Yoozer

I think it's somewhere in here: http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=180090 "Virus Challenge"?

Orion has a parametric equalizer but does not display its line as an actual graph. The page I suggested has a graphic equalizer. Both have their uses. Imagine a rubber sheet. You poke a ballpoint into it - since it's sharp, you'll get a dip (or peak, depending if you poke downwards or upwards). A graphic equalizer has a set of these pens next to eachother spaced evenly, and you can only move 'm up or down. Imagine the rubber sheet again. Instead of lots of pens, you have 16 marbles - 4 groups of 4, going from small to big. Pressing a marble on the rubber sheet will cause a dip or peak, too, but with a rounded top. A parametric equalizer lets you determine the position of the marble (frequency) and how hard you push (gain). If it has a Q-knob, too, you can change the size of the marble to get a somewhat sharp peak (or dip) or a gently sloping peak (or dip). It's not even a huge issue that the EQ sounds like ass; it's that having it displayed graphically helps you a lot in understanding the matter. Your comment on your brother's label made it sound like he was just starting with it - still, 30 releases in 10 years is not a lot, really, especially if you keep in mind that he started at a point where iTunes was a gleam in Jobs' eye.

Yes - so dump those you don't use for a month. Having hundreds of plugins is counterproductive. A preamp is a hardware box that amplifies a signal so it becomes usable. Whatever he's using, it's probably not a preamp. However, with 9 to 5 it means you don't have to immediately take your guitar to the pawnshop if you ever get into a rough month. No, it proves that you're sane enough not to dump money into harebrained family projects, especially constructs that aren't properly settled after the era of downloading music . The trick is to eliminate and isolate. From the Legacy set, pick a preset with no chorus, no delay, no reverb, no effects, nothing. http://www.geocities.jp/webmaster_of_sss/vst/ has a set of plugins with a no-nonsense interface. For the EQ, it's easy - just pick a piece of existing music. Try extreme settings, like removing all the lows or the highs. For the compressor, it's not that easy, and you could try this plugin here: http://www.audiodamage.com/downloads/product.php?pid=ADF002 Pick a basic drum loop; preferably something from an older CD (around 1990) if you can borrow it. Again, the difference is that this one has a set of very straightforward knobs instead of some intricately rendered mockup of a real device with graphs and god-knows-what kind of nonsense. Change the parameters one by one. First, see what Ratio does. Then, with Ratio turned up for 1/3rd, see what Attack and Release do. Keep comparing. http://www.thewhippinpost.co.uk/mixing-music/compression-audio-mixing.htm has a bunch of settings; but try for yourself if they're actually useful. A compressor makes volume peaks less pronounced. It's like you have a sound increasing in volume (eventually passing the Treshold) until (the time between passing the treshold and taking action is the Attack) the compressor says "oh no you don't" and squeezes the volume peak back down (using the Ratio); then it waits (Release time) a while and quits squeezing. Until there's a peak again, and then it repeats the process. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, so try to not pick up little tidbits of information like this, because they're not byte-sized learning. Quoth the Buddha: Reverb is LSD for audio. It smudges and blurs and makes things sound more complex and dense than they actually are. Removes or boosts frequencies. Removing is easy: - removing low frequencies makes everything sound like listening to iPod earbuds when they're not in your ears - high, chittering noise - removing high frequencies makes everything sound like you're standing in front of a club and the bouncer has the door closed - all you hear is a muffled thumping of the bass. The Dutch text (yeah, sorry - this was for another forum) in the bottom graph means "after applying the EQ to the bassline". Basically your instruments are pieces of a puzzle, and EQ helps to make 'm fit. As for point 3, dropping instruments; just try to cut down the volume of both when they're playing at the same time. You can do this manually, too.

Powercore is TC Electronic, not Creamware . Creamware/SonicCore have their own synth builders. Main reason I wouldn't get it is because the Virus B is cheaper and it won't break with software updates.

Took over with what? What are you using at all to make your music with? If you don't tell, nobody can help. Lesson one: get your terminology right. That's not what a preamp does. http://www.soundonsound.com/information/Glossary.php every time you don't know something - don't guess, search, educate yourself. Make it your habit to dive into Google or Wikipedia to get an answer to what something means. Do keep in mind that people on forums can and will be wrong; while SoS is not the end all be all authority, they've got a better clue of what something means or does. If you bothered to save the file/project, then you know the names of the effects. That's because it takes quite a while to get someone through the drill, especially since you're asking the homebrew 30-minutes workout equivalent of an SAE course. No, not right. See, that's the whole thing; one effect is not like the other and by guessing you'll be more likely to ruin things than to make 'm sound better. First of all, tell us which software/hardware you use; state brand and model. You're not using raw sounds; you're using dry sounds. The difference is like this: http://theheartcore.com/music/armin_communication_dull.mp3 http://theheartcore.com/music/armin_communication_shiny.mp3 Both are exactly the same (free) softsynth, it's just that nr. 2 has effects added. Your software (provided that you don't have some castrated "lite" version or something out of the depths of 1997 when dinosaurs roamed the earth) has built-in effects. Just take one of your dry sounds and try 'm out one by one; it becomes obvious on what they do. At first, consider effects like spices in a meal; if it's all pepper and no steak you screwed up. Then there are effects that do not appear to do much, or aren't that spectacular - equalizer, compressor. These however are vital tools to make the whole of the song sound coherent. These are harder to figure out, so start by studying your instruments and your effects first. Throwing a magical do-it-all-plugin over your track does not make it awesome. It may make it louder, but for that the Lord invented the volume button. You can't polish a turd. So, answer the questions above first

Oh noes, converting a load of mp3s to wave files is a lot of work! No, it's not! Winamp + Disk Writer plugin or RazorLAME will happily do the job for you and they don't cost a thing.

