Sometime soon the old Haloscan commenting system is going to go away. This means that all the old comments
will probably vanish. What do you want for free, right?
So now I'm installing a new free comment system. I think you may have to register to use it, but you can use your
Facebook identity, or your Yahoo ID, or your Twitter ID if you have any of those. We'll give 'er a shot.
This Ralph Toro project is just nuts. I've got folders within folders of different versions of Toro
songs- some longer, some shorter, some with different titles, some with different eq... I am posting up the ones
that I like best.
I'm following up the last featured Toro song with another one- this one has some history. Ralph recorded this, and
got a mix of it, then kept cutting it down and cutting it down until all that he had left was one minute from the
middle. Now, I can totally relate to this. If your eye offends you, pluck it out, right? But one of the main
reasons there is a Steam Powered Studio is that I feel that many people make perfectly fine and interesting
music- they just may not recognize (or appreciate) what it is that they do.
So I've rescued a longer version of Not Anymore than Ralph ended up with. It's the featured song. It's the
guitar slinger side of Ralph, and there's an intriguing female harmony on the chorus that I haven't heard in any other
Toro song. This is the longest version I have. The structure is a little odd, and
this is probably why Ralph kept chopping away at it, but as you know by now, I like the odd song structures. There's a
nice lead and some interesting changes in the middle, but somehow he got the scissors to the ending...
February 04, 2010
There's a new kid in town.
I have been woodshedding with the Kurzweil K2661 lately. It all started a couple of weeks ago, when I was trying
to record with it and it started making terrible noises. I thought to myself here this thing is broken now,
and I haven't even learned how to use it! That was what I thought, and it was true, because it's possible to play
the thing without having the slightest clue how it works.
I bought this particular synth because it can make Hammond organ noises. Not only does it have a specialised
system of generating the sound of a B-3, it has slider controls which act like drawbars. One thing I like doing on a
Hammond is messing around with the drawbars during a song, so I got that with this unit. But it can do a whole lot
more than just make Hammond sounds, and that's what I'm trying to learn about now. Math is hard.
I know that some of you (well, at least one of you) will look with distain on any "synthesized" sound. Believe me,
I share your feelings about that. I passed on the whole trend, beyond the small analog synths like the ArpAxxe and KorgMiniKorg 700. Wish I still
had them! They didn't "pretend" to be anything other than sources of modified sine, square, and triangle waves.
Now I am trying to catch up with 30 years of digital synthesizer evolution- well, more like 20 years, because this
Kurzweil technology is about ten years old. What has happened in the meantime was that a lot of attempts were made
to generate pleasing sounds digitally- none of the affordable ones being very sucessful. I mean, DX-7?
But they finally came up with sampling, and higher and higher quality samples led to passable, musical instruments. The
Kurzweil piano I have enjoyed playing for many years is a sampled piano sound. To make this work they had to break up
the keyboard into small clusters of keys, each cluster with its own basic sample. These are called keymaps, and
they are really the "key" to the thing sounding good. Another trick they use is layering different samples on top of
each other, which adds depth and variation to the sounds. Still another trick is to use math functions to alter the
sound over time, rather than simply using volume changes (ADSR) like in the old days. All this, and more, have added
up to making a very complex sound generating thing, which I think may be called a musical instrument. Tastes good.
But ultimately it's a way that I can use samples that I record as the basis for playable sounds. I've got a bunch
of recordings of a gas furnace that I need to get into this thing...
