Naming your Chords

I find it very useful to setup what I call a "Chords" track. For the
same reason that chord names are specified in most modern compositions i.e. Jazz and Pop music. I first tried doing this with markers in Reaper but that was less than ideal. Recently , it occurred to me that I could simply record basic block chords for the changes in question. Then its a matter of splitting the chords track into generally 2 , 1 or half a measure in duration accordingly. Not only can I see what exact change I'm on but I can also listen. Check out what I mean in the pic below.

BTW , do you find this useful ?

Making a Push with ScribeFire

ScribeFire is a Firefox addon that besides being a pretty decent blog editor it has the added benefit that one can work offline. That along with my new UMPC and AT&T 3G LaptopConnect card will give me less available excuses to not blog more actively. Of course, that's a bunch of BS. Either I'm too unsure, have nothing to say, have no reason to say anything or think that nobody's listening , these are all better explanations than suggesting that I don't have enough time.

But time will see.

Anywho, this is my first ScribeFire blog.

Stickys for your DAW ?

I would love to be able to freely drop notes over the wave form track area of my DAW. I'm using Reaper. Basically this amounts to Stickys , little memos one leaves behind to remind oneself of issues, action items etc. In the case of a DAW these notes would be associated with a specific position on a timeline and for a specific track. Global markers can already be left in Reaper but they just amount to a label on the timeline. There is not much room to leave much of a note at all. Pretty powerful way of getting the big picture , whether the project is still an evolving tune or whether everything has been tracked and is ready for mixing. Some other Reaperites feel the same way. See here. Hopefully it will catch on.

If the reader knows of any DAW that already does something like this please drop me a post. thanks.

Portable Vocal Booth

About a year ago it occurred to me to research if somebody had built some sort of mechanism to handle recording vocals in very hostile spaces i.e. my home studio. I could viably DI everything else but vocals were a problem. At the time I found the SE Reflection Filter. Yesterday on the Reaper forum, I bumped into the Real Traps Portable Vocal Booth. Its for one much larger and just in that sense it seems more effective. Also because of its size it has more applications e.g. it is viable to use it to isolate a guitar amp. It goes for the same amount of cash which is just under $300.00. Check them out.

Reaper Skins

Its amazing the number of skins available for Reaper. This is one of the new flavors of the week , most of them created by the community.

Pod Farm Is up!!!

See the discussion at Reaper forum:

http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?p=249175#poststop

Here is the line6 page for it:

http://line6.com/podfarm/index.html

Pod Farm is the next incarnation of the Line6 GearBox plugin. If you owned that just doing update via the Line6 Monkey is only you need to do. The UI looks much better and you do get dual amp configuration which is nice. Time and playing will show whether there is more tone. It does seem to come with more pre-sets which include the GearBox plugin presets.

Is this Delicious

Lately , I was turned on to Delicious. They have been around for a while so I'm a bit late to the party. Very useful especially to bookmark the posts I make into the various forums and some of the resulting web surfing that arises from that. You can embed your delicious links into your blog as I have done on the right panel of this blog. I might move that to the main content area. I wish that there was a filter so that I could limit the links here to be just music related links. Currently , either one shares a Delicious link or not.

Just went alpha

no not alpha male but I did just get my Frontier Designs AlphaTrack which has to be one of the coolest control surfaces out. It installed in a second and became immediately useful and immediately indispensable. Click on the image and check it out.

BFD 2.0 looks amazing but ...

If you looked at the demos, it was simply a no brainer, if you had BFD 1.5 you simply had to purchase the upgrade and quickly, it was that impressive, and it is but I can't help thinking that Fxpansion may have been pressured by their retailers to have this available for the xmas / end of year retail season. I think that maybe its release was a tad early.

The features, the sound quality, the workflow, the interop to trigger units, the number of grooves provided all of these make BFD quite arguably the top virtual drum package. Unfortunately, I don't get to enjoy all of that. I'm still trying to make sure that my investment in some of the expansion paks is safeguarded. You see the upgrade process from 1.5 to 2.x is not free of its kinks and so I have started the year on a very frustrating note indeed. That's what I get for being an early adopter :)

Blogging from the Road

Blogging from my pda . Maybe I will blog more consistently in 2008 ?

