Jikkenteki

Note that there are two different kinds of copyrights.... The first covers the sound recording, so anything you take or sample directly from the recording is in breach of this copyright. The second is for the actual musical composition, so if even if you play the notes yourself on a different synth, you are still in breach of this copyright.

Just got back from Tower Records. I picked up.... 1200 Micrograms Remixes (I collect everything TIP puts out, it puts a focus on my collecting impluses so I don't buy everything psy ever released) Brave Story Original Soundtrack (music composed by Juno Reactor)

Not an album or an artist per se, but I think in hindsite the track of 2001 would probably have to be Deedrah - Reload (GMS remix). Back in 2001 it was the peak of the minimal boom (basically the same situation we are in with full on now. Some good releases and a flood of lesser ones and general boredum with it kicking in the scene overall). Suddenly this track came out and EVERY event I went to that year this track was played at least once and had everyone going nuts. Soon after "full on" became a genre instead of a general way to describe trance that had a lot of sonic activity, impact and motion (unlike the less harmonic, more rythmic and repeatative stuff that was most minimal). GMS came to rule all for a while. The good minimal guys moved on and somewhere "minimal" split and changed into "progressive" and "tech-trance" and here we are today. As an aside, interestingly I find a lot of the new "dark" trance to be very similar to minimal in a lot of ways. It's more intense and there is a lot more going on sonically of course (a lot of dark fans might hate me for saying this, but I think dark psy is just a minor offshoot of full on that I would call "noisy full on" ), but it is, overall, just another backlash from more obvious melody, much as minimal was a reaction against obviously melodic goa and psy-trance that came before it.

I'm well aware of the Powercore, my partner in PAR-2 has one. I don't really trust firewire on windows and while everyone I have talked who has one says good things about it, they also often mention that it is occassionally unstable. That said, the bigger issue is that I need to buy new monitors and some other things before I'd have money for a powercore. Plus to be completely honest, I have more than enough gear at the moment. lol

I'm using Steinberg's System Link so it will only work with Cubase, although I'm not sure aobut rewiring another host to Cubase. There are some other options for connecting computers though. Wormhole is a decent cheap method for doing audio that way.

Yeah things like this tend to be handy especially when I go writing these 30 minute long tracks. I need all the processing help I can get.

To quote the title of a Rush track, I had "One Little Victory" today in my studio. Nothing terribly groundbreaking or anything, but I'm excited and feel like talking about why! For about 3 years now I have been wanting to "someday" try Cubase's system link to link my desktop and one of my laptops together. Well last night a new sound card arrived, which was the final piece of the very long puzzle involved in getting everything I needed to link these bad boys together. The routing of the mixer's in the E-Mu sound cards was a bit tricky (damn flexiblity and being able to do anything you want... why does it have to be so confusing sometimes?) but today I finally got it all worked out and working. Now I have 8 ADAT channels running between my computers, as well as midi channels so I can write the midi parts on one computer and have them control some of the heavier VSTs on the other. I can also finally have my T.C. Electronic effects units hooked up by S/PDIF rather than the old noisy analog connection and have a bunch of CPU hogging vst reverbs all handled by one machine and not have my computer coughing and stuttering anymore! So many ideas... which to try first???

Actually the end result has nothing to do with the original outside of being in the same key and having the same BPM. The Skazi vocal bits got ditched basically as soon as I got past the intro and got to some beats. Mabye someday I'll rerender it with the bits back in..... but do I really wanna do that?

I'll let you in on a dirty little secret That track started out as a joke remix of Skazi's "Hit and Run" I reached a point where I'd put too much work into it and removed the "offending" material and made a proper track out of it instead.

Listening to a rather unknown Japanese goa artist named 01-N right now. Listening to a cd he gave me, but he has a mess of tracks available Here He has an album coming out this winter, but I don't know how available it will be outside of Japan.

"Warmth In Cold Places" on my album has similar sappy roots...

Actually it was less than that until the 11th with the sale that just ended. Considering I just upgraded a bunch of stuff in said sale I'll probably just save my money for a bit and finally buy Komplete in a few months. Massive looks interesing though.

Recently Vangaurd has been my synth of choice for bass although I've had good results from Absynth, Albino and VB1 as well as my Nord Lead. The most consistant have been Vangaurd and Absynth (believe it or not).

Techincally I got it yesterday but my most recent music purchase is.... Dream Theater - Score 2xDVD Good stuff, even if it isn't trance related.

When recording midi parts I'm just used to simply pushing record, playing and then pushing stop when I'm done. It took me ages how to figure out how to do something resembling that in Live. Part of it was the manuals's fault as I read the thing probably 5 times trying to figure out how I can actually "record" midi by just playing it rather than inputing the notes and stillI ended up having to go online to one of their tutorials to figure it out (of course when I did it was "oh duh..." but still). The bigger midi issue for me is simply how I write. I tend to noodle a bit on the keyboard and then hit record and play until i have something I like. Have to set loop lengths and such in Live I find requires me to "plan" and reduces the happy accident factor for me as Live stops recording after that set length is up by default. The more I use it for writting, the more I am getting comfortable with it, but I still simply "need" some of Cubase's features that Live doesn't have. Actually after careful consideration, more than midi, I find my biggest gripe with Live to be simply the monitoring of levels on the mixer. The lack of precise +/- db peak readings on the mixer I find to be a problem as I usually want to know exactly where my levels are at when I'm mixing things down. Having to use the mouse and not be able to numerically input level changes on the mixer view page is something I find rather distracting. (sure you can do it on the track view page, but why found I have to switch to a different window to do what is a basic mixer function?) This is not to say I dislike Live. I did buy it after all (and several upgrades after I bought it as well). The internal effects aren't too bad and the audio tweaking is great. Assigning midi controllers is excellent for the most part and something I think Cubase should adopt (although with vst synths I think can be kind of a pain trying to find which slider goes to which knob on the synth interface). Editting and recording automation info is easy too (although no different from Cubase really IMO). I use it for all my live sets and have been using it to write downtempo tracks a bit too recently, but for how "I" write music I find Cubase easier somehow (probably being somewhat related to my old audio recording roots and simply having used it for that job longer). The end result is basically that both will serve you well so its just a matter of which one fits your writting style the best and which one you learn the deepest. Or you could just use both

