In which I do something fairly basic with electronic musical instruments and feel quite accomplished.
This weekend, I decided to stop faffing about and Do The Thing. There’s a song I’ve been working on for a long time and the writing is probably 75% complete, but nothing has been recorded. So, my self-assigned remit: Get something on (virtual) tape so I can mess with it, figure out what works, what doesn’t, and move forward.
One thing I’ve been struggling with is the sound design. I really want to do this on hardware instruments instead of virtual ones, at least for the initial pass, but haven’t found any patch that gets the “right” sound for the main section. I have a lot of good sounds, but not the one I’ve been looking for.
But what if I stack multiple sounds on top of each other? Now, three of my four big polysynths can do that but it comes at a price. They go from being capable of eight notes at once to four note at once. For this particular section, that’s not an issue, but still…there’s a better answer. What if I connected the four over MIDI and just used a different patch on each synth?
So, let’s control it all from the DW8000 and use it for a nice fuzzy pad. The SQ80‘s strength is chime-like transient attacks that fad into a dreamy sustain, so let’s do that. The VZ-1 gets to do the low note to make it sound huge. The CZ-1 finishes it with a slow-attack, evolving sweep.
After playing with the volume levels to get the mix it right it sounded…awesome! OK, inspiration is now flowing. I sat down and recorded it against a click and, after 10-15 takes, I got something down. As usual (for me at least), the timing accuracy was…not great. So, I re-recorded it as a MIDI track (think of that as recording a roll for a player piano that can then be played back on any piano over and over) and corrected the timing and…hey, we’re sounding pretty good.
Too good, if I’m being honest. But, I kept the original audio track, so what if we play them side by side? Word to the wise: If your timing is anything like mine? Don’t do that. Ugh. It sounded like a poor performer trying to play along with a good one. However, all was not lost. I could move the “imperfect” performance…wait, no, let’s not put that in quotes. Let’s take the imperfect performance and drop the volume down to about half what it was and give it a ton of reverb to smoosh it around a bit.
Now I’m super excited because that sounds fantastic. Now to record the playback of the MIDI track. To do that, I have to send the MIDI data (the piano roll) to the first synth in the chain and record the output. Unfortunately, that’s literally what happened. I was getting the DW8000 but none of the other synths were playing. That defeats the whole point of the damned thing.
After half an hour of beating my head against the wall, the solution dawned on me and I felt really…not smart. To explain, we have to go back to the dawn of MIDI, the networking protocol that musical instruments still use to talk to each other and to computers. All three of my keyboards have three MIDI ports on the back. The first two are the ones I used the most often: “In” and “Out.” They’re pretty self explanatory. “In” is used to receive information from another source. “Out” is used to send data from the machine to other machines.
What was happening was I was sending data from the computer (the piano roll) into the “In” port on the DW8000 and it was playing it. However, nothing was going out to the other machines because I wasn’t actually playing anything on the DW8000. I needed to use…the “Thru” port! “Thru” takes the information going to the “In” port and passes it on down the chain. Once I switch the where the cable from the DW8000 to the SQ80 was plugged in, it all worked brilliantly.
So…yay! Stuff that anyone who knew what they were doing would have sorted in a matter of minutes, but that’s how one learns. For funsies, I did a drum track with the MS-1 instead of a proper drum machine. The kick, tom, and snare all sound…passable, but totally inappropriate for what I’m trying to do with this track. All in all, there’s still a lot of work to do, but I’m well pleased with what I have and I’ve learned some new tricks along the way.
I intended for this post to be about how much fun this weekend was. That’ll have to wait, but Coco found some awesome stuff that I can’t wait to share even though I just said it’ll have to wait. Bother. Thanks for sticking with me through this. I hope you found it a little interesting.