Colin OOOD

Yamaha DS2416 with AX44 I/O expander - 8 i/o (inc. SPDIF) and headphone out. I know it's not the most recent card on the market but I am SO happy with it; having full dynamics and 4-band parametric on each of 16 channels rocks. Then there's the 2 FX units on board - a definite plus. Things like that really help when you have a relatively slow PC. Ok, so it's not a Pulsar but still... does me fine, thankyou very much. Colin

WARNING: GEAR LUST INCREASING Drool on the keyboard is NOT good. Colin

This is probably not soundcard latency, as most sequencers (and certainly Cubase) automatically compensate for latency when recording. I have heard that SX has problems syncing MIDI recordings with audio, and that this has been fixed in version 1.03 (although I still use VST 5.1), so maybe upgrade? However, what it could also be is the latency of your hardware MIDI synth. Even with hardware there is a short delay between receiving a MIDI message and the corresponding sound coming out. Pre-VST, this was never a problem as it was the norm and there was no way to compensate for it except by ear; when you can see the waveform you've just recorded, though, it becomes very obvious! By all means, chop off the silence and re-align your audio, but check first that all the audio is out by the same amount. I quite often do this as there is nothing quite as satisfying as kick, bass and snare in sample-accurate sync Hope this helps. Colin

Plus... I can't help feeling that people asking these question are looking in the wrong places. Expecting to be able to produce (and write! Whatever happened to 'writing' music?) good music just by buying a particular piece of equipment is like buying an expensive paintbrush and expecting to be able to paint like Vermeer. There's more to music than just technique and technology (hence the current debate on where the soul is in much of todays psy-trance). If the scene is to continue to inspire and progress there needs to be much less of an emphasis on what equipment people are using and more though given to writing original music that touches people and expresses something from within the artist, otherwise you're not an artist but just a technician. Colin

We've had quite a few tracks professtionally mastered, mostly at the Townhouse in London. The tracks were loaded into a Mac directly off DAT and then processed through a bunch of relatively esotedic kit (the only one I can remember offhand is a Massenburg 5-band parametric eq). The Unconscious Collective stuff definitely came out sounding fatter, tighter and more impressive but I agree, you can do a pretty good job yourself with plugins. However, you'll still benefit from taking it to a mastering house because: 1) They have SHIT HOT speakers and amps in an acoustically designed environment - unlike most psy artists! 2) The engineers train for a long time (years, I think in some cases) to do this specific job 3) Access to ultra-high quality hardware and software 4) Objectivity - you might be in love with your kick drum but is it really just a little too big? I know mine are sometimes. There's more to mastering than EQ and compression; a good mastering engineer can turn a good track into a great one (but don't expect him to rescue that turd you've been trying to polish yourself for the last two months!) Hope this helps. Colin

What do you mean, 909 won't work with psy?!? The 909 has one of the best kick drum sounds around; OK it's not exactly like the GMS kick but it's a bloody good place to start! Colin

Avi Algranati and Ofer Dikovsky were using Reason on a G4 laptop, last time I saw them... whether they use it only for writing and not for recording/mixing I don't know though. In terms of quality, both hardware and software are capable of equal quality as its the algorithms used to perform the processing that determine quality. You put a Lexicon reveb algorithm in a VST plugin and you'll have a fucking excellent reverb inside your PC... but your PC woun't have the power for much else! The problem in my mind with Reason is that the effects and instruments are programmed to be economical with PC power rather than to be good quality (although I actually think the Reason reverb is not too shoddy, if not a patch on RVerb). Colin

Cubase 5.1 and above _do_ support dual processors (they call it 'advanced multiprocessing') but only on Win2000 and XP; you won't see a hint of it on any dialogs if you're not running a multi-CPU capable OS. Colin

I mainly use virtual FX these days but I do know that Lexicon have some cheap (£300-£500) multi FX boxes out. I haven't tried them myself but they've goot to be worth checking out. I wouldn't expect them to be four-channel like the DP4 or the Digitech though! Colin

You ever looked at the waveform for a real TB303?

Yeah, Korg Mono/Poly! Wicked (not so) little synth! Fantastic sync sound too. Not cheap though... Anyway, we were talking about bass sounds... If you want it "fat and juicy" I think a good way to go is overdrive; I use the standard Cubase VST plugin and this really thickens basslines nicely. I've not tried it with squelchy basslines too much but I reckon if you kke it subtle and roll off most of the top end you'll be OK. But as for 'pushing more than it pulls', I don't know, maybe your ears are better than mine but I don't think it makes much difference. As long as there is no DC offset in the wave, the average travel of the cone is zero in ANY sound; sounds like you need some low EQ to sort your Micro Q out (a good high-pass/low cut filter at about 20Hz will do the trick). To get a good fat bass sound that sits in the mix well, you need to do a lot of (appropriate!) compression. Plus, I find that cutting out everything below 50Hz and boosting the main pitch area around 65-80 Hz (depending on the key of the track) leaves a good space in the sub-bass area for the kick drum to wallop away in... ok, ok, I'll shut up now. Colin

