June 22, 2010
Live Sound
1 Comment
If you use your laptop and your favorite recording software as the basis for your home studio (like I do), you are accustomed to the idea of playing your studio keyboard and recording the part as a MIDI track, giving you the flexibility of assigning a new voice to the already-played part right up to the time when you mix the song.
But has it occurred to you to use that same recording software to turn your MIDI-ready keyboard into a synthesizer with all the latest and greatest voices that you could play as part of a live show? Me neither! (Until recently.) Here’s how to do it.
Read the rest…
-->
November 20, 2009
Home Recording
1 Comment
I got into computerized recording fairly recently, finally scrapping my trusty (or more accurately, dying) Yamaha MD8 (an 8-track MiniDisc recorder) and substituting a MacBook laptop running GarageBand, Logic Express, and Cubase. A quick rainy weekend spent rewiring the whole studio and I was ready to go!
To get audio in and out of the laptop, I bought an Audio Genie Pro two-channel interface from American Audio. (See my article A Simple Audio Interface For Your Computer for more info about this device.) The Audio Genie Pro’s two-channel limitation was not really a problem, since I usually only record one thing at a time anyway, even if there is another musician with me, which there usually isn’t.
A problem arose, though, when I went to transfer dozens of unfinished 8-track songs from the MD8 to the laptop before bagging the old gear. The MD8 lacks a digital output, and with only a 2-lane “audio highway” leading into the laptop via the Audio Genie Pro it would take four passes to transfer each song. Plus, the resulting tracks would have to be painstakingly realigned on the computer to bring them back into time sync. There had to be a better way!
Read the rest…
-->