Getting my Groove (Electronics) on

Today I decided to dig out my Groove ( or is it Grove? ) Electronics Midi 2 CV unit. I must have bought it back in 1986-7 for £99 as I wanted to use my Roland SH-101 with my small midi studio.

Well, fired it up and I still remember which gel-buttons to press ( it works in binary! ) and everything is
still working great, didn't even have to adjust the tracking for the midi/cv conversion (wa-hoo).

I made a simple video of me testing it out. I'm using logic 5 to run a simple pattern with a Korg DDD-1 to check the timing out with. Here it is...

Sorry for the naff sound quality as I'm only recording through the iphone and small monitor speakers.

Easter Hols Fun

From here....

..to here. And from here to...

..wait for it!

Here!

And to here too!

 

 

And finally to here!

It certainly takes more time than just dropping a file into Kontakt or any other soft sampler, but it's so much more satisfying - recording audio, tweaking the file - looping, cropping any unwanted data and hoping that you can get a successful midi-dump to the sampler. Once it's in the sampler then you get to tweak it again - filters, key spans, re-naming and finally saving. I'd love to find a way to do sample-dumps with my Akai S700 - but for now I'll have to settle with sampling direct to it.

Still works great

I love Opcode. Great software - Vision, OMS and great hardware - Studio 4's and 5's. I use it to run my MIDI rig on the other side of my studio via my trusty G3 Powermac (500Mhz processor and 6gb HD - WOWZA!).

Here are some photo's. The top is Opcode's Studio Vision DAW, the other's are some of my MIDI gear - spot the Studio 4's and Studio 5LX. My other Studio 5 is dead at the moment - need to fix the circuit board (don't spose anyone has any tech leaflets or pix of insode a Studio 5? I'd use my other as ref, but it's got a slightly different wiring system for some reason?).

Opcode Vision 4

S700, S1100, D-550, JV-1080, S750
K5m, K1r, Wavestation SR
M3r, Matrix1000, 2x Studio 5LX's

Jason guarding my EX-800, Digi-001, A-Station
Micro-Modular and ESI's 32 and 2000

Found an old friend

Had a rummage around some old boxes yesterday just to pass the time and came across my old Korg SQD-8 Midi Sequencer.

It was a pain in the butt to write with and it only stored data on 2.8" 'Quick Discs' but I came up with more tunes on it than any computer based DAW that I own now, whether the restrictions it placed made you more creative or I just had more ideas then is up to discussion - but I did enjoy using it, that's for sure. Shame the crummy disk drive gave up the ghost, I'm sure I'd probably still be using it now otherwise.

Here's the sales brochure

Here's the very chap...

Crimble Tasks

I've decided to put some time in re-learning some of my underused kit - my DSS-1  for example hardly ever gets used as a sampler, as it's a pain to map samples ( but it sounds terrific). My Roland S750, which I got almost 3 months ago has hardly been used too, so I'll make some new libraries for it with the two weeks I've got off work. What else? Build some decent patches for my EX-800 and DW-6000 and get to grips with making the most of my Evolution UC33e midi controller.

Studio Cleanup

Well, I spent Sunday re-arranging my racks, deciding that I didn't like the position of my Roland S-750 being stuck at the top (now at a more useable middle location). But what a nightmare! It's not as simple as when I only had a Akai X7000, Roland MKS-70 and TR-505 Drum machine, Kawai K1r and a Korg SQD-8 Sequencer. What's that? 7 audio and 4 midi cables! I now have 25+ midi devices going through two Opcode Studio 5LX's, so that's over 50 midi leads.

One patch bay and two 12 channel mixers full of audio leads - roughly 35 of. IT's a major challenge unplugging, moving and re-connecting them, keeping a track sheet, then building a fresh OMS studio set-up and Patchbay list.
Completely knackering and rewarding in equal measures though.

I still need to fix a bug in my G3 (os 9.2, 500 mhz) where the midi seems to freeze every now and then. More than likely a extension that needs to be removed. I also need to make a useable library of patches, I've got Opcode's Galaxy and also MidiQuest. That should keep me busy for a week or two....