M635 J520

I haven't been able to participate too much in @truecuckoo 's excellent #jamuary2017, sadly. (Even though I have a close to a million of quirky drafts on various tapes from my OP-1. (It's amazing how it's such an idea generator that instead of finishing something it is way easier to just get a new idea and start following that instead. (I'll have to find a way around that one day. (But I digress.)))) This time I sat down in front of Cubase and started playing around with some new soft synths I haven't tested too much before -- Xpand2, SynthMaster, and the Kontakt library Solid State Symphony. I ended up with this stadium pop thing here. With @simsmi we will probably rearrange it and add some lyrics (on "Alternative Facts"!) and record a @1bisHill version one day, methinks. But, for now, since this is a weekend for finishing things, this is what it is -- a pompous cliché-ridden thing with the catchy name of "Jamuary2017 #29". Enjoy. ---- ...

In my constant... need... to get everything music instrument related to communicate with each other, I wanted to look into ways to get some of my keyboards/synths with only MIDI over USB to talk to devices with regular good old-fashioned 5-pin MIDI ports from the eighties. Cables! First I had a quick look at off the shelf solutions. The most interesting one being the Kenton MIDI USB Host – providing MIDI host functionality for USB devices as well as regular MIDI in and out in a small box. Unfortunately it is rather expensive (~125 €) and a reliable online source warned me that it was not entirely stable in collaboration with my OP-1, so I started thinking of more... home-grown solutions. I decided to try to use my old Raspberry Pi and see if that would serve as a USB host with a borrowed MIDI USB adapter. (Thanks Simon.) A cheaper, and, as an added boon, a nerdier solution. Step 1: Get the USB MIDI device up and running This was the easy part. The device I have been lent ...

A little duo I'm part of these days, 1bisHill (What's with the name you ask? It is a long story...), was asked to play some songs at a gathering at my work the other day. (With a guest star from Brazil.) So, without thinking, I asked my partner in crime, and he said yes, so I said yes. And then I thought about things, and realised that we have lately drifted towards more and more... noise - less, what might be regarded as, ... music ... Perhaps not compatible with playing at people at a party at work. So I got scared. And then I did what I always do when I get scared - tried to find a programmatic solution! This time I created a tiny web service where people could vote for more or less noise. Noisevote, if you want. Pedals with  NSFW names like Big Muff and Swollen Pickle en masse. Basically, server side, it is a really simple Ruby and Sinatra web service with a sqlite database to store votes (running on my Raspberry Pi at home). Client side it is Bootstrap and D3.js w...

The other day a friend and I experimented with connecting his excellent monotribe (with the miditribe extension) to my Cubase to see if we could record the MIDI-signals coming from it. For Science! This made me realize that, being a MIDI-noob, I hadn't understood how MIDI worked in Cubase, and none of my google searches seemed to help either, since being a MIDI-noob, I probably didn't have the right vocabulary to specify the searches with. The thing is that the 'tribe is supposed to send the synth MIDI on CH 1 and the drums on CH 10. We added two midi tracks in cubase and selected the channels we wanted in the track info. Like so: This did not work, as we got a mix of drums and synths at once all over the place. Interesting, but not right. To try to understand this we created a default project with 16 MIDI tracks, one per channel, and lo and behold all MIDI was sent to all channels. OK. We figured we needed to filter out just the channel needed per channel so we ad...

The other day I invested in the long awaited (in the EU, that is) Rocksmith music game. This lets you play with your good old electric guitar or bass hooked up to your PS3, instead of the plastic gadgets made infamous in the 00s. I haven't had/taken the time to sit down rock out much with the game itself, but I have had a quick try at something that I guessed might be possible - to use the included cable, the so-called Real Tone Cable, as an interface between my guitar/bass and my iPad. Plugged, played, and lo and behold, it worked! Amp modelling and recording in Garageband, analog modelling filters with Moog's filtatron, etc. Classe ! (I have not confirmed the sound quality , but latency wise it is not too bad.)