David’s Adventures Through the World of Music Creation and Sonic Exploration

While bouncing the remix I’ve done for Pandora I encountered a strange problem. I could, without any problem at all, play back the song without hearing skips and glitches. The CPU load was around 40% and the UAD load was at 85% - so you could say that the track was nearly finished - or that I need a third UAD-1 card.

When bouncing there was a short skip at 1′57″ which really puzzled me. I tried bouncing the track several times, but the skipping was at the exact same frame everytime. I even tried moving the track in the grid and added up to 70 bars of silence, and bounced the silence, but the skipping occurred at the exact same place. Yes, the real time check box is unchecked.

So, how did I solve it? Well, the solution wasn’t really the most obvious one. I moved everything from bar 68 to the end 8 bars to the right (so I could get the reverb tails and the decay of the delays and so on) and then bounced bar 3 to 76 (my songs almost always starts at bar 3) and then bouncing bar 76 to 233. Then I created a new project and added my previously bounces to the grid, placing them at the bars as in my base remix project. Worked like a charm, but it’s not the prettiest solution. If I tried to freeze tracks as well to solve the skipping during bounce but freezing resulted in a serious crash and trying to kill the Cubase 4 executable shut down my computer very rapidly.

I’ve also installed Cubase 4.1 64 bit, but that won’t find Native Instruments Battery 3. There’s always a problem lurking around the corner - isn’t there? And Z3ta+ isn’t working in a convenient way. It can, whenever it feels like it, produce 100 dB noise which would render some of my other plugins stop functioning - UAD Precision Limiter, for example.

My Motu Midi Express 128 works very well though. The timing is great and I can only blame myself for not hitting the keys on time.

2008 has kicked off at an amazing speed. I do spend too much time at the office and haven’t had the time, inspiration nor excitement to start working with the pile of projects Fred has managed to get his hands on. My old DAW (a trusty Pentium 4 running at 2,8GHz) started to throw exceptions over and over resulting in dull blue screens so it wasn’t really that much fun working with it. And, when my studio space in the apartment is rather limited I turned to software since they only take up hard disk space (and the space on the shelf for the box, unless it’s a download version) and that didn’t really do wonders on the already tired processor.

I’ve finally invested in a new casing, new motherboard, processor, memory, hard disks, everything. It’s a Core 2 Quad at 2,4GHz with 4GB’s of RAM running a 64 bit operating system, and it’s really nice to work with. Waldoft Edition wouldn’t install though, but I’ve contacted the support and they will produce a 64 bit installer. Thank you!

I started working with a remix for the Swedish artist, Pandora, and when I needed a certain sound, I could just load a new instance of Native Instruments Massive or Gforce Minimonsta and start to program it not worrying about overloading the CPU.

When the Massive Disco Monsta Remix of “Don’t You Know” is finished, I’ll be turning to a track by Adam Tensta. As I said, 2008 has started at an amazing speed.

I had my first Clavia Nord Wave hands on experience the first day it was available at JAM and after playing a couple of presets I dug into the depths of wavetables and samples versus subtractive synthesis. The layout is great! Nord Lead 2X meets Nord Lead 3, but it reminds more of the NL2 due to the lack of the fantastic (and expensive) knobs and LEDs on the NL3.

The first sound I tweaked was a simple and slightly detuned saw oscillator patch (mindXpander and Laserdance fans will recognize it as the classic staccato chords, one of the main ingredients in the production) and after that I tweaked a bassdrum using nothing but resonance and the tube effect. The tube effect is really neat and can really make the patches scream like on the Nord Lead 2 (which had a distortion effect with a setting of on or off). What’s missing though, when it comes to filters, is the fabulous filter LP+notch found on the Nord Lead 2.

Well, I could spoil the nice surprises which you’ll find when you try out the synthesizer yourself - but I won’t. Just go down to a store near you and give it a go.

So, would I want one? YES!