Big and Bashful wrote:Nice piece of home made sequencer/synthesizer! I managed to get the full size Soundcraft console a place to live in in the clubhouse where the jammers jam, so I have my dining table back! I have a small 12 track Behringer mixer which can squirt audio through a USB port into my PC, so I can record audio as well as midi to my DAW, which is Cakewalk by Bandcamp, I had the older version which was payware, and fairly pricey, so was happy to see an updated version which is free. My Yamaha AW16G 16 track portastudio thing does have midi ports but I haven't figured out what they do yet, wotking on the PC I am slowly getting to grips with midi and building a track, only copying a song so that I can mute the tracks the jammers and I will play live, leaving things like drums and maybe keyboards to be filled in by a computer, maybe my 10 year old laptop if it is quick enough to cope.
My aim is to get the jammers playing a track, something doing the midi thing to supply drums, all mixed through the Soundcraft mixer into the 4 separate stereo sub-groups, which will be outputted into the Yamaha recorder which can record the 8 tracks, giving me a multitrack recording to work with, (To show the jammers were improvement is needed (mostly everywhere!)).
As the group often consists of three or 4 vocalists, a man on bass or guitar, another man on bass ukelele or ukelele, another who has bass and guitar, another on banjo, I think there is sometimes another guitarist, then me on anything from mandolin, 6 string guitar, 12 string guitar, 6 string Nashville tuned guitar or maybe even simple keyboards, we can easily use all 16 channels on the big mixer. (Where possible I like each instrument to have its own channel, so I can set the channel up and not have to adjust every time a musician swaps instruments, also eliminating the bangs when people unplug an unmuted instrument.
So no home made synths for me, but a whole load of leads and toys!
Hopefully next Friday, once I am back from Gibraltar again, there is going to be a jamming night where all the toys can come out to play! Bet we don't have enough leads!
There are never enough leads. The drummer of the basement band I used to jam with had purchased a lot of digital tape equipment and I advised him to start doing it on the computer but he had a sunk investment he was convinced was how all the "pros" would be doing it for a long time. We did a few recordings where he really utilised the gear. For example, after getting a song down pat by jamming, we'd come in separately to record our individual bits, so even things that were on mics would have crystal clear tracks free of incidental sound from other instruments. But, to be honest, I could have recorded and downmixed all of those with nothing more sophisticated than Audacity, and not devoted so much space and money to recording gear. There is something to be said for tangible gear, though, and despite the advantages of separate recordings, there is an energy to a full ensemble performance that can't be duplicated just in mixing. All the toys definitely have a place.
I have made a tiny collection of midi gear and have mostly figured it all out. I even made my own midi cables from old PC keyboards; they used the same DIN connectors. I've found latency a big issue with every computer I've tried to use as a controller. When I press a key on the computer keyboard and there is a noticeable delay before the sound comes out of the synth, that is a problem. My M-Audio midi keyboard connected directly to my Alesis Nanobass produces no such delay, and my computer is fast, so I assume software is the problem. Overall I've given up on Midi, even though I do have the connectors that will even allow my Android phone to drive old-style midi devices like the Nanobass. I could be mistaken, but midi seems better suited to controlling devices
other than instruments; devices like lights, mixers, and curtains. If I ever want my sequencer to play one of my midi devices, I will hook up mechanical fingers to hit keys before I add a midi interface to it!