From mate_stubb@yahoo.com Sun Jun 18 10:06:39 2006
Subject:B4 encounter

Yesterday I recorded 5 tracks of overdubs at a friend's project
studio using B4 II.

Not bad!

During the afternoon session we had terrible latency issues (on the
order of a quarter second) on one track that we couldn't shake. The
evening sessions went fine, and I'm still clueless as to what
happened.

I didn't do any deep tweaking, but found a preset which contained a
tonewheel set that I liked ('Oye Como Va', natch). I dialed back the
distortion, slowed the ramp times, added a little key click, and had
a nice sound.

I found the leslie sim to be on a par with the Electro's, which is
to say good. The distortion was very tiring to my ears, and all the
presets seemed to be just dripping in it. By the time I was done
with my tweaks, I had a sound which captured some 'sweetness' very
capably.

The user interface experience was of course horrible. I played a
little M-Audio plastic spring action job perched on a precarious X
stand. The lack of ability to control drawbars sucked big time. We
actually ended up tracking multiple tracks, with me splitting up my
playing between them just to use different registrations. So no
twiddling drawbars on the fly.

I commanded my friend to buy a Doepfer controller with the drawbars
before he asks me to play again. We'll see how that goes .