The Smith's Journal - January 2010

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2010-01-06

Finally getting somewhere with studio cabling

Tags: Studio

(My goodness, has it really been a year and a half since I last wrote about this?)

After days of trudging through blizzards uphill with frostbite being attacked by demonic wires, alien birds and killer tropical spiders, I am finally getting somewhere with the ongoing Forth Bridge project that is planning my studio cabling! Being virtually snowed in at home has been a wonderful motivator for the Christmas break :-) I took apart my racks and rearranged some things for better operability. I've since been buried in manuals and vast cabling charts and have re-routed enough leads to make my own Large Hadron Collider. Tonight I started plugging stuff back in again and now I'm delighted to be able to play one synth from another, and hear them together with effects and the computer playing music too. Then I dared to start the sequencer on my new SQ80 synth and found some pattern left in its memory from the previous owner, so was able to wander over to my rackmount EQ and start re-learning how awesome it is, experimenting with narrow-band parametric sweeps while the synths played in a loop. Easily pleased :-)

I tested footpedals on the SQ80 which has now taken the place of the Casio VZ1 as MIDI master keyboard controller; my volume pedal works happily, but my sustain pedal doesn't: the SQ80 needs one with inverted polarity.

This is all quite marvellous considering I've had some of these toys for many years now and some have never even had audio pass through them :-/ The word "toyshop" is a gross understatement. There are still more cables to make/buy, and lots of stuff to fathom out and optimise but we are most definitely winning a slow victory :-)

Hopefully if I can just keep going, then quite soon there will be some new photos to show, and then even better, some sounds to hear...

2010-01-12

On the radio

Tags: Drumming, Pro

Famous for yet another fifteen minutes! I was invited by BBC Three Counties Radio presenter Tim Wheeler to be interviewed on The Lorna Milton Show. See my other page about me teaching students at the University of Hertfordshire, where you can hear the interview and our short performance that was broadcast to the nation today.