I am using Live 5 right now (6 is still beta testing.. once its out I'll upgrade), but in 5, eventhough its changed and improved its still a pain in the ass compared to Cubase IMO.

I've used Cubase since VST 5.0 and Live since 2.0 and they both have their strengths and weaknesses. I personally find Live to be kind of a pain in the ass to work with when it comes to creating and recording midi parts but outside of that I like it. As it stands now I tend to use Live for playing live and writing tracks while I am "on the road" so to speak (I don't like to carry my Cubase dongle around outside of the studio), but the tracks started in Live always get rendered and shipped over to Cubase to be finished. I jut find Cubase to just be easier to write in somehow, but that's just me.

It's amazing that your real thing looks EXACTLY like my partner in PAR-2 Productions' old studio picture on our site. Even more amazing that the url for the picture of your real studio is even hosted on our server ( http://www.par-2.com/studio/pics/par2west.jpg ). The similarity boggles the mind!

I dug around on my harddrive and found these. I haven't tried most of them (I'm possibly running the world's longest working midi daisy chain and usually can't be bothered to tear it apart for things like data dumps and such... lol), but I'm pretty sure most of them came from the Yahoo Alpha Juno users' group. http://www.par-2.com/choons/AlphaJuno.zip

Taste is taste and all, but I was pleasantly surpised by this comp and rather enjoy it. How it holds up in the long run is anyone's guess, but I have enjoyed this more than a lot of other releases I've purchased recently.

Are you looking for samples or presets? I'm terrible at storing presets as I tend to just find the sound I want, record the part and move on with no looking back. I'm pretty sure I have a pile of presets I downloaded from the net somewhere though. Although I'm not sure where they are at the moment.

Fair point. Thinking back on it, while I used Chaos A LOT, it was always for older releases no-one else seemed to be selling anymore.

Saiko Sounds all the way for me. Super fast shipping, good customer service, free items with big purchases..... I used to use Psyshop and never had any major issues, but their customer support is basically 0 (I've never had an email answered from them, even on record label business) and on one of my orders I ordered a 2x Vinyl that arrived fine. However when it arrived their was a sticker on the shrink wrapping saying it includes a special free bonus disc included in it (limited to X number of copies), but the shrink wrapping was cut open and the disc had been removed and wasn't included. On the site itself nothing was said about this "bonus disc" so I got exactly what I ordered, but I still found it somewhat lame that someone there would remove and keep the free disc and then ship the rest of the package like it was no big deal. They could have at least removed the rest of the shrink wrap I would never have known the difference. When I lived in the US I used Chaos Existence a lot too. They had fair prices (higher price per item, but less shipping costs within the US so it usually balanced out) and their customer support is excellent (they included a Christmas card to me in one order around X-mas before I moved to Japan). After moving I haven't used them much, but they are worth checking out, although their sales focus has shifted a big in the last couple years.

Up until a few years ago Mac legitimately had an edge on pro-audio but these days the difference really has become meaningless and its become a taste issue. Its true that most major studios use Macs and Protools, but now-a-days this mostly has to do with habit and I know plenty of professional engineers, mastering guys, etc who hate both (a lot of mastering engineers seem to prefer Samplitude recently, although they will still often work with Protools sometimes due to client demand). Studios are famous for sticking with the "tried and true" and Protools has held the market there for so long that it will be awhile until the competition can work its way in regardless of how good the product is (in fact, quite a lot of audio engineers actually seem to dislike the sound of Protools). Change will be awhile off but its slowly happening. The same applies for Macs. Protools on Macs has become the "standard" so people wanting to get into the business train on the standard, get used to it and therefore become less willing to change after several years. It becomes a self fullfilling cycle that has very little to do with how good the actual platform is anymore. In my personal experience I prefer PCs right now. In college I worked in a Mac based computer lab and those things froze and died about 10 times more frequently than the PCs the school had running did. Also I'm running 3 different legit versions of Cubase on my music making PC, which hasn't been reformatted or anything since I built it around X-mas 2003 and have had almost no stabilty issues at all with it. A couple long time Mac using artists I know recently switched to PC, and a long time Protools/PC using artist I know recently sold Protools and switched to Cubase on a Mac. Really it all seems to boil down to taste these days.

They are two different ways to skin a cat. I went to music school and studied A LOT of music theory for a lot of years. It CAN be counted as 6/8, but considering how the music would fall on sheet music in standard notation it makes more sense to call it 3/4. BTW, 6/8 means 6 notes (beats) to a measure, one beat equalling an 8th note.