Friday, A Guy Called Gerald, some Multisample bollocks & Crinkle Crags

 I found a great resource for multisamples someone had prepared for the Deluge - great because whoever it was has a similar taste to me in terms of what you need to sequence with. I prepared almost 2Gb of them in SampleBuilder while Pat was watching the footie - should have guessed it would handle the note B referred to as H (weird but some companies do that) so wasted my time removing them all. The biggest mistake, however, was in not bulk-converting them all to mono. I guess I've wasted almost 1Gb as the majority of these, despite being from synths like the Odyssey, ARP2600 and Minimoog, they have been recorded in stereo. Duh! Oh well, if I ever start running out of space I can always reclaim it. They're also a bit lower level than I'd use but we'll see how they sound when I import them before starting my Friday sesh. As the Wavestate doesn't really have synthesis - unless you count transitioning between different waves as synthesis - then a good stock of usable multisamples will be invaluable. 

Gig tonight at the Conti. Seems like it starts at 7 and ends just before midnight so may drain my Friday stamina. ;)

Good gig, not as packed as expected but a nice night. Pat came for us heroically but was plagued overnight with cystisis and suffered during the day. Consequently Tim and I didn't do our thing but hopefully can Monday or Tuesday. I spent more time with Wavestate and KSP. In the evening I trimmed some of those complex keygroups, deleting as many as I could and getting the RAM requirements down to less than 30Mb. Some of the worst were my percussion collections which had loads of samples, I hadn't really looked. Just shows my idea of that 4Gb gave a very false impression - one I'd have mentioned in a review if I'd been doing one. Always the way with sample-based instruments, in my experience. You always spend way too long faffing, editing, organising and generally wishing you'd got a pure synth instead. Still, I'll know in future and will make my own multisamples with far fewer chunks. 

Sunday and I think the review is pretty much done, bar that last run-through. I did drop most of the history stuff though and it's still on the high side of my expected wordcount. 

Review sent in yesterday (Tuesday), I maybe trimmed too much but made wordcount. Will see what David says. Today, Pat still got Cystitis and awaiting wee test results before antiobiotics. She's gone to see Margaret but didn't take her fucking phone so I've no idea if she's OK or not. Driving me crazy at the moment, seems determined to push herself too far. 

I had a shit afternoon with the Wavestate. What started as a simple project (convert all the multisamples to mono and save all that keygroup space). Having done so I clearly renamed some and didn't get all the samples in the right place, wasted several hours making my patches work - and they don't sound as good now, some are out of tune and I've broken about half of the Performances I made. I do wish I'd sent it back right away now and may yet ask Matt if he wants it. Failing that I'm going to leave samples alone for a while and work ith the internal waveforms as all my performances using those exclusively still work fine!

Friday I had half a gummy and did more Wavestating. Made a good patch that uses the two fairlight flute multisamples, one of which has gotten slightly out of tune since I deleted lots of keygroups. Turns out that if you have these two oscillating in two adjacent ws cells, the effect is a rather pleasuing vibrato-tremelo you'd struggle to do any other way. It may be that other features of this "transition synthesis" are also waiting to be discovered. Looking at my jul/2025 folder, I see I did one Easel track and the rest is Wavestate - 16 KSP projects with numerous Performances. Shall I chuck all this work to start again on a MultiPoly? I guess I don't know but will see if Matt still wants a second Wavestate. 

Tim and I had a good sesh on Saturday checking out the tracks he's been doing in the EMX. Some quality stuff and some with space for me to play in. We named a few to give me a starting note and all will be well, I think. We'll have a jam Tuesday afternoon mebbe too

Reading Eddie's book "An ethnic trying to get by". It's really quite excellent and very funny. I'm just over half-way through. Hope to finish it today.. My calves are still killing me after Thursday's yomp to Crinkle Crags. Tony's gonna lose me soon, I fear. 

Accidentally long walk, still bloody hot

 So no idea when Tim and I will do any prep for this gig thingummy. My Minilogue XD has been randomly powering itself off too, possibly due to the heat. Today we walked to Brockoles and back, which Tony had estimated at 6-7 miles but it was actually 12.2. No wonder my bunion is screaming at me. I don't think those trainers helped, nor did going commando on those rough cut-off jeans, old knobbage was rubbed - and not in a good way. Been a long time since it was rubbed in a good way, I feel morosely inclined to point out. Oh well. 

