bitflipper

You certainly don't want to be adding up the current value of all the gear you've gotten rid of over the years. It never occurred to me back in the day that synths would actually appreciate in value. I pretty much gave away my Jupiter, Juno, MicroMoog, TG-33, 3340-S, EP-30, RE-201, stands, mics, drum machines and PA. Almost everything went to one guy for a lump sum of $1,000. I assumed that in a few years it would all become worthless.

Every synth I lusted after in the 70's was beyond my reach financially. First it was the Moog modular, which cost as much as a house at a time when I did not own a house. Then came the Minimoog, which promised to be the synth for the masses. It cost as much as new car. I didn't have one of those, either. Arp, Roland and Korg offered more affordable alternatives, but those weren't the ones I wanted. Around 1977 I finally got a real Moog - a MicroMoog - that I used almost exclusively for bass. Like Greg, my band had no bass player. Not to emulate The Doors, but to make the money split better. But the MicroMoog only satisfied my GAS itch for a little while, up until I used an Oberheim 4-voice at a recording studio. Thus continuing the cycle of lusting after something I couldn't afford. I literally dreamed about that Oberheim. But all I could manage was a single Oberheim Expansion Module (for $800) that I slaved off the MicroMoog. Today, I have virtual versions of every synth I ever wanted. Even my "hardware" synths pack a music store's worth of synths into one. I put "hardware" in quotes because these instruments are actually just digital emulations. They have even more knobs and buttons than a classic analog synth, but the controls are oddly disconnected from any musicality. Beyond the mod and scroll wheels, one does not "play" a digital synthesizer's parameters in real time. Want to apply a filter? That's a submenu on an LCD touchscreen. Which is a longwinded way of saying I'm jealous of Glenn and can completely relate to his joy at finally getting his Odyssey.

And Fred Armisen is an excellent drummer.

Of course, as we're so often painfully reminded, not everyone shares the same sense of humor as our Craig. But yeh, I think you'd not be assaulted for using those sobriquets.

Unfortunately, one member of our group has a normal day job and cannot travel too far because of that. So for example we'll do islands, but draw the line at mountains. And anything that involves driving through Tacoma. So we won't be appearing in Vantucky or Portlandia.

Yeh, I figured that out. What got me was the header announcing "PICK ANY 3 PLUGINS FOR $49.99" followed by a listing of their entire catalog. Nothing to indicate which ones are eligible and which ones are not. The most charitable interpretation is bad design. There is no delimiter separating the products that are eligible from the ones that aren't.

PA is refusing to take my money. Maybe I'm not as smart as their software, but I count 3 products in the cart. The universe is telling me I don't need any of those things. Which is true; I really don't.

Next gig in Seattle is on June 9th, at a place we haven't played before called The Shanty Tavern. It's on Lake City Way, but that's all I know about the place. We'll be at a little hole-in-the-wall joint in Edmonds on August 12th. It's a lively venue, but claustrophobic. When we were a 6-piece I ended up playing in front of the ladies' restroom. Lovely aroma. September 1 we're in Carnation, at a brewery called Remlinger Farm. That one might be fun. $2.00 off pig wings! They have a train. And ponies. Everything else on the calendar is up north and/or out in the boonies, e.g. Sedro-Woolly, Rockport, Goldbar. There's a date in Clinton, which is close by but requires a ferry to get to. I hate taking ferries in summer. The tourists with their RVs take all the fun out of an otherwise pleasant boat ride.

Most of our gigs are in places you'd need satellite assistance to locate. Next up: Concrete, WA on the 28th. Skiers might know Concrete as the wide spot in the road on the way up to Stevens Pass. But those small towns are starved for live music and are loudly appreciative, if not always big tippers. I'd hoped you'd stop by and remind me that I'm just being a big wuss. I only play out 2 or 3 times a month. Last Summer it was 4 times a month, but we decided that was too much.

That was my thought. The only reason I can think of is if the previous X1 folder had different perms.

I'm still curious as to why this wasn't a problem under X3, which should be subject to the same Windows-enforced restrictions as any other application. I don't think I've ever had to run any version as Administrator. Most of my plugins (that aren't virtual instruments) are installed on the C: drive. Rather than argue with installers, I just let them default to wherever they want to go and fool them via symbolic links when necessary.

I didn't intend for it sound so negative. It can be physically grueling, sure. But I still derive great joy from it. A lot more pleasure than I would get at the gym, certainly.

Patience. Unlike paid DAWs, this one's driven by engineering, not the marketing department. That means there is no clueless bean counter demanding that a new release must happen on X date whether it's fully cooked or not. This is the Cakewalk we knew decades ago, when cool features such as slip edits and automatic crossfades were the kinds of things that got everybody excited.

