Friday, February 13, 2009

I was abducted

Not really though. I haven't been making much music lately, took a little hiatus. Although I did manage a work around on that MIDI CC issue in FL Studio. Seems FL Studio has a bunch of MIDI channels that it doesn't respond to. I re-mapped my nanoKontrol around most of them. Some of them still pop up from time to time but it's not a huge deal anymore.

As such I want to work on a couple songs. I just remembered the IDMF compilation, I really have to bust my ass to get in on that. And it seems GAME 4.0 is finished, it just needs to be packaged and uploaded. Hopefully the people working on it can finish it by the end of the week. Regardless I'll post links up here when it's finished.

Monday, February 2, 2009

I broked MIDI CC 66 :(

So today in FL Studio I revisited an older project I was working on. It's a tight little acid line written on the TS 404. I wonder, is that v2 of the original stand-alone TS404 application? I wonder if Fruity bought them out? Anyways, I added a patch I had made in Synth1 called Ressosaurous. It's pretty acidic and thought it would mend well with my track.

So I go to set the arpeg gate to knob 9, scene 2 on my nanoKontrol (those black units look mighty fine) but I turn the knob a little too fast. Now, these knobs aren't the best in the world and are a tad flimsy. So when I do that FL totally bugs out and stops responding to that knob. At first I thought I broke the pot, but that knob worked fine on all other scenes. So I hop over to Ableton and that knob works fine on ALL scenes.

So here I'm stumped. I go into the Kontrol Editor and change the CC# on that knob/scene from 66 to 67 and viola! FL now recognizes that knob. So I turn on my Alesis QS6.1 and set slider D to CC 66 and guess what? Nothin' doin'. FL totally freaked out and now won't accept any form of CC 66. Not even after a reboot. I really don't want to reinstall FL yet again damnit.

So my music was cut short because I didn't feel like messing around with one less knob. It just totally ruined my workflow for the day. Hopefully I can find a solution, if not, here I come reinstall...

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Vangelis

Today wasn't very productive. I caught a piano riff during work and quickly recorded it. It was just a simple major chord that I played along to Boards of Canada's 'The Beach at Redpoint'. I had some trouble nailing down the tempo so I aborted to a later time. Then I messed about with some stock Impulse banks and came up with a couple groovy little drum lines.

Over at IDMF someone asked how to get the Vangelis arpeggiation in the intro to Blade Runner. I poked around youtube for a bit and found a nice demo on how to get the strings for the intro, but nothing on the arpeggiation. Then I found a video of some guy going to town on the outro theme with his Korg Radias, Trinity and Moog Little Phatty. So I grabbed the chords from the video and recorded the outro into FL Studio using my newly created VangelisRunner patch. I might elaborate on it later and try and pull off the entire outro. Once I figure out the intro arp I'll record that as well. This time I'm doing the entire song though, none of that half-assed 'oh I got the chords down time to quit' shit I did with Underworld yesterday.