Started on review. Some glitches suggest possible fault in review unit. No music done today. Not much of anything else either. I've managed to type up most of my review notes anyway.

Pat's herceptin day so she'll be feeling poorly the next day or so.

Yesterday made wibbly noises with Tim. The best track was the one I failed to record thanks to forgetting to arm the tracks in iLogic. You hit record and it pretends to record but doesn't record anything, doesn't mention it at all. I really must investigate alternatives.

Well well, Pat drove back from Rivi this morning and reckons she's now fine to drive. So she's driven to work this evening too. Wotta gal!

So I should start on the sequencer review this evening, fortunately should be an easy one to write. May even check out the tune I started the other night (after the long painful extraction from the Microsampler) and see what I can do with it.

Hey ho eh?

Election non-erection

Well, nobody really won, everybody kinda lost, Brown will doubtless continue his clinging and Cameron will continue his cloying. Let's just hope we get some electoral reform out of this mess so that, in future, there is a chance that every vote counts.

AS Europa arrived today for review. I like the look of it, should be a fun afternoon.

Accountant bloke at 11, Duncan's BC8 to return, must send CAE number to Mars...

More crashes

Starting to think it's the new Omnisphere update causing my Logic crashes - the dumps seem to mention Spectrasonics an awful lot. Hey ho.

Sent off what I hope are my final four tracks today. Two were done and two I did a last polish of - the very last is a little odd but I sorta hope to sneak it through cos it's interesting.

Predator box arrived and it was a bit of a pain installing it but got there in the end. For some reason it thought I had an early version of OSX and wouldn't be convinced otherwise. Stupid thing. Anyway in the end I put the activation code into the elicenser and it seemed happy. The box was empty apart from the CD so next time I won't bother but will do it online.

**

Awesome. Last four tracks accepted. Will get edits done ASAP then it's onwards and upwards doing more.

Tempus Fugit

From 07:00 until around 16:00 my day was occupied with chores. Hey ho. Didn't get into the studio at all.

New sequencer coming for review, hopefully by the end of the week.

Really need to get those final tracks done. Could also do with the Predator box I ordered, wishing I'd gone for the online version now so I could be up and running. Logic crashes with any instances of the already expired demo. Hey ho.

Another Logic Crash...

Another day of little achievement. Down to just 4 uses of Predator demo already! Would help if Logic didn't crash. Anyway, despite its envelopes I ordered a copy. Might have been daft though as ordered from Time&Space for the nice box (probably still no manual!) and it'll be bound to take a few days, leaving me with a non-working version until then.

Didn't, in the end, take to Zebra, prefer ZebraCM. Fave of all is still Strobe for its analogue qualities but wish it had integral effects like Predator, and oscillators that can have fixed phase.

Right, best get to bed. Up for horsing in the morning. :)

May order a last set of ethnic samples to finish my last track. Or tracks, not sure about the latest persian one cos it's a bit similar in ethnicity to some of the others (and a bit strange). Just gotta find a country I've not pillaged yet. :)

Running around Saturday

Did Murphy, walked Jasper, got Dawn's parcel off to her and in the afternoon I pottered with Predator, explained the envelope thing in a bit more detail.

Thus: An envelope generator is basically a glide circuit.

The glide circuit only has two parameters - target level, and rate.
When the gate is off, the target for the glide is zero, and the rate is the release rate.
When the gate is turned on, you enter the attack phase.
In the attack phase, the glide target is maximum, and the rate is the attack rate.
When the level reaches maximum, you switch to the decay phase.
In the decay phase, the glide target is the sustain level, and the glide
rate is the decay rate.
Now, if the gate is off, and the level is falling to zero (release), a new gate on will re-enter the attack phase.

All this means is that the glide target and rate change to maximum/attack. You do not want the current output level to suddenly jump to zero, in exactly the same way that you wouldn't want glide from one note to another to instantly jump to a note it hadn't yet reached, before starting to glide toward a new note.

The gate input can only change the selection of which rate/level are set on the glide circuit. Gate should never directly influence the output level of the glide circuit.

Anyway, started a track using Predator (gonna buy it regardless of envelopes, still have synths whose envelopes do work like an analogue). The track is kinda different, just an embryo so far.

Tonight there will be telly. Tomorrow, something like today... :)