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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

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Thursday, March 10, 2005

Maybe I should post a little bit about music since I’m doing more with that lately than food. This screenshot show a drum pattern in Cakewalk Home Studio 2 XL (a relatively cheap music package with many good features). Learning it is like learning any program. It takes more than reading the manual; you have to do a lot of digging too. Anyway, a “pattern brush tool” created the pattern you see here. You select a combination of drum for a pattern or fill, then drag the brush across the score and it fill in all the beats. You can then select another pattern and layer it up. You might think it would all become a bit clichéd and repetitious, but the sad fact is that it is still a lot smarter than some of the drummers I’ve worked with. It doesn’t go outside and get ripped when you take a short break – but it did crash my computer twice, which is possibly the cyber-equivalent. The fault was probably mine since I still haven’t got everything set up right. It all takes time and the manual isn’t that much help.   Much awaited, Reason 3.0 came out today. I used Reason 2.5 to create all the music for Mister President (still available for downloading/listening  at Virtual Occoquan) except the vocals (that’s Mark Hoback). The vocal harmonies were created using a feature in Band In A Box 2005. Mastering was done with Adobe Audition 1.5 and a few miscellaneous VST plugins. I did not use my new mixer at all, but will on the next project. It allows real time (dynamic) mixing in Cakewalk and Reason 3.0, but not Audition. My initial problems with it were all solved by flashing its firmware to the latest level (which includes a Mackie emulation mode) and then specifying that as a USB MIDI controller in the programs. Sounds simple, but there were many false starts on the road to getting that done. I hope you’re still awake.     9:47:24 PM    comment []