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.

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.

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!

Better Performance than factory ASIO driver for Lexicon Lambda

I'm using the Lexicon Lambda audio interface and the factory supplied ASIO driver is terrible - the latency is unusable for playing VSTs live (40 - 60 ms). Instead, I'm using ASIO4All and have my latency around 9ms (144 samples). I wish it was better, but it is stable on my Dell Inspiron 6000 running XP. It would be nice if the factory supplied driver worked better, because I'm not sure what extra layers ASIO4ALL is going thru, but the net result is much better.

Here's how to set up the Preferences in Live - Go to the Audio tab, and select:
Driver Type = ASIO
Audio Device = ASIO4ALL v2



Then click on Hardware Setup which will bring up the ASIO4ALL control panel:



In the left hand column, highlight the on-board sound device, and click Disable. Then highlight the Alpha and click Enable. If you are not recording but just playing, you might find better results if you just enable the "Out" part of the Alpha and not the "In" since you don't need the input to play. Then, with the Alpha highlighted, you can adjust the ASIO buffer size.

I like to run things this way, because my on board audio is freed up if I need to go into some other app Ii.e iTunes), or if the system is trying to get my attention audibly. The Lexicon interface is dedicated to running Live.

Two other things I do to improve stabililty is to disable the radio on my wireless networking, and also to install SpeedswitchXP and set the AC performance to "Max Performance." This seems to get every last drop of processing power directed at my audio synthesis.

It would be nice if Lexicon will create a low-latency native ASIO driver for their devices, because obviously it can be done! I don't know the cost of going thru the WDM driver layer, but the net result is much better than the factory driver.

Wisdom from the guys in the CHB

A few years ago, the Passion Subway Series had it's Long Island stop at our church. We got to know the guys in Charlie Hall Band and really enjoyed hangin' out with them. I've kept in touch online with Brian (keyboards) and Dustin (drums) and they've helped me get started with Ableton, Absynth and using a laptop for playing out.

Here is some collective wisdom from them...

Brian wrote:

Most of the sounds that I use are from Absynth (I recently upgraded to 4.0 also). I also sample a lot of sounds into Ableton's Simpler plug in. Think of it as a digital sampler where you can store sounds from gear that you could never possibly take on the road. I really love it.

This sparked my interest - he had already recommended Absynth, which I was using stand-alone. Perhaps I need to also think of it as a sound-design tool rather than just a great sounding synth. Create some textures, render it, then load it up back into Live and then chop it up and process is more in Live.

He also runs Absynth and Ableton separately, rather than Absynth hosted as a VST plugin inside of live. This brought up an interesting question with an even more profound response:

Q: how do you get your rhythmic stuff in absynth to sync with everything else that is going on?
A: I sync it via BPM rather than locking it to timecode. Absynth doesn't really sync to code and for the kinds of sounds I'm using it works just as well to sync to BPM. I tend to not use arpeggiated sounds at all in a live setting because it tends to just make the mix muddy.

This is just what I have been finding out too. I try to get these great time-synced things worked out which sound great at home, but they just don't sit will with the whole band playing. Back to the drawing board!

I appreciate them taking the time to help us out.

Live 7 came yesterday!

I like Live 7 so far. The slicer and Rex import are great features. Time signature changes are huge for me as we often do songs other than in 4/4. Last night was the first time I tried out the EIC - unfortunately my laptop only has a few gig free on the HD so I installed the LE version of the EIC and the full Keys pack. Pretty nice sounding Rhodes in there, but the Grand Piano LE was lacking - think I need to try installing the full Grand Piano to give it a fair try. The solo instruments have potential, but I think the ensembles need effects applied to them to really sound big. Need to experiment with it more.

Ableton Tutorials

Greg over at digitalworship.net has some excellent tutorials on how he uses Ableton Live. He also posts some of his set files which have really helped me understand how to set things up. I have been using Live playing with a band in church, but am experimenting with using it just solo or with an acoustic guitar player. I want to create a sound that is not too big or cheezy, but just right. He has some great suggestions for using Live.

Live 7 almost delivered!

Live 7 suite (boxed) almost here! Fedex site shows:

Date/Time

Activity

Location

Details

Jan 24, 2008

6:25 AM

On FedEx vehicle for delivery

HOLBROOK, NY

I've been using the downloaded version of Live 6 and upgraded to the 7 suite. Got the serial numbers two weeks ago, but it looks like the box will arrive today!

Well, here goes...

Why a new blog? Simply put, it helps me to organize my thoughts and discoveries. There are some great forums and blogs visited by very creative people that have helped me get started and develop my sound. At this point in my life, I need a place to stockpile all this information, as well as provide a place for others to join in. So rather than creating another forum, I hope that this blog will be a way to hold helpful ideas and links to help those wanting to use a laptop as your primary instrument. Some of this will document my original findings, but much of this will be links to other helpful stuff discovered on the net.

I began using a laptop to augment my keyboard sounds in 2006 - I am now exclusively using a laptop as my keyboard instrument when playing live.

Well, the blog has been created with the obligatory first post, so let's see where this goes!