This is the first backing loop track I've made in Reason. It's for the song "You Alone Can Rescue" written by Matt Redman and I used for our church service a week ago to fill things out while playing the acoustic guitar. It's in the original key (B) and runs at 76 BPM. I play along with it until the end of the "We Lift Up our Eyes" part and then finish out the final chorus with just the guitar alone.
Comments and critique are most welcome and please let me know if you find this useful. Thanks!
You Alone Can Rescue-Loop by ToYourNameBeTheGlory
Monday, October 4, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
I'm back....
I've switched to the Mac 1 1/2 years ago, and it's been great. No glitches that I can recall. Had one problem with the motherboard where the battery would not charge, but brought it back to the Apple store and they repaired it.
One of the best things about the Mac's is the Time Machine backup. "It just works!" Two months ago, I upgraded to a MacBook Pro (wanted to get Firewire which was missing on my aluminum MacBook.) When I first started up the machine, after answering a few questions, it asked me if I wanted to transfer my setup from a Time Machine disk. I answered Yes, plugged in my USB drive from the old computer, and it happily work for a little over an hour, not requiring me to do anything!
Well, it successfully transferred all my files, applications, everything, and even handled the fact that my old Mac was running OSX 10.5.8 Leopard and the new one was 10.6 Snow Leopard. I know that whenever I've had to upgrade to a new PC it takes the good part of a day to move everything over and get it all working properly.
I've augmented Ableton Live with Propellerheads Reason, mainly due to the large library of available backing tracks / loops that are available for many of the songs I play. It's been a quick learn, although I sense that there is alot more that Reason can do, and I'm just scratching the surface. I can say, that it seems to be able to quickly find a great sound much easier and quicker in Reason than in Live. Not sure why, but I wonder if it has to do with the built-in Mastering Combinators in Reason. I also like the face that I can quickly audition different presets more quickly in Reason, so I can find a base sound that can then be tweaked.
Anyway, if anyone was following this quiet blog, I hope to post a tad more regularly.
One of the best things about the Mac's is the Time Machine backup. "It just works!" Two months ago, I upgraded to a MacBook Pro (wanted to get Firewire which was missing on my aluminum MacBook.) When I first started up the machine, after answering a few questions, it asked me if I wanted to transfer my setup from a Time Machine disk. I answered Yes, plugged in my USB drive from the old computer, and it happily work for a little over an hour, not requiring me to do anything!
Well, it successfully transferred all my files, applications, everything, and even handled the fact that my old Mac was running OSX 10.5.8 Leopard and the new one was 10.6 Snow Leopard. I know that whenever I've had to upgrade to a new PC it takes the good part of a day to move everything over and get it all working properly.
I've augmented Ableton Live with Propellerheads Reason, mainly due to the large library of available backing tracks / loops that are available for many of the songs I play. It's been a quick learn, although I sense that there is alot more that Reason can do, and I'm just scratching the surface. I can say, that it seems to be able to quickly find a great sound much easier and quicker in Reason than in Live. Not sure why, but I wonder if it has to do with the built-in Mastering Combinators in Reason. I also like the face that I can quickly audition different presets more quickly in Reason, so I can find a base sound that can then be tweaked.
Anyway, if anyone was following this quiet blog, I hope to post a tad more regularly.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
After a few days on the MacBook....
It's great! Much less latency, and more accurate MIDI timing. Playing VSTi's in Live feel great. In the past I would record a MIDI track and then play it back and say - wow, was my timing that off? On the Mac, I record it in, and on the playback the track sounds great. It's responsive and musical.
Found a great Organ plugin, the VB3. It has a really nice Hammond sound, and a nice Leslie. Much more reasonable than the B4 by NI.
More to come...
Found a great Organ plugin, the VB3. It has a really nice Hammond sound, and a nice Leslie. Much more reasonable than the B4 by NI.
More to come...
Friday, February 6, 2009
When the Laptop Fails...
I have been using a Dell Inspiron 6000 for almost two years leading worship and if you asked me before last week I would say that it has worked great....
However, this past Sunday I was playing an instrumental duet during communion with the sax player when the laptop glitched out. The CPU usage indicator went up high, the meters froze and the sound coming out was all distorted and nasty. I quick turned around to the guitar player and said "Take over, key of C" and thankfully the team stepped in. It was too bad, b/c it was really beautiful up to that point.
It's possible that the hard drive is showing early signs of failure, as the laptop is now three years old. However, up till this point it has worked great. I checked thru the Ableton log files and didn't find anything out of the ordinary.
Anyway, my laptop IS my instrument; and I want something that I can count on. After this wierd experience, I don't feel like I can count on it. When I started using the laptop I used a Korg Synth as a MIDI control and also patched the audio output from the Korg into a small mixer along with the laptop audio so if there was any problem I could mute the laptop and switch to playing the Korg. However, after a few months that was never needed, so lately I've just gone straight to a direct box from the audio interface. After the glitch, I repatched the Korg into the DI and picked up on the next song.
So it's time to get a new "instrument." I refuse to buy something with Vista b/c of the huge resource drain it puts on a system. So if I was to buy a new PC I would need to pay extra to "downgrade" to XP. I borrowed a new Macbook, put the Ableton demo version on it, and it works so smoothly. I was impressed that when I plugged my audio interface in, it was instantly recognized and worked w/o needing to install any drivers. And I could crank the latency way down with no audio artifacts. Granted, it's not fair comparing a 3 year old Pentium M with a new Core 2 Duo, but the whole experience was sweet.