MOTU 2408 vs Edirol FA-101

Well more of a comparison. I purchased the Edirol FA-101 firewire interface because I needed a unit that could hook up to my then notebook based DAW. However, as part of my efforts to resurrect my home studio I decided to put back to use my old MOTU 2408mkii. Said unit was actually dedicated to my PowerMac Dual Processor G4. I now wanted to leverage the 2408 from my new PC Core2 Duo. That entailed buying a hardware upgrade from MOTU, the 424 PCI express interface card. So what are the differences between the two units ? Here we go:

Portability

The 2408 is simply not. It requires a PCI card in the host machine. The Edirol on the other hand requires firewire on the host machine and as a matter of fact on the MAC it just uses the native firewire support. So the Edirol will be indespensable on the road on a notebook or on the occassion that I may want to record a gig.

Latency

The Edirol on my Core2 Duo system provides 3 ms latency at 152 samples which is the lowest the ASIO driver will allow, nonetheless this is quite good. However, the MOTU provides 1 ms latency at 64 samples and I can go down to 32 samples but did not want to push my luck. So I'm a happy camper indeed.

Sampling Rate

Here the Edirol outshines the MOTU providing up 96K sampling. The MOTU only goes up to 48K but in practical terms that's just fine. Most pop to even instrumental guitar music i.e. my music does not need to go over 44.1

Connections

The MOTU has by far more connection possiblities but again in practical terms and for me that would entail getting more hardware to leverage the ADAT and Tascam connectivity provided. So effectively , the MOTU has 10 channels available including 2 spdif i.e. digital connections. That is exactly what the Edirol provides except that the Edirol does toslink i.e. optical instead of spdif. The Edirol does provide 2 mic connectors with decent preamps. In reality I prefer to go thru something like the Studio Projects VTB1 which is a tube hybrid pre-amp which does a great job of warming this up.

Conclusion

The MOTU will become my interface on my main audio workstation. The Edirol will be now dedicated to my G4 which I have plans to make a midi workstation which I can use to pump soft synth's output back to my main DAW on the PC.

The MOTU 2408mkii is a great interface even six years later after my initial purchase. I will probably look for another on Ebay. The new 2408 mkiii has great specs but is overkill for my needs. If you are looking for a digital interface for your audio workstation I would highly recommend finding an used 2408mkii.

Professional audio presentations in NYC

I just bumped into a group that I plan to be spending sometime with:

Part of the American Engineering Society, the NYC chapters have monthly presentations on professional audio engineering topics.

The next one's on the 16th of October.

See: http://www.aes.org/sections/ny/

The parent organization is having a conference Oct. 5 - 8 th at the Javitts Center in NYC.

John McLaughlin at the Town Hall

I attended McLaughlin back to fusion concert at the Town Hall theatre in NYC last nite. First fusion concert in something like ten years. I think that McLaughlin may not be my cup of tea. He is one of the acclaimed Jazz fusion greats, has fantastic chops. Everybody in the band did. But it just did not grab me. The groove was too straight and too busy and too technical.This is coming from a guy that likes chops but where is the music. I think that it may just be an acquired taste. Certainly many will disagree with me. The show was sold out and the audience was as fired up as any I have seen.

It just does not seem to do it for me. Maybe I don't get it. I do get DiMeola and Metheny. I love their stuff. So maybe McLaughlin is just in another planet that I just don't understand.

I have heard that he has nice acoustic music, maybe I need to now check that out.

We do share one thing in common i.e. McLaughlin and I. We both thnk that Godin makes great guitars and especially great if one likes to blend synth tones into the mix.

Do you dig it ? Part 1

Woke up this morning to find a plumbing crew getting ready to replace my sewage pipe. We have had issues this morning but our landlord just popped this one on us.

Resurrection of my Wiki

MediaWiki i.e. the php framework used by Wikipedia, and the framework I was using on my last wiki, is actually quite prone to spam and it takes a community to fend of the evil spammers. Obviously, I don't have a "community" per se so I found a great wiki framework with a lot of bells and whistles and which has quite decent security mechanisms in place. The framework is called PMWiki and one can read up more about it here.

I like PMWiki so much that I got rid of my regular web site and now my new PM wiki is my web site. I do need to spend a bit of time adding more content but I think it already has the "look" I always intended to implement.

So check it out:

http://www.monteirosfusion.com

Testing Video upload

Musicians noodling while floor is being setup to record Jon Raney's original composition Sumbate.

