Feathers

Soundblaster 16?

Well... Stop asking dumb questions and find out for yourself which soundcard suits you best! I don't waste time asking people which synthesiser or which computer to buy! I do some research and decide for myself! :-)

An internal soundcard will always be susceptible to noise from the other devices inside a PC. Motors starting and stopping, heads moving across disk platters. A high-quality soundcard will have a lot of large capacitors and filters to remove as much noise as possible. The ideal situation is to drive a soundcard from it's own supply. The perfect supply is of course battery because it's very pure and relatively stable (apart from gradual voltage drop). If an internal soundcard is properly filtered from the other devices then it should be pretty quiet. It also helps if the soundcard uses audio grade components and metal film resistors.

They are heaving?

Anyone own a Korg Wavestation that's broken or in need of repair? Common problems include dead battery (loss of RAM sounds) and dim LCD backlight. If you have a broken wavestation for sale then let me know. Or... If you want one fixed then let me know. Feathers (UK).

Yes, I agree with stuart to some degree. You have to want to learn for yourself and not expect bum wiping. I think it's ok to ask about hardware or music software etc, but as for 'how do I make good psy music?' or 'how do I make a bassline line I heard in that track by wishy-washy?' - Well... You need to practice and also to think and feel for yourself. Perhaps it begins with a feeling? You have to feel your way through it... Time to sleep.

I'm sure there are... It wasn't a serious statement... NY is a big place. There are sure to be at least 5 good musicians there. :-)

Why not use Kazaa and Winmx? They're extremely popular and with a big user-base.

!!!News!!! Physical modelling synthesis revealed as fake by scientists... !!!News!!!

To date, I've never had a synth/workstation with audio input. I almost won an auction for K-Station and I reckon it's a pretty good synth. I curently have a Korg-Z1 and Gem S2 Turbo. The S2 is old but a very capable machine with nice multi-stage looped envelopes. The Z1 has awesome Oscillators and modulation. I will probably buy a Novation machine at some point. Audio-input as oscillator (Novation machines) is a pretty neat effect. Perhaps you could feed the output from a sampler (korg Kaos pad even) to the input to create some interesting 'live' waves?

Stylophone.

That's good then. Why would you prefer to use win 98 for music? It's obsolete and will cause nothing but problems! Why stop at 98? Why don't you people go back to using win 95? :-) I'm joking. I was serious about the AMD probs though. AMD is cheaper to buy and if they were as good or better than Intel then i'd certainly have one. They are cheap but they're awful at multitasking and will bring compatibility problems. I have a cheap and nasty soundcard cos I don't need anything special just yet. What do you people think of the Terratec DMX-6 Fire?

I know of a sound engineer who has an AMD system, windows 2000 and Cubase SX. It's apparently pretty stable. I don't know if Windows 2000 is more stable than XP. It has a lot of crap in it that you don't actually need. It's a good idea to give SX it's own XP. Something else u can do... Create a separate partition of 1gb and format in NTFS with 512 cluster size. Set XP's swap file to that new partition for max performance. If you have 512mb Ram or more then disable swap file completely. Make sure you change to NTFS when you move to XP. FAT 32 is dog poo.

Well... I have some interesting facts... I'm running Cubase SX on an Intel Pentium 3 500Mhz with 192meg Ram. I have two installations of XP. One solely for SX and the other for general applications. Both installations of XP are very stable and cubase never crashes. The problem has more to do with the manufacturer of the CPU. AMD chips are useless at multitasking. They're great for games but Intel chips are much better at running serious applications. I have a friend with an AMD 800mhz Athlon. He's had it for two years+ and today is the first day it seems to be working properly. He still doesn't trust it but it's a major achievement for him to have installed windows XP and for it not to screw up. The problem isn't with XP, XP is a very fast and stable operating system and lightyears ahead of 98/ME. I had another friend who bought the latest AMD XP 2.2ghz system with 512mb 2700 Ram. It could run only one program at a time otherwise it would flip out and crash, it was as unstable as George W Bush. He sold it within a few months and returned to Intel. These are true stories. Did you know that AMD is an anagram? You could try upgrading the soundcard drivers until you're ready to buy an Intel system. What soundcard do you have?

