Lazlo's Running Blog

Latest Studio News - February 2024

I've acquired some new toys since my last update. :) 

In March of 2023, I purchased an ASM Hydrosynth Desktop Module. It has a completely different sonic flavor than everything else in my room - which is great. It took some time to "grok" the thing, but now I'm getting some really nice sounds out of it. It can be really quite gnarly which is a great addition to my sonic palate. It still has a few minor bugs, but nothing that's a deal killer for me. I quite like it.

In November of 2023, I snagged a perfect condition 1010 Blackbox, mostly with the intent to use it as a sample player for live gigs. I'm hoping to have enough material to start playing out in 2024. I've been mixing some original material and a few remixes - my favorite being a deep house remix of King Crimson's Elephant Talk - into my DJ sets. Youngsters have no idea that it is, and older prog fans are gobsmacked... LOL

Just a few days after I bought the Blackbox, Korg dropped the price on their 2600m to a price point I couldn't resist. So I snagged one. I think they sold out in two days...

I have a love/hate relationship with 2600s. In 1979, I worked for Jean-Luc Ponty. One of my jobs was as Allan Zavod's (RIP) synth programmer. His lead instrument was an Arp 2600. It sounded lovely (when it worked), and he played it with such great finesse. Allan really was a lovely guy, one of the funniest people I've ever known, and a spectacularly gifted musician. But Arp 2600s were not built for the road. The were built as educational tools and for studio use. The thing was so totally unreliable and required work every single stop on the tour. It's oscillator tracking calibration was all over the place. 

Then again, I didn't buy ine to take out of the studio and, thus far, it's been great. Really does sound like a vintage 2600, but takes up less space which was most welcome as I don't have room for another large synth. 

And then, just a few days later, my long awaited Cirklon V2 became available. I'd been on the waiting list since October of 2019. I'd found a great condition used V1 in late 2020 and have gotten pretty good on the thing. The V2 is quite a bit more capable than the V1, and there are plans to expand its capabilities even more. I sold my V1 in one day after placing a local add. The price difference was minimal and way less than it would have cost me to purchase the Cirklon V1 to V2 upgrade which just became available last week (and which I'll pass on to the buyer if he wants it).      

The most consequential and most used new gear I've acquired since my last post is a pair of Slate VSX headphones. TBH, I thought they were a gimmick; that I'd try them out and end up returning them. Nope - these things are great! I have a small treated room, but it's impossible to get real bass extension in here. Getting the bottom end of my mixes right has been a real chore. Not anymore.

I just finished mixing and mastering a track for a female artist I met at a party a few months back. I saw her again at a social event a few weeks ago and she mentioned she had a track she wanted on her upcoming album, but her producer just couldn't get the mix right and she asked me if I'd give it a try. Sure...

The track is a mix of R&B and HipHop, two genres I don't have much experience with. And HipHop bass and drums are really crucial d own low. I had my mains and my NS10s working, and used the VSX for getting the bass right and trying the mix in different environments; in a club, a car and several other sound systems. When I sent her the first rough, I thought she's have concerns with the bass, but nope, her notes were more focused on where the vocals sat. (She liked them a bit louder than I. Bumped the lead vocals 1.5db without changing the 2 Buss chain settings at all and she was over the moon. Mastered using Ozone and added a bit of loudness and some air and done. The VSX really is a stupid cheap way for a bedroom producer to have a solid monitoring experience. And they saved me $3K as I was thinking of buying some Barefoots. Not anymore. 

On a less than happy note, I've been going through HELL with my Moog One. I bought it back in October of 2018 out of the first batch they released. There is so much YES about that thing, it could be my desert island synth. The sound and the UI are spectacular. But it's buggy. REALLY buggy. Most of the bugs I could deal with, but it's main flaw (at least my units main flaw) was it's propensity to freeze notes when played over midi and occasionally from the keyboard. I'm not really a hands on keyboard player, and my main use case has always been sequencing from my DAW or my Cirklon. But it never worked right. After the 1.5 firmware upgrade, many of the other bugs were resolved. It finally tracked properly. But it still locked up every minute, so for the last 6 years, it's been an expensive paperweight. 

