Mark Peters

I had a Fostex X15 too. That, my ESQ-1, and a couple of cables were all I ever used in the 80s. I still have my handwritten notes for how I laid down a click track on the Fostex and then bounced recordings around so that I ended up with 16-polyphony stereo. I had to record the right stereo of all tracks first and then go back and record all the left stereo. Sadly the Fostex disappeared during one of my numerous house moves and the loss wasn't noticed for years.

I count myself as a 22-year Cakewalk user now, even though there was a 20-year gap in the middle of that period. Years ago Chip Grayson of Micrografx gave me a copy of Designer, which eventually became part of the Corel portfolio, so I ended up using CorelDraw for years too. I also had a ZX81 with a Memotech RAM extension. Did you really have 16Mb? I think my Memotech pack was 64 Kb.

I've had another, possibly related, problem with the BBCSO interface (I am using the Discovery version): on occasion the plugin window opens with a black background, elements of the interface are missing or appear different, and none of them work. Closing and opening the plugin doesn't improve matters, but exiting and restarting Cakewalk fixes it.

That makes sense. I can see this job ballooning before my eyes; I am glad there are only two parts for the 32 violins! I think I will literally play this by ear - see how simpler setups sound before making things more complicated. In the mean time I'll investigate the detuning and chorusing options you suggest. I suspected I would have to anyway.

Thanks to both of you for responding. It looks like I have 10-15 new parts to create now. Oh well, so be it. BTW John, I started working through your tutorials yesterday. Thanks for doing them. Cakewalk does not behave quite as I had assumed. I am sure I will be replacing TTS-1 sounds with others, once I've settled on which set to get.

I've created MIDI parts for a brass section in which trombones play in harmony most of the time. This is conveniently done in CbB by putting the parts together in a single clip. A problem arises however when the parts are in unison. At such points I entered just the one note but, because two voices are replaced by one, the power of the overall sound falls noticeably, just when it should focus. I have found that I can double the sound, by entering a second note a semitone sharp and dragging it down on top of the first in the piano roll. Tests with TTS-1 and my ESQ-1 show that this works, even when the two notes differ in duration. There are clearly two voices and staggered note-off events seem to apply intelligently to single voices rather than to both. That's encouraging, but the editing remains messy. To make editing clearer I suppose I could separate parts on to different clips, lanes or even tracks, maybe just at the points where unison is called for, but before I go through all the parts and do this I wondered if there is a better way - is there a recognised 'best' way to handle unison? I am concerned that later, as I try out different virtual instruments, I might run into unexpected effects and have to re-edit; I am not confident note-on and note-off events would work the same way with all plugins.

IMHO you've done a great job with CbB.

This is true. I was still somewhat surprised to see all my old program names there on the tracks, and even my original notes preserved in the Notes tab of CbB. There is a template I used when creating new songs that is still usable with CbB today. I had completely forgotten all this stuff but Cakewalk hadn't. You're right about keeping media up to date. I've moved my old files a few times over the years, generally as I've upgraded computers, and after the experiences of the last week I've also resorted to the low-tech solution of keeping programs in a big .ods spreadsheet with a sheet of notes about sysex headers and footers. As long as bytes exist, I should be all right.

That's all new to me. Have you seen this?

I was only a nipper when I got those headphones!

Agreed, a good style and very informative.

Thanks! Yes, reading up on it, it seems that the battery must be long dead. As soon as I can find someone competent I will get it replaced. I know it requires soldering and I don't trust myself to do that. Good to know your old stuff is still alive and kicking too.

Absolutely! I had zero expectations about backwards compatibility.

I downloaded Cakewalk by BandLab a couple of weeks ago and I am astonished at what it can do. Granted, it's been about 20 years since I last did any digital music recording (using Cakewalk Home Studio, as it happens). The advances between then and now are about as amazing as they had been between then and the 1980s, when I did a bit of work in recording studios with 2-inch tape machines. The whole world of VST effects and instruments alone has changed everything. Anyway, I managed to get my 1987 Ensoniq ESQ-1 working with CbB, even to the point of opening twenty-year-old .wrk files in CbB and finding them already set up to play the ESQ-1 again, after I'd loaded its instrument definition, which I don't think I had to change at all. I also found a pair of AKG headphones I bought in 1974 that still work too. I have to say that the videos by Mike at Creative Sauce were crucial to how quickly I got to understand CbB. The only tricky part of getting everything back the way I left it at the turn of the century was reloading stored ESQ-1 programs. I originally stored them on audio cassettes, later transferred to .mdx files about 1999. None of my old MIDI software now runs on 64-bit Windows 10, so I had to search around for something that would at least let me try sending stuff to the synth. I settled on Bome Software's SendSX in the end. It is clear and straightforward to use. The mysterious .mdx file format, once I could inspect the contents in SendSX, turned out to be standard MIDI codes, but the sysex headers and footers were oddly messed up for some reason. With a bit of assembly-style code-breaking, and reference to the appendices of the ESQ-1 manual, I figured out where the program data began and ended, and simply appended the sysex headers and footers that should have been there. Instant success! The ESQ-1 thought for a moment about what it was receiving and then lit up with all my old voices. So not only was I able to get old songs into CbB, I was also able to get them to sound right on the ESQ-1. There is a problem in the ESQ-1 that is causing it to lose internal program and sequence data every time it is switched off. This I can live with, as the programs can be safely stored in the 80-voice EEPROM cartridge, and the sequences are better off in CbB anyway. I suspect the problem is more than a flat battery, as I am not getting a battery warning at start-up. Unfortunately the engineer who last worked on the synth (Phase Engineering, in Sydney) appears to have retired to the mountains.

I had the same problem, and reports of runtime error 217 at 0051CF9. I found that the inability to hear other sounds was due to selecting WASAPI Exclusive in Preferences>Audio>Playback and Recording. Selecting WASAPI Shared solved that problem, but I still get the runtime error on exiting Cakewalk. PS: It seems the two problems were unrelated. I believe the runtime error was caused by the old SQ8L plugin. Removing it from the Synth Rack stopped the error.