I fear it may be too hot for the studio tomorrow. If so I guess I'll work on the review. 

It was hot but I got in a couple of hours then did some review work. Didn't record what I did but it should be OK, I think. May even get similar tomorrow. Review flowing nicely thanks to sweetie. 

Saturday and I did some more Keystep.Wavestate messing. Making progress learning my way around and finally starting to get the modulation system, which is terrible but terribly powerful and hidden, mostly, from my eye. I am starting to assign knobs though, not at performance level given I'm using it multtimbrally although I will explore that eventually. Wavestate has RTZ envelopes, which I discovered just not trying it in mono mode. You can blur notes into each other using wavesequencing though so maybe just needs a different mindset. 

Monday again. Mum not in a great mood yesterday, hitting the morphine quite hard now too. Janet tried to get her to talk to district nurse who popped in but that cause some unpleasantness. This morning I got pretty much my first draft - and it's a bit longer than planned at 5,000 words. With luck I can whittle it down a bit during this week. I got some time in with Wavestate and managed to overwrite a useful performance - really must be more disciplined there and copy things often. I'm still learning stuff though - took ages, for example, to find the reason for some unknown reverb in a patch I'd copied from the presets. I really should set up lots of base programs and wavesequences with my own stuff in so I'm not forever stumbling around in search of things. 

Made a worthwhile discovery that you can make very different sounding waveforms by sticking a load next to each other and having very, very short transitions. More to explore there. I also realised I should have named my own stuff with some kind of easy prefix so I can find it easier. The category thing is a PITA cos it resets every time you do a search rather than remembering your last selection. Stupid. 

Tuesday and I got my first draft finally done - only 1,000 words over what I guessed it should be. Oops. Spent some time renaming my Wavestate performances and setting up a base program featuring a simple wavesequence of my own with a few transitions and mapping the speed of transition to a knob, octaves to another, main volume to the master knob for each layer. Think I did something else too but there's still more to prepare before I can just fire up and go. It will never be a spontaneous thing, I accept that. I also made a few extra FX programs, an alternate ring mod etc. Starting from my own base was slower at first but at least I know what everything does and don't have to go searching for mod routings that baffle me. It does make me wonder if the MultiPoly might have been better but I didn't really look at that in any detail as it's a bit expensive. Reading the MP manual it has far more synthesis options, still has 60 notes of polyphony and features wavesequencing of a sort that would probably be easier and faster to use. No sample RAM and still the same inability to tweak FX though so I dunno. Did notice yesterday how quickly my ears get tired of hearing samples of the WS. They can probably be mulched together and disguised better if not used as 4 separate layers though. Anyhoo, the KSP was being temperamental too, refused to record again so I powered off and on. Next time I'll see if loading a new project then reloading the current one works as I don't really like on/off solutions. Starting to think I should've taken the MPC37 route. 

May walk tomorrow, not heard. Pat and I went to Tockholes in the morning, got a lunch at the cafe there as the pub didn't start food until 12 and we were too early. I decided to withdrawm the S-4 from sale, at least for now. Was listening to some of the things I did in January and realised just the Tape recorder and granular thing still produce effects I like and would want to keep. So I'll keep it at my old version and Torso can do what they like. Maybe one day there will be an Open Source firmware. 

Friday tomorrow and a Guy Called Gerald. Should still get a decent afternoon sesh in. 

Wave-reinstated

OK, it's like this: before I started on Friday I spent a while importing some multisamples - just a part of my regular collection that goes everywhere. Then I faffed around with the new laptop (and a magnifying glass) until I'd made half a dozen effect presets of my own. Then I had a musical stoned bonding session. 

Result: I think the Wavestate is staying. It does a lot of things, interesting things, that mean four parts of it would be more than enough for what I want from it. Have now made a dozen or so performances, getting a bit deeper all the time and making progress in areas that were initially puzzling. 

