Category: music technology

Categories
music technology

Sampler Crunch impulse library expanded

The Sampler Crunch impulse response library has been expanded! I’ve added the Akai S1100 and the E-mu E4XT Ultra. The S1100 is the updated version of the S1000, but altogether it’s a completely different machine, redesigned from the ground up. This results in a cleaner sounding sampler with brilliant top-end. This has been captured in the impulse responses. The E-mu E4XT Ultra sampler has very fat lows and mids, great for hip-hop! These two machines complement each other nicely!

The samplers have been captured at different sample rates and input level settings, mono and stereo. Both samplers have built-in effect processors, these effects (reverb and delay) have been captured as IR’s as well. The effect IR’s from the E4XT Ultra are from the optional RFX-32 effects board.

The other sampler IR’s are captured from:

  • Akai S950
  • Akai S1000
  • Ensoniq EPS16+
  • Roland S-550
  • Roland S-750
  • Yamaha TX16W

You can order the Sampler Crunch impulse response library here.


The Akai S1100 16 bit sampler


The E-mu E4XT Ultra 16 bit sampler

Categories
music technology studio

Roland GP-8 guitar FX for keys / TB MIDI Stuff real-time controller

Recently I bought a Roland GP-8 guitar processor to use as an FX box for keys and other stuff. It only accepts Hi-Z instrument signal, so you’ll need a Lo-Z to Hi-Z converter (I use a Radial X-amp re-amper). Real-time editing isn’t what it should be when using the alpha dial on the Roland, so I built a real-time controller in the TB MIDI Stuff app. Roland sysex has been hard to program, in my experience, but it was really straightforward in the TB MIDI Stuff app.
The Roland GP-8 (1987) is like having 8 BOSS pedals in one rackspace. 6 Of them are analog (dynamic filter, compressor, overdrive, distortion, phaser and EQ) , the delay and chorus are digital. What strikes me the most when you compare it with guitar oriented plug-ins like NI Guitar Rig, is that the GP-8 has much more punch/attack in it’s tone and has a more dense sound. The great thing is that these boxes are really cheap (I bought mine for €50,-)! They sound absolutely great!! My experience with Roland gear from the 80-ties is that they just keep on working, built quality is very good.
For GP-8 / TB MIDI stuff users out there, here’s the template:

GP-8 controller.tbms

Here’s a short demo:

 

Categories
music music technology

The Roland Juno-60 Sample Pack

Juno-60 cover pic

Last year I spend a lot of time making this sample library of the legendary Roland Juno-60 analog synth. And now it’s ready! Over 2 GB in size, more than 2,500 individual samples, 135 multi-sampled sounds and 583 presets. It’s the largest commercially available library of the Juno-60 there is.

The sounds range from fat, punchy basses, funky clavinets, brass and lead sounds, lush strings and pads and much, much more. Also included are the Basic Waveforms (Saw, Square and PWM’s), with and without the built-in chorus. You can use those as building blocks for your own sounds. As opposed to some digital emulations the high end doesn’t suffer from aliasing when chords are played and the low end has that real analog fullness.

The most used parameters from the EXS24 (filter, envelope) can be real time controlled with the pre-configured Smart Controls (in Logic Pro X).

All sounds are recorded with the same high-end quality gear ( Radial DI, Crane Song Spider mic-pre and A/D conversion, Mogami cables)

For more information and demo’s please click here

Categories
music technology synth

Roland JX-10 virtual controller for Logic Pro

The JX-10 is my favorite analog synth for pads and synthstrings and it also does a good job for leads and basses. The thing is (or was) that it was almost impossible to edit the sounds in realtime without the PG-800 programmer. The only way was to look up one parameter at a time in the menu and then turn the Alpha-dial wheel a thousand times to get the sound where you wanted it to be, a lot of button pushing and wheel turning! The MIDI implementation was a disaster but luckily Colin Fraser rewrote the  sysex code for the JX-10, so now it can communicate with MIDI editors/controllers, DAW’s, etc… I still got a copy of Emagic SoundDiver, and I was able to program the JX-10 using a modded JX-8P preset and MKS-70 preset, but it wasn’t really stable. Another downside was that it couldn’t be controlled in real-time in combination with Logic Pro, so I decided to give a try and build a JX-10 editor in Logic’s Environment. Last time I used the Environment was almost 15 years ago, my programming skills are very limited, so don’t expect the editor to be a work of art! I only used faders, no knobs for switching the waveforms, there’s no reading of value’s in the editor, but luckily the JX-10 display tells you what you are doing.