Moog had me ship it back east in mid 2022, and they replaced the keyboard. They then said it was fine and sent it back. It wasn't. The hanging notes from the keyboard were gone, but it still couldn't play over midi without hanging voices. I was then told it would take a firmware update to fix my problem - which they confessed was a known issue - but I was also told it would be 8 months to 2 years (maybe!) for the next firmware update. That didn't sit well, nor did I feel any better when Moog was purchased by inMusic. 

I recently met a couple Moog ex-employees, including a master tech with extensive knowledge of the Moog One history. I will respect the confidentiality of what he told me (which wasn't very confidence inspiring) but he told me that the issue with mine wasn't firmware at all; it was most likely a defective voice assigner board. Over the last 3 weeks, I was trying - unsuccessfully - to reach someone at Moog to discuss this new info, but I couldn't get a return call or an email response. I got pretty heated with my Sweetwater rep who sold me the thing and who has been kept in the loop all these past 5+ frustrating years. Either Sweetwater's call to Moog or the tech's reaching out to them (or both) got someone's attention. I was contacted and asked to ship the unit back to Ashland - on Moog's dime - which I did today. Based on my discussions with a management level employee, I'm hopeful that they will either finally fix mine, or they will replace it with a brand new unit. Fingers crossed!  And I have been told that inMusic does plan a firmware update in a few more months that should add some new features and fix some of the other firmware related bugs.

I'm probably done buying new synths for a while - unless Behringer releases a desktop module of their OBXa for me to pair up with my OB6. I'd snag one now, but I just don't have room for another full sized keyboard. 
​

Studio Upgrade 2020

Well, 2020 was quite a challenge on many levels. I hope you all got through it with a minimum of personal loss. Please get vaccinated as soon as you can!   

In trying to keep my sanity as we were all locked down, I decided to take some time to make some music of my own. In doing so, I ran headlong into some equipment problems, a just-by-chance opportunity to acquire a piece of equipment I'd been lusting after for since 2017, and the time to put together a new, more efficient, workflow. The 2021 Studio Upgrade had begun.

My first stroke of good (great!) luck actually occurred in late 2020 when I found a early version Cirklon sequencer for sale on a modular synth board I follow. (Used to be called Muffwiggler, but the PC Police got involved and it's now called ModWiggler... gah!)

Cirklons are - in my humble opinion - the best hardware sequencer ever made. Admittedly the UI takes some learning, but once one wraps one's head around the Aux Events concept, there is very little this box can't do. 64 tracks, 5 Midi Din ports, 6 USB Midi ports, and a Break-out Box with 24 jacks that can be arranged in various configurations of CV and Gate outs, Envelope Generators, LFOs, Midi CC ports, and even CV/Gate inputs to record with. Not surprisingly, the waiting list for new Cirklons has exceeded 3 years. Covid and the current world-wide shortage of ICs hasn't helped either. Finding one used (in decent condition) usually entails paying multiples of the price for a new one. Last December, I found one, with a CVIO and a BOB, for just under what a new one would cost. Work's perfectly. Great communication with the seller. Couldn't have been a better on-line buying experience and made me one very happy synth nerd!

I found a nice comfortable position for it between my keyboard and my Raven, and it's now the centerpiece of my studio. 

I was sooooo ready to start cranking out some deep house, but then, as luck would have it, technology got in my way... (Ah... the marvels of modern technology)

As I finally started recording real time compositions where the Cirklon was sequencing my modular, my Analog RYTM MKII Drum Machine, multiple layers of my Moog One, and several other instruments, all at the same time, I started noticing audio dropouts in my recordings. These are the ultimate scourge of the recording process. After about a month of troubleshooting and tearing out what little hair I have left, I discovered that my trusty (but annoying) Steinberg MR816s were the problem. 

