight hitch on the “it just works” front when the isight camera failed to function, but a shut-down and restart fixed the problem. Shades of Windows there already!

I had been planning to pick up the Logic 8 Studio box, but I’ve decided to give my Pro Tools licence another bash for now. It does have a good reputation, and having paid the money back in January for the little blue hardware thingie and all the associated 1s and 0s, I’d feel it remiss of me not to try and actually use it a bit. After a skim through the 800+ page manual, it turns out it’s actually got a lot of features I didn’t even know about, so it could work out well.

Also, looks like I’ll be able to get Reaper to run using either fusion or crossover, which will give me access to my favourite bits of the PC audio world as well.

But all that is for the future. Thus far I’ve only had a poke around the various bits & pieces of OSX, and put some loops on the timeline in Garageband and pressed play. Strangely enough it sounded like every other garageband “composition” I’ve ever heard – 120BPM, 4/4 time, one chord. Get Timbaland on the phone!!!

Actually, he’d probably like it.

Then he’d steal it.

So on second thought, don’t.

Well…

I had a number of concerted attempts to work on some T3E material over the weekend. There are two great ideas of Curtis’s that I wanted to add some string parts to, and play with some melodic/lyrical ideas I’ve had swimming around my head.

A while back, I noticed an occasional weird freezing thing that my PC was doing in REAPER.

Well it’s doing that again. ALOT.

It seems to be some VSTis that trigger it more than others (SFZ was particularly problematic) but it’s still doing it occasionally regardless. If I switch over from the EMU to the Nvidia audio drivers on the motherboard it works again for a while, then freezes again.

It’s very weird… I press play (or record, or whatever) and the buttons on the transport “depress”, but nothing moves, plus it’s unresponsive to MIDI/audio input. The program itself hasn’tf rozen, I can still move around the interface, load, save, change prefs etc. But nothing other than a re-boot of the whole PC will get sound happening again, or the transport moving. Then after about 5 minutes of work, it happens all over.

It’s doing it with the Mbox too, so at least the EMU is ok… hrmm…

I tried rolling back to version 1.888 of REAPER (in case it was a funky Beta issue) and it still happens. I’m going to try a fresh install of the whole PC this week, and then if that runs, I’ll add VSTs one at a time and see if I can figure out what makes it fail.

I am THIS close to picking up a Macbook and a copy of Logic Studio on finance or Rental. I can’t really afford it, but it’s fully tax deductible, and at least I’ll be able to get some bloody work done.

Sigh…

Presenting a brief tour, from left to right:

First you’ll see a guitar stand, sans guitar. Ignore the green bag, it’s full of spare cables and bits & bobs. I’ll find a less obtrusive hole for it somewhere. Up above that, there’s my trusty Alesis QS6 which I’m using as a MIDI controller and extremely occasional sound source. It does those twinkly 90s digital synth textures really nicely, but I don’t have much use for those any more, so it’s mostly VST land. The music stand and mic stand are pretty self explanatory I hope.

Behind those, you can see an old Dell slimline desktop case, a 34cm TV, and a bookshelf speaker (I actually have two of those, for glorious stereo). The desktop box is my web broswing, email checking, word processing (etc. etc.) general purpose type PC. It’s also got a TV out card in it, so I can chuck a movie or something on if the desire takes me. My Digidesign Mbox is sitting on top of the telly – it’s not hooked up at the moment, the new EMU having taken over primary audio interface duties. I’ll probably hook the Digi up to the Dell PC and use it as a glorified DAT machine at some point. Maybe… The last thing I want to do is run Pro Tools on it…. *shudder*

Oh, there’s also a little webcam sitting on top of the TV which I bought on a whim and have yet to use.

The 21″ beige monitor is due for replacement with a nice flatscreen at some stage, but for now it does the job. Under that is my cheap & cheerful Behringer UMX49 MIDI controller, which has the dubious honour of posessing the worst feeling keybed of any instrument I’ve ever played. It’s truly horrible – I seriously can not stress enough how unpleasant it is to play. Thank god I don’t use it for that. Instead, I’ve got keys, knobs and sliders mapped to various functions in REAPER (my audio software of choice) so it functions as a bit of a poor-man’s control surface. It’s not quite touch sensitive motorised faders, but I can get around a lot faster than with the mouse alone. The key/control mapping is a bit of a work in progress there…

Skipping down past the mouse and keyboard, you can see the bottom half of a Sansui amplifier that I’m using to drive my monitor speakers, a custom built 4 channel mic pre amp that Curtis built, and a DBX 162 stereo compressor. Jumping back up the top again (because I forgot before) there’s a vertical rotation fishy lamp which I think is broken (last time I switched it on it made a disconcerting creaking noise, then a SNAP, and now it doesn’t rotate any more, which is a bit sad), a baby halogen desk lamp, some miscellaneous pens and stationery, and a small monkey in a chair (without which no home studio would be complete).

The beige box at the bottom right is my music PC. Not much to tell there… it’s a PC. Woo. On top of it is the input/output box for the EMU, and it’s very pretty. Flashy lights and such.

So there you go. That’s what I did with my Saturday morning – debaucherous rock and roller that I am.