It was a great gig. Hoppin' joint in a beautiful location, and close to home. We've already been asked back and hope it becomes a regular stop on our circuit. But jeez, I have never been so beat at the end of a gig. Played from 8:00 until 1:00. The last set was purely muscle memory because my frontal cortex had checked out around midnight. I've always assumed that a day would come when I'd have to admit that I'm too old for this. But dammit, I refuse to accept that day might have been yesterday.

That Space Echo is tempting. I haven't used the actual hardware since c. 1980, so my recollection may be more nostalgic than objective, but I loved that thing back in the day.

But when was the last time you used it?

The NS3 is actually four synths in one box. One's dedicated to organ, another to piano, another to synths and one plays samples. As a sample player it's not deep, nothing close to what you'd expect after being a Kontakt user. My Korg Kronos is a better sampler. Plus it's a true sampler, in that you can record directly into it. It's actually a sequencer that can record 16 channels of audio and 16 channels of MIDI, but I don't use that feature. It has a drum machine, too. But I don't use that onstage, either. The Nord's Hammond emulation is pretty good but the Leslie sim sucks. Consequently, I physically play organ on the NS3 but the actual sound is coming out of my Kronos. That way I get the benefit of a light-touch organ-feeling keyboard and physical drawbars, but with better tone and a better Leslie simulation. I've used it with a Ventilator, but that's extra gear and it takes me an hour to set up as it is, so the Vent stays home. The big benefit of the NS3 is that it's ergonomically laid out for real-time tweaking. I can, for example, add delay, reverb, distortion, chorus, etc. to any of the modules on the fly. The Korg, otoh, must be tediously programmed via gobs of deep menus and subsystems, so I don't fiddle with it at a gig. But tbh, the main reason I bought the Nord is that it weighs only 22 lbs, compared to the Kronos at 82 lbs in the flight case. I need help lifting the Kronos onto the stand, whereas the NS3 I can sling over my shoulder when I go to jam sessions.

You're making a damn good case for this tool, Mark. You've got me thinking about building an instrument from Omnisphere that I can load into one of my stage synths. Funny how these conversations can go down a rabbit hole quick. I know nothing about sample formats for the Korg Kronos or the Nord Stage, so now I'm thinking I've gotta learn those things too.

I still use TTS-1 regularly and have never had an issue with it. For me, its main limitation is the four audio outputs, which limits audio processing possibilities if you're using more than four voices. However, this is rarely a practical concern because, like the OP, I mainly use the instrument as a placeholder during composition that will later be replaced by more sophisticated synths. Combining multiple voices into a single audio output isn't a problem while you're composing a song. It only becomes a limitation when you start mixing, and you will have already substituted other synths before starting the mix phase. The main advantage of using one instance of any multitimbral synth is CPU efficiency, which may be important to you if you play the synths in real time and thus need low latency. The main disadvantage is that you can't freeze tracks independently. But this won't be an issue until you start mixing and may need to freeze tracks after adding CPU-intensive synths and effects. My advice to the OP is to do whatever feels comfortable, since it doesn't really matter which method you choose.

I was a fan of Myst back in the day, and was disappointed when I found out it was strictly DOS-only and unplayable under Windows. It was a genre unto itself, and a god-level achievement given the technological limitations of the day. I'd buy this title!

It's actually ~120 bpm. That's something AudioSnap sometimes does, guessing a tempo that's double the actual tempo. I still think it's pretty damn impressive, given that in this example it's extracting beats from a full - and in this case very dense - mix. An MP3, at that. It'd be more accurate on a drum track.

I was fortunate enough to sample my favorite patch from my old Yamaha MO8 right before it was stolen. Jeez, I wish I'd had the foresight to get the electric piano and sax patches! But to emphasize Mark's comment, it is going to be more tedious than you think. Though not exactly rocket surgery, it is time-consuming. But also fun. Note that when I did it I had no tools such as SampleRobot to help. Just Kontakt. It has all you really need, but you will have to become familiar with velocity maps and group editing, things that casual Kontakt users never need to explore. The good news is that older synths like your Kurzweil , due to memory constraints, had far fewer velocity layers than most current commercial Kontakt libraries. That means fewer samples to import.

Maybe Melodyne makes this easier, but I still use the same method I've used since SONAR 6. 1. Select the audio track 2. Press ALT-A to bring up the AudioSnap dialog 3. Click the "On" (enable AudioSnap) button 4. Click on "Set Project from Clip" 5. If you don't care about the transient detection, click the "On" button again to hide them You now have a tempo map that follows the audio pretty well.

I've seen plenty of audio-related tutorials that gave me GAS, but this is the first one to ever make me hungry.