In fact, I build 2 versions of the editor, one that only reacts when moving the virtual faders in the Environment and one that can be controlled by a hardware MIDI controller, in my case the assignable control faders on the Kurzweil K2500. With my limited skills I couldn’t combine those two into one version without very noticeable artifacts (sloppy timing when using more than one fader at one), but you can combine them both. That’s how I use it, because I can only automate 32 parameters of the virtual controller with the K2500, the ones that aren’t controlled by the K2500, can be controlled in Logic by hand that way . Now I can record all changes made in the sound into Logic in real-time, just like you would do when using a plug-in, but now it sounds good too 😉

You can look at the JX-10 as two JX-8P’s in one box, it has literally two JX-8P boards in it. Another thing they didn’t get right at Roland at the time is the way the JX-10 saves it’s sounds. One sound (called patch) build out of 2 tones (1 tone=1 JX-8P). Those tones can be used in more than one sound (patch). So if you save a tone in one patch, other patches using that tone will also change….. If you got the M-64C memory cartridge you can do sysex dumps, so that would be a wise thing to do before you starts messing up great patches. Being two 8p’s, you can only edit one tone at the time,  not a big thing if you’re only editing a sound, but if you’re recording the sysex changes, it would have been way cooler if it could handle both tones at the same time. But still better than turning the Alpha-dial and not recording sysex at all!

I really like the sound of the JX-10, while creating the editor I finally heard the full sonic power of the JX-10. Sometimes you read that people find the JX too slow for basses, but with a few tweaks in the editor I got punchy basses with a lot of weight. It’s so much easier now to get the sounds you want.

I’d be happy to share the JX-10 environment with you. I think you can also use it with the MKS-70 module version of the JX-10 and if you can change sysex code yourself, you can also use the JX-8P (change the 3rd hex nr “36” into “35”, change sysex view into hex). The JX-10 MUST be upgraded with the  rewritten sysex code, version 2.3 (latest version) in order to work.

If you want to program your MIDI controller, please check the “JX-10 CC info” file for the CC numbers.

If you’re a Kurzweil K2500 user you can load the “MIDI_SET.K25” master file into your machine, then all 4 fader banks are automatically ajusted with correct MIDI channel and CC number settings.

Click HERE to download

Categories
music technology studio

Mac G5 Quad back from the dead

My G5 Quad is about 6 years old and still is a great machine, until a couple of weeks ago, when it froze on startup. Led no. 7 burned, which means that your processor’s dead or you logic board. In my case, it was the latter. Brought it to a Mac repair shop, they couldn’t help me, but had to pay €140,- for the check they did. A bit of Googling around learned that if you heat the logic board with a hair dryer, sometimes the machine could be brought back to life. I had nothing to lose, so gave it a try. Yes, it worked…. for a couple of hours. The feared LED#7 burned, the machine froze, fans going full power. I did the hair dryer treatment again, a bit longer than before, and it powered up fine, ran for about 12 hrs, so I thought that the problem was solved. Next day same problem on startup, I gave up hope…..

