music

I bought a Roland D-10 Multi Timbral Linear Synthesizer on E-bay. It's about 10kg of 1988 in keyboard form. It's about the oldest thing around that can wired up with midi and play drums and upto 8 other instruments simultaneously.

Roland D10

It has some awesome sounds and some utter duds. Strings are completely out, and the pianos are no way near as good as the later JV-80 and JV-1080 although I understand some of these are designed to sit nicely within a mix rather than sound good on their own, which probably means Roland get the last laugh in a million places where those sounds haven't been noticed. The organ and brass sounds are completely awesome. A-53 Brassy Lead justified buying the synth on its own, it's a layered brass synth sound reminiscent the intro to Europe's The Final Countdown, which was done with the analog Roland JX-8P layered with a Yamaha TX7 (Rack version of DX7).

The D series has limited memory, 128 tones and 128 patches (combinations of one or two tones or partials) when in performance mode, and when mine arrived, it was littered with evidence that its former owner had spent a very long time refining several patches and left a lot of copies of them. I confess to doing the same from time to time. I didn't find his patches particularly exciting, so I thought I'd try a factory reset. Bad move. The secret code didn't restore the factory patches, it just made every patch make a nasty eeeeeeee sound. The same nasty sound. I had to go and find a System Exclusive (.syx) file containing the original files and send it across by midi using a sysex program. I haven't yet found anything that does this on linux so I had to wrangle with Vista and a gammeport midi cable. Additional problems were caused by my not being able to find the original patches for the D-10. Until I realised the D-20 had identical patches. Synthzone.com to the rescue. There's also some more interesting patchsets.

The D-10 is a D-20 without an attempt at a sequencer. Given the choice of wrestling with a tiny dot-matrix display and a few undoubtedly worn out push buttons or the rich mouse-and-keyboard driven environment of a PC running a favourite sequencer (Rosegarden) is nominally easy, I thought I'd save myself both money and the temptation to do anything really masochistic. Rolands are not known for being easy to program, not for having particularly friendly manuals. I think this one has the biggest of any I own, although the midi implementation is probably the best described.

A few days ago we were recording some stuff. It's not like it's sometimes portrayed on film/TV with the whole band playing at all at once. It's technically possible to do it that way if you have an enormous budget and an army of technicians but for the most part it's much easier to concentrate on one part at a time. First one records the drums, then the bass, then the rhythm guitars. This then give a nice firm foundation for lead guitars, violins, synths and whatever complicated stuff to be recorded on, and then we put the vocals in.

High budget set-ups have a separate recording booths and control rooms. Our cheapo set-up relies on double glazed French windows on both sides of the extension, the near-silent nature of the salvaged Dell powering the studio, remembering to turn the monitors off during recording, minimising the number of people in the recording room and a lot of patience.

We made the following observations:

• It's very easy to forget to arm some part of the recording chain.
• Your lead guitarist will always be busy playing Diablo II when he's needed.
• Deprived of a musical instrument to hold, comic actions are required when doing backing vocals.
• a large number of takes (usually of main vocal parts) will feature someone wandering in and knocking something over, usually during the silent parts of the best takes
• almost every take ends in a declaration of the number of screwups the performer made, followed by quick agreement or a raise by anyone else within earshot.
• we really should keep a (video) camera handy to capture the scenes that have to be seen to be believed.

...so spank me and call me eldrich.... Tomorrow I'm going round to see a few friends and there is the prospect of music being played. Ok, the intention is for all 3 of us to play instruments, whether it's music is debatable. Anyway, I have spent the last few hours collecting kit together. The intention is to sequence at least the drums, probably some synths too, leaving me with hands free to either pilot more synthage or to play good ol' fashioned electric bass. At which point I've never been satisfied with any preamp other than than the one built into my Fender amp, at which point I want one of the matching speaker cabinets as I'm scared of plugging in a less capable speaker and tearing it to bits. That and I know that if we're being quiet I can sit on that cab and at least feel what I'm playing. At least my rebuilt cab and amp housing don't weigh as much as the original one piece cabinet.

On top of the amp is a recycled dell workstation running Ubuntu Studio, my current favourite way of running Rosegarden, which is versatile enough to keep me happy, yet user friendly enough for me to wave at people who've never used any kind of computer music software.

