Everything is breaking, now my trusty midi keyboard.

This was like a member of family I’ve had it so long, since around 1993, the infamous “yobcuts” was the first composition made on it.

In 1999 a speaker fell on one of the keys and broke a chunk off it, but that injury only added character.

It died peacefully last week, simply plugged it in to find no sign of life. Opened it up to have a butches inside and it was full of all sorts of dusty crap, and i think it had at one stage have been host to a colony of something insect like.

Anyway, ordered an M-Audio Axiom 49 to replace it. Lord knows when it will arrive, still hasn’t come into stock.

RIP Roland PC-200 MK2 1993-2007

I’ve been playing with Native Instruments Reaktor and have come up with a tastey little number.  Reakter lets you create instruments from scratch by sticking modules and then connecting them together, a bit like connecting chips on a circuit board.  It’s great fun, you can really mess things up like noones business.

I’ve come up with Scented +LFO, you stick a sample it and it plays it so that speed doesn’t affect pitch, and pitch doesn’t affect speed.  You can play notes whilst you move the play position up and down.  Or, toggle the LFO on and have that bend the sample up and down.  It sounds silliest with voices.

Above is the structure of it.  I feel like such a circuit bender!  Download and have a play with it.  But you do need reaktor 5.

I’ve decided it must be punishment, I don’t believe that a god exists, but if he/she did they were tut-tuting everytime I make a “beyond my means” purchase and cursing said purchase to upset and befuddle me.

The latest upset, well, I actually bought it weeks ago but as seen as I fell out with the world for a few weeks… I only write music for fun, a silly hobby and I’m not even very skilled at it. So splashing out on extraordinarily expensive software bundles for just a hobby, when you have financial problems (due to other deeper problems… shush) is a wholey stupid thing to do. But I am stupid so I went and ordered NI Komplete 4 anyway.

It turned up in an impressive looking box, albeit one with ugly stickers thrown all over it.

Open up the box and you’re greeted by some lush bounty, a multi-dvd box and an entire shelf of manuals. It comes on 8 full-size (8GB DL) dvd’s, for all the software and sample libraries, enough to fill even a freshly formatted HD a couple of years ago. Installing the application’s disk was OK, just a standard mac installer package type affair. But then you have to load an app called NI Service Centre, which activates the software. NI have some very strict copy-protection going on and every time I tried to activate it would fail telling me “a technician has been informed of the problem.” I hit NI’s forums to discover that most people are having the same problem and it appeared to have been going on for days. So you pay all this money, and you can’t even use it when you get it! It was a further few days before activation worked.

Oooh, I’ve got some reading to do, lets dive straight in shall we?

Whaaa? I suddenly can’t read!!! And ever page of every book is illegible. What’s wrong with my brain? Yup, I purchased the bundle from a quite respected UK based musicians equipment store, and yet somehow, I’ve ended up with german (I think?) manuals! Arrrrgh!

And the misery didn’t stop there, a few weeks later, because I hadn’t needed yet to use some of the sample libraries I came to install the rest only to discover that I had 2 disk 6’s, meaning I didn’t have disk 5. Double Arrrgh! To be fair the online store have been helpful, for the manuals they are arranging a replacement from the suppliers and letting me keep what I have so far so I don’t have to do anything other than wait. When it came to the disk, it was a little trickier but still they arranged for a courier to arrive at me house the next day and collect the spare disk 6. But the suppliers still haven’t come up with the goods. Turns out Native Instruments and their distributors are freeeeaking useless and I hope them a crappy christmas.

On a more positive note, amazon.co.uk had some more wii’s to sell today, they emailed to tell me they were putting them online at 3pm-4pm, so there I was at 3pm refreshing feverishly and at around 3:15 my work paid off when it appeared and I purchased quick as. I must have been pretty lucky because I checked back at the page just after completing the order and they had already gone. Knowing my luck though it will probably turn up with a power cord designed for china.