While they actually have always sounded pretty good, these interfaces have been a real PITA since I acquired them back in 2011. They were advertised as being "zero latency" - meaning a person could record in real time without the normal delay caused by converting analog audio to digital, sending it through the computer, and then back out so you can listen to the audio while recording additional tracks. They were also advertised as being able daisy-chain together, so in my case, two 8x8 interfaces could provide seamless 16x16 ins and outs. However, Steinberg conveniently overlooked (?!) disclosing that they couldn't do both simultaneously. Either they could daisy-chain, or a single unit could monitor with zero latency, but 2 daisy chained units couldn't monitor with zero latency. As you might imagine, this caused me and quite a few other Steinberg customers some serious consternation. When confronted with this misleading advertising, Steinberg initially denied having done it.  But advertisements were everywhere, so they then backed down and promised a software fix for the problem. (The old "check's in the mail" trick...) After repeatedly promising a fix was coming soon, a little over 3 years later (coincidentally just beyond the statute of limitations for false advertising...) they announced they couldn't fix the problem.  This was infuriating, and if I had been running a pro studio, I'd probably have filed a class action lawsuit before the statute ran.  But this is just a hobby, I was really busy at the time, and the number of times I really needed more than 8 ins at one point were pretty minimal, especially after I sold of my percussion rig. So I swallowed Steinberg's BS and kept using them. But I will NEVER buy another piece of Steinberg hardware again.

But Steinberg wasn't through with me just yet... The MR816s run through firewire. I had months of headaches getting them to work under Windows 10. Had to swap out the firewire card in my DAW a couple times before I found one that worked reliably. But when Steinberg discontinued the MR816s, they kept providing updated drivers ... until November of 2019. People with Mac's had their interfaces become instantly unusable under the updated OS. We Windows guys were OK, for a while, but the lack of support finally caused them to become unusable as the firewire drivers in Windows wouldn't maintain a solid connection, hence the audio drop-outs.     

So... after a 10 year run, it was time for a new audio interface. After years of following the audio engineering boards (e.g. Gearslutz, recently renamed by the PC Police as GearSpace...), speaking to other engineers and musicians, and chatting up people at AES and NAMM, I decided that my next audio interface would come from RME. I made this decision based on two main criteria:  1) Their stellar reputation for high quality, great sounding, fully professionally supported products; and , 2) the fact that they have a multi-decades long history of supporting their products - including their discontinued products - with the most rock solid drivers. After my Steinberg experience, this is what I wanted. 

I chose the UFX+ as a "more than I really need/future proof device and I'm more than happy with it. Sounds great, rock stable, no dropouts, thunderbolt ready, and superb tech support (which I needed when I couldn't get it to work through ne of my USB ports). In addition, their TotalMix software is amazingly versatile and, while I do all my routing in Cubase, it's nice to be able to have multiple configurations set up for other environments. (It really helps in Ableton as well!)

(Note, I have a love/hate relationship with Steinberg's Cubase too. But I've tried pretty much every DAW out there and it is still is the most complimentary to my personal workflow. I just wish they'd stop breaking features, or releasing half baked enhancements, do some proper QC before releasing updates, provide some actual tech support that knows more about its products than its users...)

An extra added bonus is that the UFX+ has 2 sets of ADAT lightpipe I/Os, so each of my old MR816s can still be used as 8x8 interfaces ported through the UFX+. I now have 28x28 analog I/Os, and have one of the old MR816s mounted in the rear rack on my synth wall, connected over lightpipe, so there's no loss in audio quality from running long TRS snake cables from the back of the room to the console position. 

Adding all this extra I/O required me to add 2 additional 48 point patch-bays. I now have 2 in a back modular wall rack and 2 in the front DAW rack. But everything is normalled to my studio's main workflow (e.g. OB6 L/R normalled to Patch-Bay 1, positions 1 and 2 which are then normalled out to UFX inputs 1 and 2). If I need to change something, I can patch around the normals and literally have anything patched to anything. I do have to say that designing the patch-bay layouts made my brain hurt more than once. Trying to come up with the most useful configuration took a few weeks, and on one occasion, I woke up in the middle of the night with the realization that I had a better way of doing something I'd already started wiring. For a guy who used to build video edit bays, and has 45 years of signal flow experience, this was a bit depressing...  But it's done and it works GREAT!

