I’ve been playing around with audio a lot lately, both for work and for fun. Work has been mostly doing cleanup of the audio track of a keynote lecture that we videotaped. I made the mistake of trusting some new equipment and recording the live sound from the lecture in the camera instead of sneaking an audio recorder into the podium and synching it up in post-production. Fortunately, the shareware sound program Amadeus II does an excellent job with filtering out excess room tone, finding odd peaks and amplifying low points without distortion.
For fun, I’ve been tooling around with Apple’s new GarageBand. It’s a blast… I’ve assembled two kinda nifty songs just from the default instrument loops and samples. I’ll probably put together a music page, sorta like my movies page, and have them available for download later. Anyway, default loops are nice and all, but I want to be able to make my own stuff… I haven’t yet hooked up the therimen or any of the analog instruments that I’ve got, but I did toy around a bit with MIDI input from the old 66 key synthesizer. It’s a nice stand-alone keyboard as far as portability goes, but it lacks some important features like velocity sensitivity and weighted keys. I’ve got a replacement for it coming in from ZZounds. So far I’ve been really happy with the store, even though the order hasn’t been without some hiccups…
The keyboard I’m getting is the Fatar Studiologic 88. It’s a MIDI controller, with no built in synthesizer. That’s exactly what I was looking for. When I’m using GarageBand, the computer will be doing the synthesizing work. If I just want to play around with a stand-alone keyboard, I’ve got a Korg X5DR synth module that I bought from a friend a couple of years ago.
Anyway, the first keyboard that I ordered was ‘factory blemished’. I don’t mind a misprinted logo or a scratch or dent on something that’s not going to be a showroom display model, so saving $100 on that was pretty much a no-brainer. Unfortunately, when the keyboard arrived, in addition to the minor ‘factory blemish’ dent on the front, it had been rather more heavily blemished in transit. It looked like it had been dropped on one end. The case was split open and the top octave of keys were rattling and loose. So it’s going back.
The folks at ZZounds got the return process going in a hurry, and I got an e-mail (with tracking numbers!) showing that they’d shipped the new keyboard out within three hours of my having called them. It should be here late tomorrow, which is very nice service. Then I’ll just have to figure out how to get it home in the back of my bug.