From oldzuto@yahoo.com Mon Oct 17 14:00:22 2005
Subject:Re: Native Instruments B4 version 2
Tony,
Nice report! Thanks for all the details. No doubt many of us will be selling off parts/all of our rigs very soon. I know I will!
Already owning the Doepfer LMK4+ I'm on my to this lighter, vitural rig, and with the great reports coming out on B4 II it seems like a no brainer. I took delivery about a week ago of a Doepfer D3m waterfall style controller keyboard and while it is no were near as powerfull of a controller as the LMK4+ it has a great keyboard feel and is super light. With both Doepfers, one Muse and one or two rackmount sound modules the simple lightweight rig that is more powerfull than a Keith Emerson setup is a true reality!
And thanks for the kind words about me helping you, it truly is/was my pleasure. Remember it's a two way street, as I learned a lot just from talking to you too about the Muse and B4...now we've got to pick Bruce W's brain about that stupid USB to Midi ongoing issue, maybe he can shed some light on the problem.
Take care and congrats on the gig going well.
Bob Manzitti
tonysounds wrote:
Hey Norm...
First, I'm using B4, not "II", although I will upgrade soon as possible.
Ok, where to start. I don't use...or haven't until now, but I can see this is all about to change drastically, computers with music. So my learning curve was more of a Hard Banking Turn.
SYNTHWARE
Learning to use the soft synths was easy: the interface is dummy-proof (in other words, made for me!), and editing is a breeze if you're familiar with the instrument being modeled. B4 gave me options and tones not available in my other clones. The leslie sim is very good, and I'm in love with it. It's tweakable on almost all fronts, and through an amp, sounds fantastic.
Pro-53 is killer, and gets those Prophet 5 sync-lead tones that just scream!!!
MiniMonsta blew me away and next to B4, may be my favorite; it's definitely my most used, right behind B4. It sounds fat, aggressive, smooth, and the "knobs" do what I remember them doing, the way I remember them. It has built in delay (unlike my old Mini), and makes me smile every time one of my sounds comes up. AWESOME!
I used M-Tron on a couple songs ("In the Flesh" and the vocal section in "Time") and it sounds just like you think it should. It shares the quirky tape "artifacts" that influence ...er...dictate the way you play the mellotron, so all in all, pretty cool.
I didn't use the CS80 program in the show, but I played with it quite a bit just to hear it. That's an awe-inspiring program, and captures the unique sound of the CS80 very faithfully.
The Muse Receptor enables this whole thing to work. I can only imagine the grief I would have encountered using a computer live; the dread of a crash, gear that doesn't work well with each other, and other "quirks" really helped push me to get the Receptor; before buying any of this stuff I went to the G-Spot (Gtr Ctr) and Sam Rash to audition some of these programs. That was a waste of time, as both of these stores have let their licenses lapse, so you can't hear anything except the Korg Legacy stuff, and whatever is new that month (Spectrasonics' Atmosphere). Rash had Ivory to demo, and they were running 2 very big (3.2 gig) Macs, and that thing couldn't play a simple chord change without glitching; there wasn't even a sustain pedal hooked up. This scared me, but the power of these softsynths was too alluring, so after being disappointed that this wouldn't work out, I decided to look into the Receptor thanks to a few earlier posts on this group, and a mention in Keyboard's
interview with Jordan Rudess.
Let me say up front, if you're going to use this in a live application and run more than one program at a time, SPEND THE MONEY and fully upgrade to the 160 or 200 gig HardDrive, and get 2 Gig of RAM. I only upgraded to 1gb, and I'm going to rectify that eventually.
When the Nord Stage didn't pan out for me as a controller, I was going to start hunting for an A90, but Robert M on this group recommended the Doepfer. After researching that, I decided to give a whirl. There's a free editor available for it that has quirks of its own, which are easily surmounted, but the never ending grief I experienced with my USB-Midi interface caused me lots of unnecessary headaches, and slowed me down.
While waiting for my Doepfer to arrive, I mapped out everything I would need for the show. Since I already had done a lot of work using my Electro, FantomX7 and Motif, it was simply a matter of reducing the keyboards (from 3 to 2, a real objective of mine), and figuring out what sound should go where, and any octave transposition that would need to occur, and which hand would be able to reach it; then, figuring out what footpedal/switch could activate modulation, leslie speed, volume messaging since my hands couldn't do it. Of course, knowing while some sounds I was happy with, and knowing others I wasn't, it was also a matter of knowing which sounds I would need to develop (the easy part!).
I spent all of last Saturday, about 8 hours trying to get things to work, and failed miserably. I called Robert M on Sunday and he was gracious enough to spent about 5 hours on the phone helping me troubleshoot and get going. It took us 5 hours to get one set-up complete because of all the weirdness going on; it took 40 minutes for the next one. After that, I could program the layouts in about 20minutes or less, depending on their complexity (thanks to my pre-weekend planning). Further grief with my USB-midi interface screwed me over later, but Robert took a couple short calls from me, and kept me on track. GREAT GUY!!!