Saturday today but local field day so roads closed, no music day with Tim. We had a beer and a g&t and a noodle, Jupiter sounding good. 

Worked on Easel review, well I actually just got sucked into playing with it. Again. 

I also did a bit of sampling - lots of short LPG stuff, some raspy wavefoldy stuff, some pure stuff. For the Wavestate. May as well load it with interesting noises. One downer about the way it handles samples is you have to send the whole lot every time you load any - meaning you have to keep everything you ever want in it available and accessible all the time. A bit stupid, like the blanket reverb and a few other annoyances. Still, what can you do?

At least my theoretical workaround for the Keystep bug does seem valid. Basically, if it doesn't save a Scene successfully, you should save a Chain instead of a pattern for the failing track(s) and then it will save correctly. A chain of just the one pattern you wanted will suffice. You can even go back later and save just the pattern and that seems to save properly too. The thing has all kinds of weird corruptions that happen though and I don't expect those to be ever sorted. Would I dare trust it live? I'd like to...

Review going well after a bitty start. Seem to be getting a shape I like now and it's flowing reasonably well. 

Got an offer for my S-4 - an MPC Key37 - but I think I'll either hold out for cash or keep it in the faint hope it may one day be sourced to a more competent (or less overworked) programmer. Surprised at so little interest, possibly it's due to my over-honest advert. ;)

 

Went mad, bought Wavestate, seem to be coming to end of line with Torso.

Unlike Labout,  Torso announced no rethink on their stupidity and therefore the trashing of Tape (replacing a 6 min looper with a 30 second one!) will not be rolled back or any compromise considered. I'll not decide what to do immediately but I either stick with 1.22 and miss out on macros and the envelope follower, use Beta 12 and put up with the bugs, not least the distortion that happens with overdub sometimes. In both cases probably would not trust the thing live, which is a downer. I could use version 2 and try to find a reason to do so but my heart isn't in it any more and I think the time may have come. 

In other news I bought a Korg Wavestate. It was a kind of snap decision after talking to Matt and reading the manual. The idea was to pair it with the Keystep Pro as a mini jamming and possibly live rig. The Keystep was troublesome today though, hung a few times until I discovered a rogue pattern that I deleted. That kind of thing has happened before but I don't see any more development on it. Will try the program changes with it too as hopefully I can work with weird bank select it does but can't be turned off.

Had a day setting up first performance and corresponding Keystep project Still some stuff to find - e.g. the effect parameters - but selecting presets worked for today. Have not done much with the wave sequencing but will get to it. At least performances take copies of the patches you load so shouldn't be the issue of the original WS pointing to shit that you then change. Fiddlier to get around than the gorgeously logical Opsix but I did expect that. 

https://soundcloud.com/smokyfrog/wavestate-1 

Making good progress with Easel review and learning the Wavestate. Seems that annoyance with the FX parameters is genuine and there's no way to see the parameters, just set offsets to whatever they are. Stupid! Otherwise I like it but it does make using FX really hard. 

Ah I see the FX can only be edited in detail from the editor - what a downer for a hardware synth. It's worse cos the editor totally sucks. I mean, it might work on a large screen but it's shit on my two Windows laptops, just won't fit properly without shrinking so I can't read any text. And the FX are right at the bottom so I'll have to find a way to drag the box without the top bar, probably windows geeks know how to do that. Anyway, I'm still struggling to edit some things. Like today I spent almost 30 mins trying to work out what one sequencer lane wouldn't go beyond step 3 even though its length was 7 steps. Gave up in the end. Next time I start something I'll choose an Init wavesequence rather than keep doing edits on whatever it was I started from. Must be something in there I can't see that's hurting. Was tempted to send it back but I still feel it has potential. Laborious though. 

Walking tomorrow. Cautley Spout. 

Friday today. Think it's crunch time for the Wavestate - if I can't find a way to edit those FX parameters I may have to reluctantly send it back. Dan from Korg has been trying to help but doesn't realise how hard it is to use the app on my laptop so will do some screen dumps with little arrowspointing to the areas off-screen where the (only) paramters I need are to be found. I would not have bought it had I known you couldn't edit everything from the hardware. Reviews should have screamed about this.