After some time which will not be described much yet, I at least
can use a 4 octave touch sensitive keyboard on a computer after a long
time, which is more than nice. It works fine enough though it is cheap,
those conrad guys should have thrown in an XP installer, though, that cost
me finding out midi interupts, a guess at a roland mpu midi interface driver
from the amazing xp installer before something worked at all.
I've been playing with cubase audio, the demo version, after having put aside for midi experiments the cubasis supplied with the keyboard.
This is a sample piece I've played together, without making a real song or production out of it, mainly some instruments from the 'sampletank' VST demo, and some others, which are nice enough. The title of the original jazz piece is 'Nothing Personal'.
The mpeg itself is pretty small for the length, so the quality isn't very optimal, and not all effects and instruments are as they can sound, the drums aren't processed very accurately, the piano has a pretty lousy reverb, the bass is fine, but probably could do with some added distortion cruncyness, and the whole mix is static with not much work done on it, I just played the tracks, put them down in midi form, left the the mixer channels as they were during record, played the whole thing into the Nero sample processing program, saved it in the smallest stereo compressed mp3, and uploaded it.
The guitar sample with added effects is a funny story. The wah wah under modulation wheel control from the sample tank plugin module makes the free guitar sample come alive well enuogh to realy play the thing, and though it is quite discernable from the real strings, many guitar sounds, from funky chops to heavy distorted chords and solo licks, can be made with the right playing style and with the right effect modules and settings.
Lets see, I did most sounds with compression somewhere between 6 and 12 db, the wah module without auto wah, the lowfi with medium filter, lots of distortion and some stereo, followed by some chorus, and reverb, possibly from a channel insert or a master effect, which both are not very good reverbs as in sound pleasingness, though chorus is fine enough.
Jimi would have been proud. Snif.
It is pushing it to want to do a whole song with a computer program, and expection to mimic a band beyond recognition, but then again, I did serious song productions with a teac/tascam 244 4 track recorder/mixer 20 years ago, with my own built effect units (reverb and lesley/chorus), a casio keyboard, my own built synth, a ibanez digital delay, a poly 800 synth, and a yamaha drumcomputer. And quite frankly, when I included carefully done microphone work with a 30 dollar condenser microphone with a good preamp and equalizer settings and a moderately prized country guitar, and set down to do the final mixdown unto my philips 3d casette deck and the best metal tape I had, I'd made a few pieces worth listening to on a high quality stereo set, even though I was quite intimately aware of the audio limitations I had. That takes good thinking, from track bouncing till microphone techniques, and hard work in my shared 2 by 3 bedroom.
A day time wasn't strange for one short piece, often gospel oriented at the time, I knew queen or abba would spends parts of a year in a studio to do an album, which in those ways are still worth listening to today. And I could play those pieces enough, I had hours of practice for years, I found it fun and hard work and rewarding to make a certian production work. Later on I've played live mostly, practicing or performing or jamming somewhere in between, and as always practicing any instrument and setting I'd like enough, so I can now play seriously in most any music I like, which is good for my self image, that resonates well with what I like. Yet sitting down with the digital tape machine isn't that easy because delay. We have almost 2 giga computer cycles per second, and we need almost a 16th note to process a key press to start sounding an instrument, something is wrong with XP or PC's, it would seem.
I've set down with the midi click track and handfull of midi tracks to do a blues in maybe an hour or so, and then without effort shift the software mixer sliders a bit to see what the instruments can do. I could leave them all on, and the song never takes of to what it certainly could with some work, though it never gets stuck or realy wrong, and of course the instruments should be more sparse in the mix than that, the playing is good enough,
I've nicked the piece tvblues1