Electronic Music Production

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Just a follow up on the story about Synthrepair. Stephen Jones is great, I used the the custom chips that I ordered from Belgium and they sound great, as it is I only had to replace one faulty chip but I ordered six waiting for the day when more of them break... can't wait.... ! I working on a track as I write this that uses the Juno.....

Went to see Jamie-T at the Metro last night, errrr, can't say it was exactly my thing, but apparently this guy is big on Triple-J. I got the feeling that I should have known the words because everyone else seemed to....B-) so in order to help my self through the experience I downed a few amber beverages, needless to say I'm not feeling my usual sprightly self today so I'll keep this short....

I didn't like it very much.....

After the show we went to the Civic hotel, they had another live band playing Jazz/Blue stuff that was far more enjoyable, in fact I was bopping around to that more than I was to Jamie-T. Well, that's got to be a first for me, three bands in 2 days, 5 bands if you include the support acts..... not bad for a studio bound electronic music producer.....

I went to see John Farnham last night, it must be about his 20th comeback concert and, as he joked, definatly the Last Time he would perform. The show was good, but not great. I have to admit that I don't know all of Johns work, manly only listened to Whispering Jack over the years but I was still surpised to realise how many of his other tracks I knew since many of them where hits during the early 90' and tracks like Freedom had been used in advertising. His voice is still top notch and he still gets around the stage all right given that he is about 60 years old. I like the venue, I had not been to the Lyric Thearter at Start City before. It's very modern, not to large, has comfortable seating and the sound is great quality, using Myer M Series flying stacks, however I did find the mix a little off putting.... and this is where the show fell apart for me. First thing I noticed when I sat down was that the sound guy was positioned off to the side of the stage, behind the stage curtain. I thought to myself, how could it be possible for him to make an acurate mix from sitting over there, it then became apparent that it was not. It seemed that they may have pre-auditioned the mix and saved the setting in the mixer and recalled setting for each track, with fingers crossed. This was became painfully obvious to me when there was a solo from the male backup singer, a Baratone, as he went to solo and sung the low note I heared the distinct click of the EQ and the low freqencies suddenly jumped, I sure most people would not of noticed this little slip of timming but it was like dogs proverbiales to a trained ear. Another little thing that I noticed was that the bass guitar was not loud enough and was not gating off, so it lost it's punch and sounded muddy in the background of may of the tracks especially the tracks from Whispering Jack. There is alot of programing on that album, it's very good quality, much of the bass is programmed and compressed up nicely to sound real punchy this effect was lost on the live stage. Infact it seemed that the mix was really geared up for his newer stuff because that sounded much better, those albums (33 1/3 & Chain Reaction) tended to be recorded with live musicians and not programmed. One other thing that was missing was onstage percussion, there would have been some much more groove if there was a precussion player, especially during Touch Of Paradis e it was bland without it. There where a few other little things that erked me aswell but I'll save you from bordem and end here. I only too one picture since I forgot to take my good camera and only had my phone.

My JUNO-106 is a little bit broken.... (Juno-106's keyboards suffer from this annoying problem where the VCA/VCF output chips just decide to blow up!) Normally I would go to Phase Engineering to get it fixed up but I have since found that have moved to the Blue Mountains, which is not exactly convenient, so I have just contacted this bloke who is located in Sydney. I never realised that there are in fact third party chips available which sound eactly the same and last much longer, really, it should have been apparent to me that someone would make such chips because the original Roland one stink..... I'll let you know how it works out, because I know you are dying to hear !

It's about time I posted something on here. And the news is that I have built myself a new computer !! It's well wicked….. I've finaly bitten the bullet and dumped Windows and built myself a system that runs Linux, Debian 5.0 with Xen virtualization is my weapon of choice. My hope is that I can use this cool virtual toy call 'PCI Passthrough' and the idea is that a virtualized Windows XP system will have full access to the Creamware Scope card that I have in the system. The pain and heartache I have gone through to get here has been huge, I can't explain all of it but let me just say that I have ended up with two $500+ motherboards and I will never be buying a Gigabyte system again…. I love ASUS…. 'nuff said…. Anway the new machine has i7 920 CPU, 12gb RAM, 2x RAID5 Arrays totalling in 2.5TB storage. There are some really cool things I can do with this system and then there are some things that should just work but simply don't, like the damn iPOD… it’s really frustrating but a fun game at the same time. Now that I have some content for you all I will post up my stories as this progresses. But for now here are so pics for you to ogle at, the first one is a shot during the build when I was installing the Gigabyte board, the second is more recently after I installed the ASUS board and took a screenshot of the desktop... YEAH BABY !

(click for a larger view)

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