Blue Moon

You saw me standing alone

Without a dream in my heart

Without a love of my own...

The end of a decade in which freedom is under increased threat from those who are entrusted to uphold it; fear and ignorance are twin cancers sweeping the land. Frankly this is one year I'll be glad to see the back of.

So here's to a new direction in 2010, more time with Pat, more time on the things that matter. And hopefully Apple will fix some of the bigger bugs in Logic 9 before I go crazy!

More crashes

Today I thought, innocently enough, I'd get my JV-2080 patches into a Logic environment so I can call them up by name.

The supplied template in Logic seems to be a copy from the 1080 (not enough slots) but just as I was trying to work out how this might be extended, a helpful soul sent me a logic song with an environment in it almost ready to go. It had about three of the expansion boards I have anyway which is a start. Now I'm watching that spinning coloured circle thing again because Logic has crashed. All I was doing was pasting in the names from the environment to the inspector window. What a pile of POO!!

Every time I start something it goes down the toilet. Wondering if I can send Logic back and get Cubase instead...

OK, I don't mean that cos I have a lot of stuff for Logic's sampler. Still...

Further Tales from the Logic / Sanity Border

Logic 9 crashed today while I was loading in some Kontakt 4 orchestral sounds. Here we go. Included in the fun were low memory warnings, something I hadn't expected with my 8Gb machine after running only about 20 tracks. Hell, I used to run maybe a hundred tracks back in my Cubase VST/32 days on a poxy little PC - but all these orchestral things are memory-heavy, apparently. Dearly wish I could upgrade to Logic 8 until 9 beds in properly.

Discovering a few small things about Logic that annoy me - compiling a list of questions and observations - but generally I'm getting around it. One of the most annoying behaviours is the way it insists on starting playback at the cycle start points whenever cycle is active. Huh? Why not just cycle when you get to those points but start as normal? Hoping there's a workaround for that.

Somehow also keep losing the metronome setting to play on record. It seems manual tweaking of metronome whenever I like causes the program to think I'd like to change my preferences too. Stupid thing!

The squeaking noises aren't happening today so either my bearings have oiled themselves or it was something else. We'll see.

Lie-in

Wow, crawled out of bed at half eleven, a record for me I think. Got to bed around half two but didn't fall off to sleep until probably fiveish. :)

Couldn't post P3 cos post office shut. Arranged to see Jason this evening. John and Andy coming round this afternoon. Ready for more sleep...

Mac has developed a vibrational noise, could be bearings in the fan motor, will open up and tighten stuff down but if it persists will need a fix before it fails entirely. Grrrrr, have just got the damn thing set up!

Warning from btinternet about getting close to my 10Gb -month limit, hardly surprising. Will hold off any more big grabs for a few days until January.

Slippery when wet

Only fell once today. Pavements and sidestreets treacherous. Went up to see Murphy and help much him out. Now gonna have some shortbread and sit back and watch Hamlet! Don't have a Hamlet cigar to smoke but I'm sure I can find a substitute. :)

No Mac time today, have gathered a freebie 2Gb library of orchestral stuff, will try tomorrow. Also got the Mac version of the Korg sample editor. So as productive a day as I could have expected. Work tomorrow... :(

Remember!

Ring Harvey. Shoulda rung him yonks ago. Will have time for that stuff now. Blue moon, 2010, here I come! Control excellent film!! :)

More Tales from the Logic / Sanity Border

Got all the NI stuff installed and the updates - except for the Kontakt 4 library updates that seem to have no option to put them with the rest on data2; instead it is intent on adding them to the system disk. Have emailed support but don't expect a prompt reply given the date.

So far the orchestral stuff is good, Absynthe has some potential, Massive seems a CPU hog and nowt special, FM8 good and the two drum things didn't blow me away. Much more to explore though but the rather brittle overall sound from the synths was much improved by the Sherman Restyler.

Started pottering with a track, recorded some bass guitar courtesty of Tim into the microsampler and sorta started a new piece using some mellotron brass, Kontakt strings, Absynthe bass, Apple loops and the newly downloaded B-Station beta that seems more stable than the previous production version.

Must back up system disk tomorrow and check about auto backups from various sources to various destinations - see how flexible it is. From what I've seen of Mac so far, flexible is sacrificed for mind-numbing simplicity. Reckon this is a computer for the female-balanced mind.

Hmmm.

Gonna go to Longridge tomorrow for bar snacks. Oh, credit card bill came today. Sigh...

Studio in tidy up shock!

Spent a fair while yesterday moving things around so the computer is, once again, back at the center of things. Have been considering something similar for a while but it still feels weird.

Ordered Komplete 6 yesterday which, thanks to Digital Village being on the ball, is scheduled to be delivered today. Assuming the van can get down the street. Have actually started reading software reviews again, first time in years.

Still lots of snow. Looking forward to a nice walk.

Pictures of the studio will follow later. Might even ask my talented photographer pal to bring his camera round. Hint hint (if you're reading this Tim!).

In Out Shake It All About

Wasted time today because, well, the MIDI ports on my brand new soundcard (but old stock at Jigsaw?) are labelled the wrong way round...

http://www.focusrite.com/answerbase/en/article.php?id=1032

One day I'll just sit down and do some music and everything will work...

Snow!

Mmm lovely!

Time to make some toast then take the dog for a walk!

Today: post Bass Station and Warp9

Bloody Bugs!

This one cost me an evening's pleasant music-making cos I got diverted by it. There's a bug in the pitch shifter that screws the playback timing of the track once the pitch shifter has played (or even been triggered by a bounce). I posted it to the Logic Forum so we'll see if anyone solves it. Hopefully if they do they'll report it for me and it'll get fixed. Eventually. Wish I'd got Logic 8 instead but they wouldn't sell it me.

Anyway, abandoned making music for tonight. Very frustrating. Gonna watch Blade Runner instead and loosen up. Should have quite a bit of time this week to get up to speed. Gotta buy a decent softsynth.

Logic

Tales from the Logic / Sanity border

OK, so I started with Logic 9 and I dutifully fed it many DVDs. I installed Novation's B-Station as it arrived with my soundcard. Well, I had to get a serial number from Novation and, when I did, I discovered that Logic crashes each time I use it. Scrub that and continue...
Otherwise it's been pretty stable. Only after a week of pottering have I disturbed the CPU meter, and that because I'm exploring how many insert effects I can use to make this particular guitar sound interesting. I briefly considered the option “playing it better”.
One anomaly occurred when auditioning loops. Just using the library browser and the arrow keys, I set out to listen to every drum loop, even if just for a few seconds to go “no thanks”, and I discovered a “low on memory” message. I've got 8Gb and I'm just listening to loops - one at a time. WTF??
Still in need of some decent sounds and am leaning toward Kontakt4 for a good range of everything and Zebra for an affordable but cool-sounding range of synth stuff. If cash were not an issue I'd go for the CPU-hungry (allegedly) Omnisphere. Some great sounds from that and lots of them, even before you start tweaking (which I inevitably would).
Not totally sold on the latency / thru response but this seems the way with software, even with a Mac that cost four and a half grand! The Atari ST: how did we forget how fast it was and be resolved to make it The Standard? MIDI may be a slow, serial interface but it still beats most DAW thru times for these “amazing, sample accurate softsynths”. OK, I have absolutely no proof of that so let's call it a religion and accept it anyway, eh?
It occurs to me that I should try and review as many softsynths as possible. I'm being noble, of course, the keen computer newbie heroically taking on the odds so you don't have to. And so I can collect some new sounds, of course.