Wednesday 25 April 2012

Getting my Groove (Electronics) on

Today I decided to dig out my Groove ( or is it Grove? ) Electronics Midi 2 CV unit. I must have bought it back in 1986-7 for £99 as I wanted to use my Roland SH-101 with my small midi studio.

Well, fired it up and I still remember which gel-buttons to press ( it works in binary! ) and everything is
still working great, didn't even have to adjust the tracking for the midi/cv conversion (wa-hoo).

I made a simple video of me testing it out. I'm using logic 5 to run a simple pattern with a Korg DDD-1 to check the timing out with. Here it is...


Sorry for the naff sound quality as I'm only recording through the iphone and small monitor speakers.

Thursday 19 April 2012

Post Modular Man

Spent a relaxing Saturday playing with my Nord Micro-Modular. What a great synth it is, there's so many possibilities to create a sound with it (as long as you have hours and hours of patience!)

Wednesday 18 April 2012

Time to dig out the soldering iron...

My Roland MKS70 has been getting temperamental lately - keeps cutting out after a few minutes, at one point it only worked by leaving it on it's side! I reckon there's going to be some cracked solder joints in there somewhere causing the problem. Time to dig out the magnifying lens and the solder iron.

Friday 6 April 2012

Sample Libraries

Been playing around with my old samplers today - just dusted off my old Akai S1100. What a great sampler it was (and still is!) Built like a ruddy tank and weigh's the same too..



It has a built-in effect section which is brilliant - superb delay's and reverbs, the only problem is preset levels of fx send - 0, 14, 29, 43, 57, 71, 86 and 100%

Being old I need to fix a few things - a new floppy drive (that'll be tricky I reckon) and a new lcd backlight which is easy enough to find on the web. I can probably make do without the disk drive as I have the S1100 scsi'd up to the mac, zip and CD-Rom, so I can easily load and save files - I have the latest os on a Zip too. Another bonus is using BIAS' Peak audio editor via SCSI and also Propellerheads' ReCycle (v1.xx) as it sends the file as a patch with all the samples allocated to keys automatically - which is brilliant to drum loops.

I also managed to snag CD-Roms for it ages ago on Ebay for an absolute bargain. Imported them into Reason using ReLoad - they make a great ReFill!



Easter Hols Fun

From here....


..to here. And from here to...


..wait for it!


Here!


And to here too!


 


 


And finally to here!


It certainly takes more time than just dropping a file into Kontakt or any other soft sampler, but it's so much more satisfying - recording audio, tweaking the file - looping, cropping any unwanted data and hoping that you can get a successful midi-dump to the sampler. Once it's in the sampler then you get to tweak it again - filters, key spans, re-naming and finally saving. I'd love to find a way to do sample-dumps with my Akai S700 - but for now I'll have to settle with sampling direct to it.