Death of my wiki

I am sorry to announce that due to my total neglect and abandonment my wiki has died. I actually put it out of its misery after I found it to have been pillaged by a gang of virtual hoodlums. Yes, I'm talking about spammers. I used WikiMedia which has lousy admin to guard against spam. The various Php Forum software on the other hand have decent protections. My only option it seems would have been to entirely disable registration. I may try this later but for now I have to concentrate on the music. The front may pick up soon. It has been a slow and frustrating year so far but my friend and collaborator Jon Raney may finally come back online towards the end of September.

Keeping it safe

Recently, I started getting really paranoid about the safety of my content. I have been thinking about setting up a backup system for my music system since I got the new system in January but I guess now that my friend Jon and I are resuming our collaboration the issue has stepped up into the front burner.

So what's my strategy for my music content security?

First of all, start with a 500 gb Western Digital SATA drive that has enough space without accounting for compression to back up all of my drives. Then buy the right enclosure. I opted for the ICY Dock eSATA/USB single tray enclosure. Mostly because of tray driven design where once the hard drive was fastened to the tray, there was zero need to make any cable connections.

It worked perfectly and as I write this blog I'm formatting the Western Digital disk.

The hardware side of the solution i.e. disk and enclosure cost around $160.00. Not bad at all.

The software solution entails using PathSync , a utility for folder synchronization developed by the same developers that develop my preferred multi-track recording digital workstation i.e. Reaper.

Playing the Matrix

I recently purchased an M-Audio TriggerFinger. At first most music tech savvy will recognise it as a midi drum pad and indeed that was the original reason I purchased. Not because I wanted to program drum parts but rather because I wanted to embellish sample based loops i.e. such as BFD with “live” albeit triggered patterns and single hits. In other words for the purposes of recording live playing of the TriggerFinger against a BFD track backdrop.

However, I soon realized that the TriggerFinger doesn’t care what it triggers. Now that makes total sense of course , its afterall a midi controller, but what I had not thought about was to use it to trigger something other than a drum sampler. Indeed, the TriggerFinger becomes an instrument. Using the accompanying Enigma software one can map any scale on to the sixteen pads. A transpose controller allows one to transpose the registered scale to any other base note. One of the reasons that this is appealing to me is because there are certain patches , percussive in nature but yet melodic that play better using a percussive approach i.e. instead of playing it as a keyboard. Another interesting aspect of playing on TriggerFinger and for that matter any similar grid based midi controller, is that there are no rules. Guitarist, piano players and others develop an almost subconscious memory of underlying finger patterns and its these patterns that tend to come out in one’s playing. A good thing for sure, but it can lead to a “confined” expression. The TriggerFinger has no rules and if you just “jam” with it you may be surprised what note sequences you get and what you learn.

Calibrating for Latency

Calibrating your DAW for latency is an increidibly important first step not to be forgotten. Depending on your audio interface and computer setup the latency i.e. delay between what you play and what is recorded can be significant. Furthermore, if you are not aware of the issue it can really be disconcerting since it will seem like you have timing issues.

On Windows reduced latency is achieved by using ASIO drivers. Once you have an ASIO driver installed the next step is to determine what the lowest buffer setting is where your interface still operates normally. Abnormal operation is discernible due to audible pops, clicks and glitches. The lower your buffer setting the lower your latency but having low latency is still not enough with regards to recording. The goal is to actually "zero off" latency i.e. calibrate your DAW so that an a sample size offset is specified so that there is no latency at all.

So how do you do that? Well, you conduct an experiment which is known as a loop back test. I learned about how to set this up from a thread I started at the Reaper forum.

These are the steps:

1. Find a sample audio material such as a click track or very simple drum loop.
2. Set the master output of your daw to a specific out on your audio interface . say Out # 1.
3. Arm a track for recording and set its input to a specific input on your audio interface , say In#1
4. Physically connect with a patch cable the on your audio interface Out #1 to In #1.
5. Record a few seconds of the material.
6. Use an audio editor to find the crest of a discernible piece of audio on your original drum loop. Make sure that timeline on your DAW is set to show samples and note what sample the crest resides. See figure above.
7. Do the same for the recorded material.
8. Determine the difference in samples between the original material and the recorded material. This is your offset.
9. Add the offset to your DAW's preference settings for latency offset.
10. Repeat the experiment making sure that the offset has been applied and saved to your preferences.
11. Confirm that the second time around that the original material and the recorded material line up perfectly.

If using Reaper there's a project file availble in the thread I have a link for above. The thread has some interesting discussions on latency and is a good read. Check it out.