m00dawg

Whoa that was incredibly impressive and catchy! Checking out your discography on iTunes now. Really cool stuff! The hipster in me that I'm trying to claim isn't a hipster (but probably is *sigh*) is wondering if you guys will/would ever do a release on vinyl perhaps?

There is also a to Sidplay on OS X that TK made which outputs the ASID stuff.

Right on, I'll check him out. I did indeed hear about, and participate in, Louis CK's experiment :)

I'll do that, thanks! Just to be clear, you're talking about this guy? I'll be honest, I have not heard of Bob Lefsetz or if I did I wasn't aware of it :)

Hey TK, what was the sound source that you were filtering against for the demos? An MBSID or something else? (They sound AMAZING by the way - this project looks incredibly exciting)

Ah wow thanks for the kind words! We absolutely love the sound we came up with! And, indeed, we have talked about making video game music. That's something we very much want to do and are going to try to get our name out for that once we figure out a good way to do that. We do our own promotion and trying to get our name out enough so that folks within those circles will notice has been a bit tough. But it also has not been our focus right now as we wanted to finish up the album first. It's SOOO close to being done, but we did get a bit distracted while playing around with the concept for our next album (which, oh man, we are ecstatic about). The next album will still have our sort of hybrid chipsurf sound, but we will be taking it in a more acoustic direction for the other bits. It's shaping up to be the perfect sequel to Chipsurf Pipeline I think. The next album should also make things easier to do live shows, but we'll see how that goes. One step at a time :)

Yes indeed the DBX should help with that. It looks to be analog so you will end up with better results than you can digitally (potentially, anyway). Just takes some practice with a box like that and it might be easier to bounce to it until you find the levels you like before you go hooking your mic directly in. That way you won't have to worry about your own vocal takes AND compression at the same tim

Wow those lyrics are awesome! Nice job!

Haha me too!

A compressor is just decreasing the variance in volume, typically above a volume threshold. Ableton Live's compressor visually shows what's happening fairly well. I've attached a screeny of a compressor I used for vocals. No compression would have been a 45 degree line with volume being plotted on the line from left to right. So, where the line bends below 45 degrees is where you are starting to compress the volume. The effect is easy to see visually - the variances in volume are decreased which is done via gain reduction (the GR bar on the right of the graph will kick in so you can see how much reduction is taking place). Since you are reducing gain over the compressed part, you have to often kick the gain back up to get the volume to where it needs to be. If you do it too much, you need to put a limiter on the end, which is just another gain reducer. It, however, prevents hard clipping so you can increase the volume a lot. This is one potential gotcha with destroying dynamic range because if you have to do this a lot, it means you're over-compressing most likely and removing clarity and richness from the audio.r source. Hopefully that makes a bit of sense. Heck doing a quick video of the compressor in action may help explain it better but hopefully you get the idea. It's very easy to do with a DAW, with the downside being that you can probably achieve better results in the analog domain over the digital one. The price you pay for convenience and cost :) Most professional mastering studios likely use analog compressors, along side tons of expensive gear :) That said, you can achieve some very good results in a DAW. Not suggesting you drop what you're doing and go get a DAW though. The most important thing is, ultimately, the music, not the mix so if you're happy with your MPC, keep doing what you're doin' as clearly it seems to be working. If you do want to experiment around on the cheap, check out Reaper as it's a very nice and affordable (free, in most cases) conventional DAW.

The vocals? Possibly but I think that can be corrected. I actually like that effect because it's sort of chorusey in places and plus the harmony is awesome. Maybe panning a bit more aggressively? If you can, a vocal compressor can probably do a lot as well. I'm often surprised how much compressors help things and usually try to avoid using them (Loudness Wars being what they are) but they are valid and important uses. Beyond that, I think if you dropped the lows a bit, tried touching the mids just to see, and then increased their volume it may help. They sort of climb on top of the bassline a bit and I think that might be part of the issue. Again sorry if I'm over-analyzing - you didn't ask for a critique but I had my mastering engineer hat on so it just sort of popped out of my mouth :) This is my favorite track you've posted on the forums by the way, so perhaps that's another reason I have so many comments :)

TK has given us a few hints about it on the forums here and there, but nothing official just yet. It will be using the LPC CORE but will probably keep the PIC COREs for controlling the SIDs. The control surface won't change enough to make v2 control surface designs incompatible. That's about all I can remember :)

The bassline sounds awesome! In terms of vocals, if you were going for the more subdued style, it could just be a case of mic choice or placement? I agree going punk on this one would probably be over the top :) They just don't pop like they should - I'm having trouble hearing the lyrics for instance. So perhaps you just need to bump up the levels a bit with some EQ changes. That could do the trick.