A few days ago I talked to a computer repair guy and he told me that instead of using a hair dryer or heat gun, you should remove the logic board and put it in an oven, he told that I should google on “reflow”, and yes, several Youtube video’s showed brave people putting the guts of their G5 machines into grills and ovens. I gave it a shot, desperate as I was, and after 8 minutes at 190˚C (375˚F) the apples were grilled. Did it work? Until now, YES!!! I ran the AHT (Apple Hardware Test), logic board OK, no other problems. Even after rebooting a couple of times, no LED’s burning:-)

Hopefully I can work another year on it before moving to a new Mac Pro (I was actually waiting for the Sandy bridge model that expect to arrive Q1 2012), but I read that the 2nd gen Sandy Bridge processors will be far more powerful than the ones that arrive in january, so I hope the logic board was “well done”…..

Of course, when the G5 dies again, I’ll let you know.

Update: april 3rd 2012. It died (again)…….

Update: november 7th 2012: after using an iMac 2008 I bought an Mac Pro 2,8 Ghz 8 core. I didn’t wan’t to wait for the 2013 Mac Pro to come out, the iMac was too limited for me in terms of processing and connectivity, that’s why I bought the 2nd hand Mac Pro. Great machine, put in an SSD HD, very fast and a lot quieter than the G5 Quad, which is a nice thing in a recording studio:-)

 

Categories
music technology recording

analog vs digital summing

I’m convinced! Analog summing works better for me than digital summing.

I’m working on an album and wasn’t happy the way Logic did handle the mixdown. It sounded flat and messy. I then did a mix on my Soundtracs PC MIDI desk and I was really surprised, it sounded a lot better. More definition, better stereo imaging, etc. Lowering the levels in Logic did improve things, giving it more headroom, but I had to work very hard to get it to sound a bit like the “analog” mix (the digital mix was done in Logic using the SSL Duende Channel strip mostly for EQing and compression, the TC Electronic System 6000 for reverb). The mix on the Soundtracs was done very fast, only using one compressor (a Behringer T1952) for drum, bass and guitars and also one reverb (Korg A1) for most parts (using the auxes).

Because the fast Soundtracs mix did sound so much better I thought it could have something to do with analog vs digital summing. It always seemed a bit of a myth to me, but I wanted to hear it for myself:-) I made a submix trough the TC System 6000, returning in Logic (4 stereo busses) and send it into the Soundtracs. I’m also a proud owner of the Crane Song Spider, an very high quality 8 channel mic-pre/mixer. The same submix was also send trough the Spider for analog summing. So I ended up having 3 mixes:

1.) the digital summed mix in Logic.

2.) the analog summed mix using the Soundtracs console.

3.) the analog summed mix using the Crane Song Spider

As I expected in the meanwhile the Logic mix was the worst one. The Soundtracs did sound a lot better, which is actually pretty amazing when you consider it’s age (late 80-ties model). The Spider mix was a bit better than the Soundtracs mix, more focussed sound, especially the snare had more punch and detail, the same for the acoustic guitar. The Soundtracs mix had a bit more bass in it, but not necessarily better than the Spider, a matter of taste…..

If you have a decent mixer somewhere and you haven’t tried it using as a summing device, just do so, it could make an improvement to your mixes!

Categories
music technology

Hardware integration in Logic Pro (or any other DAW)

If you’ve taken a look around on this site, you’ve probably seen that I still have (and use) quite a bit of hardware (synth’s, samplers and FX gear). Software is great for ease of use, but it’s not always the best sounding option when compared to hardware. My DAW software, Logic Pro 9, is great in what it does, but is poor when it comes to hardware integration. There used to be the Emagic SoundDriver hardware editor software, but this was dropped when Apple bought Emagic in 2003. Woudn’t it be great if there would be a synergy between these two products? Imagine that you could load your specific editor of your synth in a Audio Instrument channel slot and edit it as if it were a software instrument?

Please your opinions and/or comments!!

Categories
music technology synth

Why do I like (Roland) synth’s/samplers from the 80-ties?

Nowadays you only need a powerful mac or pc, a piece of (freeware) DAW/sequencing software, some plug-ins, a decent audio interface and a couple of speakers to create some great music. Software samplers with libraries of several tens or hundreds of GB’s are no exception. With all those big libraries you can achieve very convincing, realistic results. But to my ears it’s often too sterile, too clean, too perfect.