Since this is already getting verbose, I'll try to keep it short. I programmed all of Dark Side of the Moon and Animals before Wednesday's rehearsal, and found I had some problems to fix with levels, and with the Receptor going into "Load" mode for unexplained reasons. Waiting a full 45 seconds for this procedure to take place was unacceptable. I never could ascertain why it was doing this, but I'm confident it was a midi message being sent on some errant zone, or some quirk; I just went and cleaned up every zone I wasn't using, and that fixed that problem. I also had to go and shut down every program in every multi-set-up I wasn't using to ease the burden on the CPU. I was running CS80, MiniMonsta, Mtron, B4 and Pro53 simultaneously, and the load would get too much; when that happened, there would be a popping sound. Turning off what wasn't being used in the multi took care of that problem. (A call to Muse got me the answer to buy more Ram!!!!! My way is cheaper! But as I get
more heavily into this, I'll pop for the $100 upgrade, doable myself...or by my computer pals more likely.) Another horrifying problem involved my Fantom X7. My X7 was going to be the remote controller for the Doepfer, and I was using it as a tone generator as well. Even after turning the Local Off, and turning off its own internal "remote keyboard" capabilities, it would sporadically set up a midi feedback loop, generating a static tone that wouldn't go away until I changed patches. Also, while reacting to my joy at the sound of B4, I took a nice happy smear on the X7 and yanked a key out of its moorings. At that point, I decided the Electro would be the remote keyboard, and I would barter for a FantomXR.
I spent Thursday evening fighting with my M Audio USB-Midi interface again. I can't understand why it flakes out, but it does, and you have to reboot your computer everytime it does. Annoying, especially when you're spending 4-6 hours a night trying to get this all to work. I was getting 4 hours or less of sleep a nite, and by Thursday, I was down to 3. I was getting REALLY burnt out, but I was determined to get it up and running.
After fixing the problems Thursday nite, Friday nite I spent programming all of Wish You Were Here, and the 6 or 7 songs we do from the Wall. Saturday was spent running errands (I had to take my wife's car in for some engine indicators, and built my pedal board there in their waiting room; the Doepfer has 2 footcontrol jacks -it likes the FC7, and one footswitch jack, which will use a standard cheapo sustain pedal, or if you wire two together with an insert cable, you can use a pair of pedals.) After errands, I programmed the last two songs, and set up 5 all-purpose "spontaneous" jamming patches; one with Rhodes and organ, one with clav and organ, one with piano and organ.
At 6:45 pm, I started to build my rack (running WAY out of time!); M120 line mixer, MotifEs rack, FantomXR rack, Receptor, Power distributor. By 9pm I was on my way to the gig. The long short of this, the gig sounded killer. Those synths were incredible, the B4 blew me away, being clean and smooth (Us & Them), gritty and abrasive (In The Flesh), thin and reedy (the intro to Time), and full and thick. I haven't even configured the drawbar controller into this mess yet because most of the Floyd stuff doesn't require drawbar manipulation while playing, but the sound of the settings I preprogrammed was believable and inspiring. My guitarist, who hates synths, was very impressed. The Pro-53 had me super inspired during Run Like Hell, and after the guitar solo, I went off on an exploration of my own that went on for a couple minutes and got me a very enthusiastic round of applause. The MiniMonsta gave me the screaming sounds from Animals, and yet gave me the truly warped sounds in
Brain Damage; harmonizing that melody line with Pro-53 was the icing on the cake.
All in all everything worked perfectly, and all my hard work and lack of sleep paid off. Everything came up where I expected it to, there were no mysterious "Load" episodes (The Muse loads just as fast as a normal synth module when prepared correctly), pedal assignments did what they were supposed to; only one time the whole evening was I surprised. One of my FantomX7 rewrites to the Electro had a transpose message, and I had to improvise over the raised tunings. One faux pas out of 50+ set-ups is more than acceptable in my book.
Bottom line: I'm hooked. This is the wave of the future. An 88weighted controller that weighs 47 lbs IN ITS CASE, combined with my 23lb Electro is a sleek, small, keyboard rig; the rack weighs less than another keyboard and has SO much more potential.
Well worth the money and effort expended.
T
Norman Peterson wrote:
Tony, I am waiting for your comments and review of the Pink Freud show debuting your Muse Receptor and B4ll. Everything go well?
Norm
----- Original Message -----
From: tonysounds
To: CloneWheel@yahoogroups.com
Sent: 10/17/2005 8:56:43 AM
Subject: Re: [CWSG] Re: Native Instruments B4 version 2
As a guy in love with his XK3 through a leslie, who has just discovered B4 (and likes it a lot as a non-leslie'd clone), I have a question: when you say the B4 II will respond to midi info, would I be correct in assuming that info does not include drawbar changes? (The XK3's drawbars don't send midi info, right?)
T
b3monaco@aol.com wrote:
In a message dated 10/17/2005 11:03:45 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
groovecake@yahoo.com writes:
Yeah...but how close is it to the XK-3?
Now that opens up a big one!!!!!! Actually the new b4II has a controller map
so that it can respond to the xk3 midi info as translated to the b4II. As
far as sound, Hammond is Hammond! Software Synths are Software Synths. They
both sound excellent for their applications. If the software gets the sound to
the software users, than maybe someday they'll want the real deal!!!!!!!!!!
Actually, they can be used together! Using the xk system to record all the
tracks (using as midi controller) using the b4II engine for playback. Then
stripping the audio with a real leslie through the xk3 engine (check out demo
here of xk system with leslie and di used for Hammond Suzuki
_http://b3monaco.com/saw.htm_ (http://b3monaco.com/saw.htm) )
But with software ussage, The B4 is a great teaching tool. See here how I
use the old B4 for lessons _http://b3monaco.com/Playingjazzhammond.htm_
(http://b3monaco.com/Playingjazzhammond.htm)
I think the key here is to remember that Hammond is a Hammond, nice
Keyboard, Drawbars, setup for gig now. The B4II has a great engine as well but no
hardware! I don't like any controllers out there right now for playing organ.
That's the real difference. You still need the feel of the right keyboard and
good ergonomics of the layout of drawbars...Pedals...etc....
Leslie, Bench........ :)
Tony
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