Archive for January, 2010
Dragon Warrior 4 – Tower Music – Remixed Drafts
Here are my two first drafts of the in progress remix of the Dragon Warrior 4 Tower Music. I’ll write more about it when I decide it is finished.
Current Draft:
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First Draft:
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Here is a short little take I remixed of the fanfare from the NES game Contra. I used the Roland XV-5080 and Fantom XR for this. More specifically I used the SRX-04, SRX-06, and SRX-10 expansion boards patches.
Enjoy!
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Dragon Warrior 4 – Tower Music
A friend asked me to see what I can do with this midi music of the game Dragon Warrior 4 if I had time to check it out. He mentioned that it was making patch changes to sounds that his synth doesn’t have. I have identified that the MIDI is most likely a Roland GS midi of the SC-88pro sound set, as none of the patch changes call for sounds from anything newer than the SC-88pro. I started cleaning up the first couple tracks, getting rid of redundant control messages mostly, and have recorded the song unaltered on my SC-8850.
Here it is:
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(MP3: Dragon Warrior 4 -Tower Music)
Now, it is time to see what I can do with it on the XV-5080 and Fantom XR 🙂
Messing around with Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta
On a whim I’ve started messing around with the current beta of Adobe Lightroom 3. I’ve “developed” some new photos of Herman using the software, and am liking the results I’m getting so far.
The image tweaking capability is quite good, despite the fact that some features are disabled in this beta. I don’t care for the UI much though, coming from only iPhoto, it will take some getting used to.
I like the export options available in Lightroom. Being able to set up a preset that will resize my images and add a watermark automatically is fantastic! Until now I have just been going through a whole procedure of having to drag images out of iPhoto to a desktop folder or external drive, run a shell script that that can resize all the images in a specified directory, or load them up one at a time in GIMP and resize them. I’ve never even bothered with adding a watermark before mainly because of that extra work I would have to do on each image.
The other thing that I’m liking about Lightroom VS iPhoto is that it appears to keep track of all my edits rather than just “overwriting” my images and leaving me only the ability to revert to the original image.
Finally, Lightroom runs on my main Windows workstation, instead of my laptop, which is the main reason I am interested in it.
Enough of the rant, below are a couple of my photos exported from the Lightroom 3 beta. You can see even more on the Herman page.
Herman Profile!
Sleepy Herman.
Are We Posting to Facebook?
As most of my friends know, I don’t really care for Facebook all that much. I have an account sure, but I hardly ever look at it. I prefer the simplicity of Twitter, the control of running my own website, and WordPress. So, hopefully with this new WordPress plugin called Wordbook the few people that I have “friended” on Facebook will be able to better see what I’m up to. We’ll see how it goes…
New Gear: Yamaha MG124cx mixer and Radial J33 Phono Preamp
My new Yamaha MG124cx Mixer!
Front/top of my Radial J33 Phono Preamp
I got some new gear to showcase: a second Yamaha Mixer model MG124cx, and a Radial J33 Phono Preamp.
First I’ll talk about the new mixer. Having been very happy with the MG102c, having a desire to be able to plug in more of my synths simultaneously, combined with the holiday sales at Sam Ash, the MG124cx seemed a somewhat logical step. I would have rather gotten a non ‘X’ model, as I will probably never use the on-board effects, but they didn’t have that model in stock. It’s basically the same great little mixer as my 102c, except it has more inputs and two stereo outputs. The extra output pair is really great because now it allows me to truly separate my microphone input from my synths from within my computer itself. I had an amusing yet headache-inducing time wiring this thing up for the first time. I had to draw up a whole spreadsheet of all my audio I/O’s, from my Two M-Audio Delta 1010’s through to both Yamaha Mixers until it all finally made sense.
Moving onto my new Radial J33 Phono Preamp, this thing is pretty cool. I’d been looking for an easy solution to allow me to ‘archive’ my LP records at a quality I saw fit, like 24bit/96Khz FLAC. So far it works great! I plan to have a dedicated page for the J33 sometime in the future with some example clips.
Below are some more photos of the new mixer and phono preamp.
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- Faders!
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- Faders and buttons!
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- Knobs!
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- Knobs AND buttons!
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- On/Mute and Pre-Fader-Listen buttons.
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- You can see the ‘Group 1-2’ and ‘Stereo’ select buttons here.
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- Lit-up buttons!
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- Input, HPF, ground, unbalanced outputs, and power lights.
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- Balanced XLR outputs and DC power input.
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- My new Yamaha MG124cx Mixer!
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- Front/top of my Radial J33 Phono Preamp
Happy new year!
I’ve been busy enjoying the holidays with family and friends. I expect to update more regularly again soon. I got some cool new gadgets to photograph and post up on the site.
That’s all for now, until then…
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