This is where my love for 80-ties (and early nineties) stuff comes into play. I’ve got a bunch of Roland 12 bit samplers (S-550’s and S-330’s), all bought within the last 5 years. They all have tiny memories, not even 1 MB, they miss all the detail, finesse and ease of use of modern sample players/sample libraries, but the instruments and libraries created for them have one thing: character.

from top: SP-700, S-550 x 2, S-330 x 2

Maybe my love for instruments from this period has also to do with my age (1975). Around the second half of the 80-ties I started to gain interest into music technology, but couldn’t afford to buy all (or some) state of the art equipment of that day and era. Nowadays you can buy these classics for a couple of tens of Euro’s/Dollars. Back in the days a Roland S-550 would set you back about €3500,-!! The Akai S-950, my first sampler bought new in 1990, cost about fl. 4800 (+/- €2200,-), I delivered a lot of newspapers for that! But I still use it from time to time. Do you think you will use the same software you use now in about 20 years from now:-)

Two years ago I bought a Roland JX-10 for something like €300,-. This is a great synth, especially for pads or hard synced sounds. If you’d compare it with something like a NI Massive virtual synth, a fantastic plug-in, I still would choose the JX-10 soundwise. Why: character, warmness and just fat sounding. Although the NI Massive can produce trouser-flappering bass, it again sounds too sterile and clean to my ears….

Another thing that strikes me is the build quality. All my Roland gear is still working perfectly. Only trouble I had was the FX board of my MKS-20 that died, Roland Benelux did a great job fixing it. Thumbs up, they still service 20+ year gear!! Another favorite of mine is the MKB-1000. It’s a master keyboard, with a wooden keyboard, which is a joy to play. The thing is build like a tank, it weights about 50kg (100 Ibs), and is virtually indestructible. It’s a fairly simple device, but it does what it must do, and does it without problems since 1984. Another great Roland machine, the S-750 sampler (1991). Specs are 16 bit, 18 MB sample memory, the GUI monitor output/mouse (like the S-550/330) makes it a breeze to use. Fantastic DA convertors by Apogee and a very pleasant sounding filter. Again, loading samples with modern software counterparts is a lot faster, I still like working with it. There’s a great Roland library (S7x0, for S-770, S-750, SP-700,S-760 and DJ-70 (mkII)), co-created by Eric Persing, founder of Spectrasonics. Highlights of this library are i.m.o. the “Keyboards of the 60-ties and 70-ties” Vol. 1 & 2 and “Orchestral Family” Vol. 1 & 2. When they were released the Orchestral family would cost about fl.1200,- (€500,-), now you can buy it (if you are lucky, you don’t come across them that often) for something like €50-€100,-. It doesn’t have the detail of -for example- the VSL library, but when used in a mix it holds its place better than the VSL library. I often use ’em both when doing classical oriented tracks, when you layer them it broadens the sound, partly to do with slightly different tuning.

Don’t see this post as an add for Roland, I’m not a huge fan of their new products (with the V-piano as exception, can’t wait to see spin-offs of this in other products, right now I think it’s too expensive), but I want to make clear that back in the days they built machines where costs were of minor importance of build and sound quality. Of course, more companies built great equipment, but I have the most experience with Roland. Today I feel that most things (not only musical instruments) are produced to make the most profit for the company, not to create the best possible instruments. I’m afraid that you can’t turn it back. However, the good news is that you can buy these (underestimated) classics for almost nothing and -within their boundaries of technical performance- you can create some fantastic sounding music!

Categories
music technology

Yes!! It’s true, Logic Pro 9 on PPC G5!!

Want to try? Make sure you’re running OS 10.5.7, then install LP9 and then it should be working…..

Glad I tried this first, I was almost fooled in buying a new Mac Pro. My G5 Quad is still a very capable machine, so I hope it will run at least another year.

Logic-Pro-9-on-G5