On top of that is my trusty furry blue rack case, containing my Roland JV-1080, an almighty black box containing reasonable approximations of just about every instrument I've ever heard of. Actually the guitar imitations don't sound or play like a guitar, but that can be forgiven on a box that contains several decent sounding pianos, enough orchestral instruments to give me delusions of grandure, and with a bit of tweaking some very convincing 80s synth sounds. Oh and with the help of an expansion card, enough percussion to justify firing your drummer and trying to find a name for is that doesn't instantly reveal your master plan of someday cloning Doktor Avalanche. If only it could tell whether the stage was level...

Above that in the same rack is the Behringer Gate/Compressor/Limiter that always gets us very odd looks from backline folks that are used to having these somewhere on the way to the power amp, not first in the chain. I keep the left channel set for guitar and the right channel set up for bass. Why? Well firstly the gate kick in and cuts the sound right of when I'm not playing, eliminating most of the hisses, hums and feedback squeals that get really annoying. It's so much better than training lead guitarists to keep a hand on their strings at all times, which then turns the handling of beer into some kind of sideshow. Secondly the compression stage makes it a million times easier to keep a clean instrument in the mix, does amazing things to your sustain and give a much wider window between having enough gain for hammer-ons and pinch harmonics to sound right and having chords turn to mush. Then there's the simple luxuary of haivng a gain control before whatever's next in the effects chain, the Monster Strat no longer causes something to clip horribly, and a small nudge clockwise will sort the levles out if I have to switch to instruments that don't have insane outputs like the Shine and the DeArmond. Finally there's a hard limiter that cuts out the deafening pop of the cable accidentally coming out of the bass or other theatrical incidents.

Above that there's the MicroKorg, which makes a nice buzzing noise and the vocoder works when I can't sing but still want to. On top of that is the monitor for the dell, a bag of cables, a wireless trackball and a qwerty keyboard for when it all goes wrong, and propped up against all that is my magic briefcase, an M-Audio midi keyboard, a keyboard stand and last, but never least, my long suffering and much loved Washburn Mercury bass. It has this massive menacing growl that I've never been able to get out of anything else, and it's stood up to being put through a ceiling attacked by me (along with everything else on stage) when Sonia was using him in Thought Crime, and I've lost count of the number of times I've woken up wrapped round him.

Anyway I got sidetracked. my point is what don't I need to take?

It's times like theses I wish I was the singer or the violinist.

I think the e-mail address for the myspaz where I quietly leaked my creations to absolutely no-one so I'm going to dump my infernal noise right on the blagosphere.

Black & White - Lonely Android Version (demo)

For those that have encountered previous musical projects I have been involved in, little warning is required. Everyone else should know that I consider this a proof of concept, and consider suggestions that I can't sing as an offer to do better. It's a collection of first takes I put together using Rosegarden earlier today, with absolutely no thought paid to the latency, realtimeness or anything resembling an effort to mix things properly as it's a bitch to do in Rosegarden, and I'm a victim of the lack of multicore realtime support in Ubuntu 8.10 so there's little point in me prodding Ardour right now.

I plan to strip out the (fake roland flavour) piano and put in a few layers of clean guitar or maybe some more considered synthage. This is the first time I've got anywhere using a vocoder and I'm considering using it more. I've a stack of material waiting for me to get my hear round how to get the vocal sounds I want and the vocoder is helpful for filling in where my voice doesn't reach, especially when I can't lock someone in a room and wave a microphone at them.

Black and White was originally performed by the first incarnation of Thought Crime (Bruce/Elwood/Furze/Holmes/Mills) and is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Lost teenagers are nothing new, but are quite often the sole purpose of blogging. I've just got my hands on AFI's first two albums again, and it's a huge trip down memory lane. Very Proud of Ya is a 37 minute hand grenade of outcast fury. File 13 and Advances in Modern Technology still push the same buttons in my head they did when I arrived in Doncaster, on a mission to form a band and destroy myself. Geoff Kresge's hyperactive bass lines seem to have tunnelled directly into my subconscious, as I've rediscovered who was responsible for all the little manic fills that I knew were someone else's but couldn't place. I have the urge to make music but it's 6am.

The burning question: should my mohawk return?

Oddly it's yet another band with a UC Berkley connection. Maybe I should make a pilgrimage there.