Yep, I reckon - as long as it's new. A friend of mine bought one about a year ago for £450, which was also a really good deal at the time. Colin

I'm not sure whether he's still in Turkey but try: murat@off-the-ground.net I know Murat tried to put something on but I'm not sure if it worked. Colin

Marc, I'm not sure exactly, not having Cubase in front of me now, but I think one of the knobs on the MIDI Gate plugin should be something like 'Depth'. This controls the depth of the gating effect; setting it to anything other than full will keep a proportion of the ungated sound in your signal. You can automate this as well. Colin

Nord Modular, I reckon, if you want something versatile. Colin

For the most part you can place MIDI notes on every 16th note with a length of 1/32, but for that Posford feeling (and OOOD, and God knows who else, everybody probably) you need to double up on the timing every so often... Try this: At the end of every two bars, replace the last 16th note with 2 32nd notes each with a length of 1/64. Then this: Using the pattern above, replace the 2nd and 3rd gate pulse with one note 3 32nds long. Do the same with the 5th and 6th, and the 8th and 9th. Delete the 15th gate pulse (the one before the really short ones you put in earlier). Sound familiar? Colin

You might have key velocity mapped to filter cutoff or something similar... Colin

It's on a few tracks... we call it "J. Edgar"... Good luck with your tune... maybe email me an MP3 snippet when it's done? (Make it 1.44MB or less!) Colin

2 or more pulse-wave with quite a lot of PWM; enough to fuzz the sound out but not too much to make it disappear (make the PWM different for each oscillator if you can). Modulate pulsewidth with a sinewave LFO at maybe 5 Hz. Detune the oscillators between 2 and 5 cents either side of zero. Wide open filter with maybe 25% res so it bites if you sweep it. A nice wide chorus and you should be there. At least, if you're after the sound I think you are! Colin

A very personal subject, inspiration; different for everyone, I'm sure. For me, a strong source of inspiration has been smoking weed, listening to music with my friends - many of whom I collaborate with from time to time. However, getting too stoned can sometimes be a definite hindrance to the correct operation of a computer, although the level of stonedness I personally have to achieve for this to be a problem means that unconsciousness is an equally likely effect! Now that I'm trying to cut down on my ganja consumption I find equal inspiration in my choice of collaborators. I find it incredibly inspiring to work with people who are excited about making music, of whatever kind - and who are able to express themselves well with it. Mike. Geoff. Ryo. Steve. . Colin

You BOUGHT Sound Forge 4.5???? Not in a shop, I hope!

Andreas... if you can't get a hard-ass kick out of your analogs you can't be trying hard enough... I know the Juno's filter self-oscillates but not sure about the SH-1. I know it's possible to get a DAMN solid X-Dream style kick with an SH-101 though. Colin

Hmmm... Yeah, playing live is difficult. For about 5 years we used to do 50/50 sets; we'd take the whole studio up on stage and play alternate tracks from the PC (no audio, MIDI only!) and from DAT so we could set up the system for the next live track. For our music and system I think this was the best way of doing it at the time; the live tracks had an immediacy and power you can't get from pre-recorded mixes; audience interaction was, well, fucking fantastic; the uncertainty of playing live meant that magic could happen, and it sure beats standing there pretending to twiddle knobs. We ended up releasing 9 live tracks as our debut album. HOWEVER... it kicks fuck out of the equipment (we were doing 2 gigs a month in the UK for a couple of years - a lot of tearing down and setting up) to the extent that one thing preventing us from playing like that now is our gear is broken. It also used to take us a week to set the studio up at home after a gig even though we could set up and soundcheck in an hour and a half at a gig, which meant that writing was often difficult. Plus the uncertainty of playing live meant that things could go wrong very easily! If you're trying to mix the tracks live on stage you need proper monitoring; not something you have every time. Another thing against the way we used to do it is that our writing methods have now changed completely. Previously, our live sets sounded like the records because exactly the same gear was used in exactly the same ways to do both. Nowadays all our music goes down as audio - this is stuff that you _can't_ perform live, 1 instrument per part, because we don't have that many keyboards. Personally I want to do as much live as possible when I play, but at the same time I want my tracks to come across as well as possible. At the moment this means playing .wavs and playing live keyboards/guitar/percussion/didge (delete according to which act). It's a compromise, but there you are. At least there is musicianship on stage during the live set - it's more saisfying for me as an artist/performer and, I hope, satisfying for people who want to see some evidence that performers are doing more than pressing 'play' and dancing. I always used to say that acts who did DAT/CD/WAV 'live' sets were lying to the audience, that if all they want to do was pretend to perform then they should be DJing. I think now that with production taking the direction it has, this is more of a necessity if you want your tracks to sound the same on stage as they do on vinyl. But if you're not going to give added value (and most of the acts I've seen live _do_ have some performance aspect to their set) then for Bog's sake, get off the stage and on the decks. Colin

Hey Roopak, good luck with everything... By the way, can you send me your mailing address please, I want to send you a CD Colin