Digital Music Front

Posts Tagged ‘synths’

Again with the slackness, and again due mostly to a lack of progress. I have been working on a new track lately and I’m happy with the way its coming along. I’ve been trying to modify my work flow to just put in an hour here and and hour there instead of setting aside whole days as that rarely happens and often I find when I do that I’m just not in the mood anyway. I tried to set aside some days in my calendar to work specifically on my music, but on the first day I ended up having to reinstall Logic because it was crashing on start up, and the second time I just couldn’t really get into the groove. So now I’m trying to take advantage of the mood when it strikes me, even if its only for an hour. So far the results are promising. I still have 2 unfinished tracks which need work but I think I might leave them til my new years holiday to work on again.

My plans to buy a hardware synth have been shelved for the moment mostly due to financial reasons. I have been looking into getting a DIY synth kit just for the sake of learning about how synths work better and having a bit of fun but I don’t know if my solder hand is up to the task, its never been very steady and something requiring fine motor control like a PCB might not be within my capabilities.

Yes I have been massively slack about updating this site. There are any number of excuses I could make, but in essence it all boils down to one thing: I haven’t been working on music at all lately. You would think after buying new monitors I might have lept back into it, eager to finish off some of the stuff I’ve left unmastered, but no. Its the same old story, I’m scared of it, I’m not compelled to work at it. I went out to see Protoculture a couple of weeks ago, one of my musical heroes. Every time I’m at a gig listening to great music I get this wave of motivation to get back into my own work, but i think its 9/10ths wishful thinking that one day I might be able to produce stuff as awesome as that.

Of course, my solution to this latest bout of procrastination is thinking I now need to buy a hardware synth, which I conveniently cannot afford right now, thus affording me another excuse to not do anything new until I can. Yes, I realise its getting pathetic at this point, but there is some actual justification for this new desire. As much as I love Logic and Reason, I find one of the most frustrating things about them is controlling synth parameters. Doing things ‘manually’ with the mouse is pain and it also restricts you to controlling one thing at a time. Mapping controller dials is an improvement, but I’ve found that in Logic its a pain in the ass to do, especially on 3rd party plug-ins, and in Reason the default maps it creates always seem to map to the oddest parameters (at least for my controller). My controller also only has 8 rotaries so its not enough to control a whole soft synth.

When you’re writing music in a studio environment, the less efficient means of control is less of a problem because generally you’re not trying to tweak things in real time. If you just want to jam however, its less practical. I envy The Rockstar Philosopher for his ability to just pick up his guitar and start mucking around, for me its a much more involved process which just serves as another deterrent to me actually sitting down and doing some work…