I found those too and I was kind of surprised that they were so bent on burning that thing down. Must be due to the fact that it costs a fortune - but they can't download a demo of it. I could understand this with a horde of people asking for "the Virus sound", preferably for free and with a complimentary puppy.

It however loses in the complexity department, having no such thing as PWM, wavetables, or the new oscillator models. I'm convinced that Albino and Sylenth1 overlap with parts of the Virus, but as of yet there's nothing that emulates it completely. However, making the Nexus sounds (courtesy from Vengeance) is not hard if you know the trick - unison, unison, unison.

Welcome to 1982 when they invented MIDI . Just buy a controller - while the TI's keyboard is excellent, the Polar's isn't and an M-Audio Axiom or Xboard will work just as well. It means dragging along 2 machines, yes - but this is not an issue at all. The Snow fits in your pocket, and if the keyboard is ever hit you won't have to kill people (just maim them badly) for ruining your $$$$ synth.

Workstations contain bread & butter sounds and don't go deep into actual alternative territory, so I'm not surprised by that. All of those workstations have samplers but they're included more as an afterthought. Sampling is done better on software anyway. In terms of sequencing - they're linear. For dance you'd rather want something pattern-based. See if there's a Virus Snow in the store you've demo'd these in.

Audio interfaces have stiff competition, and again I think Roland's strengths are with synthesizers - not directly audio interfaces. Audio interface choice is determined by answering a few simple questions: - what are you willing to spend - how many inputs/outputs do you need - do you want to hook up guitars or microphones? Then it's simply looking for whatever fits those criteria and reading reviews on how well the company keeps up with drivers. If they don't; avoid.

What do you want to buy? The V-synth is pretty awesome for what it can do. The SH-201 not so much (although it's a decent starter's synth with a lot of sliders for cheap). The SonicCell is good if you don't need all that's in the Fantom. I have the FP7 digital piano and I like it a lot, the keyboard of the RD700GX feels really good too. Roland and monitors - not my first choice, really. Audio interfaces are more in Edirols domain.

That's a good idea - they don't have one here, either .

If I catch the Ableton people on the Messe I'm going to hug every single one of 'm.

If you have a printer hooked up via USB, use that cable. It's most likely the same.

Imagine that you're in a store, trying to fit clothes. All measurements are in increments of 5 inches. Nothing fits. No, facepalm.

Or a computer with a software sampler and a library. If you look at the back you won't see an audio output, so no . Cubase 4 has Halion One which has a similar philosophy behind it as the 1080 - cram a ton of samples into a box, seal it, and let people play. There's also Proteus VX (free) which is E-mus take on the JV-1080 box. I've got the Roland XP-30 - the keyboard version of the 1080, basically. I also have NI Kontakt 3. In terms of sound quality, Kontakt is better - but it takes a lot longer to load up a sound. My XP-30 is faster, but editing sounds is a chore with the small display, and its sounds aren't that hyper-realistic. The default Rhodes piano is meh, the one in the expansion board is a lot better, and the orchestral sounds in the expansion card are passable but pale compared to Kontakt's VSL. Besides installing the driver like Zephyr says, Cubase has to know that you want to use this as a controller, so you might have to enable it somewhere in a menu. Doesn't make a difference.

None, because you just don't do this with a single keyboard. What are you willing to spend?

That's exactly what you do in Live, only dragging a sample in an audio track just puts it there instead of making a 16-step sequencer for it. Live is not pattern-based, that's all the difference. Yes, but you'll lose track quickly if none of your patterns look alike. Correct?

Samples are useless in this case; get yourself a neat 4-op FM synthesizer and you'll have all the sounds you want in far better quality. FM is hard to sample; its metallic, glassy sounds have a lot of dynamics going on, so if they're sampled, they sound pretty bad. Or heck, even 6-op will work. http://www.discodsp.com/phantom/ but for the money Native Instruments FM8 and Sytrus are probably better. Too bad the christmas blowout on those is already over.

Max for Live 8. http://www.cycling74.com/story/2009/1/15/114420/967 Looks like I'll be building that concept of mine this year with a bit of luck.

Alternatively, http://www.zzounds.com/item--EMU0202 It's a fact that having it in an external box is simply going to cost more. If you bring up Behringer gear as a counter to this, yeah uh. No.

Absynth lowers the volume of each note depending on the polyphony. 1 note = 40 db. 2 notes is 43 db. (twice the loudness = approx +3 db). 4 notes is 46 db. And so on, until you hit the ceiling. Another option is that with a wonky soundcard the computer or buffer shits its pants - albeit that is something that shouldn't happen when rendering, when your computer has enough time to figure out what the sum of 93158 sinewave notes is.

Hook up Voices of the Apocalypse, combine the trigger with an envelope, and you can have yourself some awesome Ligeti action going on there. This is a project I found out about today - when this works, it'll beat the crap out of Unisyn and SoundDiver, so if you can code and have some older synths that listen to MIDI, give it a try: http://code.google.com/p/ctrlr/

http://www.bome.com/midi/keyboard/ You mean a sequencer instead of something you can drop wave files in. That's what the programs in the list do.