In The Lab – Dec 2009

Greetings crew….

Happy Holidays (Kwanzaa, Happy New Year, etc) to all. A lot of you catch my tweets about what I’m doing musically, so I wanted to give you a peek at where it all happens. All the composers, songwriters, musicians, etc have such a spot, most of them (obviously your truly) tend to call it a lab of some sort. I was talking with a friend yesterday, who’s a songwriter/musician/producer about studio workspaces and how they run the gamut of styles. I kinda thrive on ergonomics, comfort, and organization, etc…helps the muse flow freely. As for as tools, I’m a firm believer that the best utilize what they have to the max to get the results needed.

I’m looking forward to completing a long awaited CD that my partner and I have been working on, continuing work on a collaboration called “contempojazzsoulhop” with my boys Fave and Todd, a smooth jazz project with KLWJazz, more remixes for Philip Clark, gospel jazz keyboardist Kevin Battle, vocal group Destined 2 Praise, vocalist Dana Yates, more production work with AfterSix Productions, saxophonist Harron Evoria, annnnnnd my own CD project, whew. Ok, anyway, here’s mine, in it’s current form:

That’s about it…now u see where the tweets flow from, the hangout spot.

Happy New Year…

peace,
F!

Call me a neo-Luddite (old tech wins this round….)

In my recording studio, I have a very old sampler, a Yamaha TX16W. This sampler has a 3.5″ disk drive that reads Yamaha’s proprietary format sample lilbrary. I have at least three cases of sample disks that I’d like to convert before possibly selling them with the sampler. I really didn’t want to fire up the sampler, connect a MIDI keyboard, play the sample, record the audio into my computer, and save it…but…that would seem the only way to do it….UNTIL…I remembered that I could use an old app called Sound Converter to read the sample disk and do the conversion for me. The problem was these disks are ALL 3.5″ DSDD floppy disks. A-ha…no problem – I can buy USB drive 3.5″ floppy disk reader. Drive purchased, disk inserted…no cigar…the drive only reads HD 3.5″ floppies….bummer. Light bulb goes off…pull out ye olde Power Mac 7100, and hook it up….it has an internal CD-ROM drive *and* internal floppy drive that reads 3.5″ DSDD and HD floppy disks….voila! Fortunately, since I started music production on this computer like 10+ years ago, it’s still running Mac OS 9.1, and has Sound Converter installed as well. Cool!

I set it up, hooked up a spare flatscreen monitor, an iOmega Zip drive and again was in business, like the old days! Fortunately, I was able to find the app PC Exchange on an older Mac OS system update disks that had the DOS Compatibility app software on it which allows me to read DOS formatted floppy disks. I popped the first sample disk in, opened the file with Sound Converter, and did the conversion…good to go. Now to do the other gazillion disks!

Definitely paid to keep the old hardware around. Yeah, for those who know, the samples are 12-bit (as opposed to 24-bit today), but I love samples….the bigger my library, the better…they sound pretty decent for a sampler from the 80’s 😉 It’s 3:13am Saturday morning….thankful I can sleep in and late for once! Good night!

peace…

F!