It's a good question, Spiral. Ozric Tentacles have made reference to mood altering properties of some of their tracks but I don't know if they've used binaural beats. Perhaps the thing to do is to analyze any track which seems to have an unusually strong relaxation/hypnotic effect. I was listening to a Hallucinogen track (I think it was one of the 'live' sets) and at one section it started to make my head spin with the swirlyness of the sounds. I'm sure this was what Posford intended. :-)

Pancakes. :-)

I would guess that people using binaural would be trying to hypnotize the listener for various reasons, ie.. Relaxation, subliminal suggestion (for example: you could suggest that George W Bush is an honest and true leader (this would obviously be a lie!)). I have used Binaural light and sound and the two together can be very relaxing. It can give you a sensation of lying on a beach (A politician will lie anywhere!) or of floating upwards on a bright and sunny day. I used red light synced to the binaural tones but I'm going to use white light (white LED's) since these will create a more intense experience. I would like to point out that certain rhythms can also be hypnotic. Anyone listened to a certain track by ozric tentacles (from Erpland?) that sounds Turkish. The rhythm is shifting in a very clever way which causes the listener to drift away. If you lock onto the rhythm you can also get carried away trying to decipher it. :-)

Blah blah blah! What I'm saying is that the quality of speech is bad... It's like Speak & Spell, it sounds like a robot. If you want robot (George W Bush) type voice effects in your song then it's good! Try getting any other commercial speech synth to speak at a certain musical pitch, you won't be able to do it. Fruity speech allows you to set the voice pitch in terms of musical notes. Does fruity speech use the microsoft speech engine? (I haven't checked) if this is the case, then you could easily expand it with AT&T natural voices! So, in summary, what I'm saying is that Fruity Speech is good for robot voices, not good if you want realistic voices. Sheesh! :-)

Ahhh the quality! Yes, Reflekshun, I agree that the quality is not good! It sounds as bad as the very first speech synths! If anyone would like realistic sounding speech then you must buy the AT&T Natural voices. :-)

"The Speech engine is merely a fad, a gimmick" - If the Fruity Speech is merely a fad, then so are most of the audio effects in use these days. Simon Posford has made use of singing voice synthesisers on many of his tracks and so then the 'gimmick' or 'fad' isn't so much of a gimmick after all! It all depends how creative you are. There have been many musicians who have made use of 'speak and spell' voice synths in their music. New systems are being developed that are able to mimic the human voice very accurately. AT&T have natural voice synthesis modules that sound as natural as any human voice. Put the two together and you have an artificial voice that sounds very natural. It would be great for people who can't afford singers! I have used the Fruity speech synth in my music and it sounds great! It really adds life and humour to music!

Windows XP is a great operating system... To illustrate: Two of my friends have Saitek X35 stick and throttle controllers, both using windows ME. Both report that their controllers don't work properly. One of my friends was going to send his X35 back for repair. He let me test it on my windows XP system and it works perfectly! The problem is with Win-ME. (I had the same probs with win 98). Re: Fruity speech engine. Some musicians are experimenting with artificial speech/singing in music. I recently was given access to one system developed by a university. You can get some interesting results with it. The Speech in fruity might seem like a joke, but it's actually a pretty good feature! Fruity certainly is innovative in many ways. It's just a shame it's so basic in other areas. A note to anyone considering changing to windows xp: It's the most stable operating system available for PC. I would recommend that people also convert to NTFS if they're going to make the change. XP is perfect together with NTFS.

You can run hardware synths from Fruity (it's more Reasonable than Reason) but I don't like the way it works with midi hardware. The midi sync hardly ever works (I gave up trying and used Cubase sx instead). The way Fruity works with midi hardware is extremely basic and irritating. It seems like a pain just to set up simple recording/playback of notes/controller from my synth. I'd only use Fruity for getting simple ideas or for the speech synth (v3.56). It's certainly not a serious tool compared to even Cakey Sonar. :-)

There is a secret law which states that 'the sound you intend to create will not sound as good as you planned, but... The sound that you created by accident will sound amazing!'. Very short sounds can often be as impressive as longer ones. Small sections removed from voice or sound effects can be very good. You could try recording some sounds from the television and taking small sections and looping them.

No problem! :-)

How do you make it spin?