Song is awesome! You mentioned the MBCV but what is it controlling? Can you elaborate there? Harmonies are really good too! I do have to make some suggestions on the vocals though. Your vocals are way too drowned out and meek. EQ should help with the drowned out bit, but the meek part is a function of your inflection and volume. It sounds like you were nervous when you recorded the vocals. I say that because my first vocals sounded similar and I was nervous about doing vocals with other people in the house. If you're gonna do vocals, you just gotta go for it. And going for it means projecting, and getting past the being embarrassed about doing them, particularly on the bad cuts. You gotta put it out there and, as a result, there's gonna be some bad cuts. Just keep doing them until you get them right, but don't be shy about it. That's just a guess anyway since I had to do the same thing. Apart from that, using some dynamic range compression on the vocal track can help a bit as well. Not trying to berate you, your vocals, or the song, but just trying to provide suggestion. The vocals have lots of potential, the harmonies are great, the synth lead after them also fantastic. It's a good song and if you can get the vocals fixed up a bit, it will be a great song.

A green bar can indicate your LCD might not be getting data, so check the pins that connect the LCD from the base to the control surface first (you can sometimes coax them into being naughty or nice by pushing on the board around those connections a little). You can also check to make sure the synth itself is working by trying to play notes and things to see if that works. If they do, you know it's probably something to do with the LCD.

I should preface this by saying I haven't built one myself, but the merger would run on it's PIC chip separate from the CORE and would sit in front of the MIDI inputs on your SID CORE. So you run your MIDI keyboard and external in to the merger and it would then connect to your SID CORE via internal MIDI connections.

V3 would use the new LPC core, which I think supports 2x MIDI out of the box and also supports MIDI over USB so yeah that should largely resolve it. But just because it's a separate module doesn't mean you can't have it in the box. If you're building your own chassis you can just have internal connections between the modules - the external observer wouldn't be aware there happens to be a full CORE dedicated to MIDI merging. And doing it that way should keep latency reasonable (just an educated guess there).

Hah I, too, forgot you could do that :) Oops.

That should be possible with MBSIDv3 but as it's not finished yet, one of these is probably what you want: http://ucapps.de/midi_router.html http://ucapps.de/midimerger.html

*oh* now I see what you're getting at. Hmm yeah that's an interesting way to do it!

It sounded like he was wanting to change the behavior in real-time though? I thought the patch handing for MBSID had already been done (as in if you change a parameter, it just changes the patch state in RAM, not in flash until you save it)?

I don't see that function as being available either using NRPN or CCs, though I only took a brief look. So currently the answer seems to be no, although it may be possible to add this by making some firmware changes. Or perhaps it is something already in the works for MBSIDv3?

Hmm I hadn't thought about stuff like Max4Live but that actually would be wildly convenient! I think I'd still opt to make a control surface just to have something to play with while I'm finding a sound. That way I don't have to remap any buttons to anything on my soft knobs and things (which I don't use as much as I probably should). Or, better yet, if the control surface could send MIDI out events, I could do some automation using dedicated knobs into my DAW! But I agree, it makes sense to do a software interface first. Just hope you keep all the doo-dads for us wanting to build a hardware interface ;)

Hah agreed. But then again, rubbing the SIDs directly on the carpet is probably safer than the C64 PSU :)

We talked about other things as well though didn't we? If it's just the crowbar that does the important quick short protection then I could probably swing that (perhaps in my next design) but I thought there were other things? I really wanted to use the resettable pico-fuses and MOVs as well to protect surges and things (I was going to use standard replaceable fuses on mains as well - I do that now).