Getting a solidly built laptop is important, as it will always be moved from home to church, and when I compared the better built PC's they were not much less expensive that a MacBook. And when I found a refurbished MacBook for $200 off at the Apple Store, I went for it. Ableton and most of my NI plug-ins are cross platform so they should work well. I need to find a good organ for the Mac - I've been using the AZR3 free one, and that only runs on PC. Can't spring for the B4 now.
Well the MacBook will arrive next week, and I'm looking forward to see how it works. I'm getting ready to move stuff over and rebuild my Live Set so it will work w/o some of the PC plug-ins that don't exist on the Mac. I think the built in Ableton instruments will have to suffice for now.
However, this past Sunday I was playing an instrumental duet during communion with the sax player when the laptop glitched out. The CPU usage indicator went up high, the meters froze and the sound coming out was all distorted and nasty. I quick turned around to the guitar player and said "Take over, key of C" and thankfully the team stepped in. It was too bad, b/c it was really beautiful up to that point.
It's possible that the hard drive is showing early signs of failure, as the laptop is now three years old. However, up till this point it has worked great. I checked thru the Ableton log files and didn't find anything out of the ordinary.
Anyway, my laptop IS my instrument; and I want something that I can count on. After this wierd experience, I don't feel like I can count on it. When I started using the laptop I used a Korg Synth as a MIDI control and also patched the audio output from the Korg into a small mixer along with the laptop audio so if there was any problem I could mute the laptop and switch to playing the Korg. However, after a few months that was never needed, so lately I've just gone straight to a direct box from the audio interface. After the glitch, I repatched the Korg into the DI and picked up on the next song.
So it's time to get a new "instrument." I refuse to buy something with Vista b/c of the huge resource drain it puts on a system. So if I was to buy a new PC I would need to pay extra to "downgrade" to XP. I borrowed a new Macbook, put the Ableton demo version on it, and it works so smoothly. I was impressed that when I plugged my audio interface in, it was instantly recognized and worked w/o needing to install any drivers. And I could crank the latency way down with no audio artifacts. Granted, it's not fair comparing a 3 year old Pentium M with a new Core 2 Duo, but the whole experience was sweet.
Getting a solidly built laptop is important, as it will always be moved from home to church, and when I compared the better built PC's they were not much less expensive that a MacBook. And when I found a refurbished MacBook for $200 off at the Apple Store, I went for it. Ableton and most of my NI plug-ins are cross platform so they should work well. I need to find a good organ for the Mac - I've been using the AZR3 free one, and that only runs on PC. Can't spring for the B4 now.
Well the MacBook will arrive next week, and I'm looking forward to see how it works. I'm getting ready to move stuff over and rebuild my Live Set so it will work w/o some of the PC plug-ins that don't exist on the Mac. I think the built in Ableton instruments will have to suffice for now.
Friday, March 21, 2008
ASIO4ALL V2.8 working well
I've been using the V2.8 driver released in January for a few weeks now and it's stable and working well.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
EIC Grand Piano!
I finally installed the EIC Grand Piano after doing some extensive disk cleanup. It needs almost 4GB of disk space! Anyway, here's what I found:
1) De-fragment your disk! I was having trouble playing the Grand Piano preset without stuttering. The samples are stored in two huge files, which evidently were fragmented all over the place. While trying to play simple parts, the audio would stutter. CPU usage was very low, but the disk activity light was on alot. After de-fragging the drive, it almost plays perfectly.
2) It sounds much nice than the Grand Piano LE when listening in stereo (I'm using earbuds at home.) I really like it. However, as a test, I put the Mono Utility Device after the Grand Piano and compared it to the Grand Piano LE - there wasn't too much difference. Yet, the LE version taxes the system much less. So for playing live, where you're not sending stereo, you can save a lot of space and disk usage by just using the LE version. However, for making recordings, then you can swap the full version and get a really nice stereo image.
1) De-fragment your disk! I was having trouble playing the Grand Piano preset without stuttering. The samples are stored in two huge files, which evidently were fragmented all over the place. While trying to play simple parts, the audio would stutter. CPU usage was very low, but the disk activity light was on alot. After de-fragging the drive, it almost plays perfectly.
2) It sounds much nice than the Grand Piano LE when listening in stereo (I'm using earbuds at home.) I really like it. However, as a test, I put the Mono Utility Device after the Grand Piano and compared it to the Grand Piano LE - there wasn't too much difference. Yet, the LE version taxes the system much less. So for playing live, where you're not sending stereo, you can save a lot of space and disk usage by just using the LE version. However, for making recordings, then you can swap the full version and get a really nice stereo image.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Change Services to Manual Startup
I am trying to optimize my laptop for music use, and the accepted wisdom is to shut down any services that are not needed. So, here is a list of what I shut down, and any consequences of doing so. This list will grow as I try to create a lean-mean music machine!
I read somewhere to change "Help and Support Service" to manual startup, so I did so. Also, did the same with Adobe Active File Monitor (I have Photoshop Elements installed on this machine.) So far, no problems!
I read somewhere to change "Help and Support Service" to manual startup, so I did so. Also, did the same with Adobe Active File Monitor (I have Photoshop Elements installed on this machine.) So far, no problems!
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