While I was going through this process, I decided to swap out my old midi interface as well. I've been using a MOTU Midi Express 128 for years. It's been pretty solid, but it has had issues dropping off the USB hub and they are known for having issues passing Sysex, which meant that more than once, I've had problems doing program data dumps and updates. I decided to make a change to a more modern interface and chose the iConnectivity MioXL. What really sets this interface apart from the others was its ability to send and receive USB and Din Midi over RTP which cut way down on the number of midi cable runs I needed. In addition, the Cirklon upgrades are going to allow for RTP as well, and when that becomes available, it will greatly enhance the ease of sequencing multiple instruments simultaneously, as well as the tightness of the sync between the instruments. One caveat about iConectivity; they use a program called Auricle to configure the ins and outs. Once you wrap your head around how it works, it's brilliant.  But the documentation for it is pretty much useless. I'm clearly a reasonably tech savvy guy, but after reading the "manual" (such that it is) I couldn't figure out how to get things configured no matter how I tried. I needed a tech support guy (who was awesome bye the way) to walk me through it. But once the AHA lightbulb went on, I see how flexible Auricle can really be. Like my audio routing, my midi routing can now - quite literally - go from anything to anything, so I can literally play any instrument - or combination of instruments - from any other instrument or controller in the room.









​The final piece of the studio redesign was spending a day updating my Raven batch commands. I'm using a Slate Raven MTI2 as a touch screen DAW and VSTi controller.  But what really makes this device more than just a touchscreen is Slate's Batch Commander software. Admittedly I've had some issues using it, but many of those I must admit have resulted from my operator error. 

​Combining Batch Commander with Cubase's Track Presets is a seriously powerful system and has made it easy for me to set up specific repeated tasks that get executed from a single button. This makes recording far easier and much faster. And actually fun from time to time...

A few examples from simple to more elaborate:

I have a button on my Raven Recording Layout named "MIC" which, when I push it, loads my must used mic channel and effects configuration. The vocal mic chain I most often use involves a Slate ML1 mic into my UFX interface feeding a mono audio track with the Slate mic software, some other effects loaded on the track VST inserts, and sends to 2 effects tracks, a delay and a reverb. All my interface inputs are normalled through the patch-bays and named in Cubase. The Mic is normalled to Interface 1, channel 9. A Track Preset has the mic input source assigned to an audio channel with the slate mic software on VST insert 1, a VST channel strip on insert 2, and 2 sends set to named effect tracks. 2 other Track Presets have the effects loaded in my usual initial ways and named to correspond with the aforementioned mic channel sends. The Batch Command first loads the effect track presets (so the mic channel sends can be routed), then loads the mic track preset, names the track "Vocal Mic" and arms the input. I just have to push the "Mic" button on the Raven and it's ready to go.

Another example involves my master controller to Cirklon to MiniMoog configuration. The patch sends midi from my Master Keyboard (Novation SL61MkII) to my Cirklon, which sends midi to Cubase, which sends midi out to the MiniMoog. Audio from the MiniMoog comes back into Cubase. The Cirklon uses instrument definitions to send outs on specific channels or through the CV breakout. I then use one track preset to recieve the master keyboard midi and send it to the Cirklon; another to recieve the midi back from the Cirklon on a specific USB port and midi channel number that matches the Cirklon's MiniMoog instrument definition (so I can record the midi if I want to edit later) which then sends the midi out to the MiniMoog. Another track preset creates a mono audio track that is fed from a specified input on my audio interface (which is normalled to the MiniMoog audio out) and which has my specified VST comp/EQ/Efx chain preset for the that track. I  programed a Batch Command to load the Track Presets in a specified order, set the audio and midi ins and out accordingly, and arm the respective channels. There's a button on my Raven Recording Layout 1 named "MiniMoog." I press it, count to 10(ish), and its all ready to go.

My usual synth guitar setup involves audio in from a Helix over spdif, 6 individual midi channels (1 for each string) from an AX50 guitar to midi converter, all in a folder track, and each sent to its own channel in a 6 patch multi in Omnisphere, with some additional controls from a FCB1010 midi pedalboard routed to both the Axon and Omnishpere. Setting up everything takes quite a bit of time and, to be honest, I'd always miss something and spend the next 1/2 hour trying to figure out what I did wrong... by which time my inspiration to actually play something was long gone. By assigning various pieces of the master patch as Track Presets (e.g., each midi channel from the AX50 is its own separate midi track, input source from AX filtered so it sees just the specific string, routed to a specific layer of the Omnisphere multi with track names and colors, etc.), and then building a Slate Batch Command to load the presets in specific orders and set buss routings as desired, I just hit one button on the Raven named "Guitar Synth" and in a few seconds, the whole patch loads and I can hit record and start playing.

Full disclosure, I've lost even more grey hair getting everything to work as intended. I've spent unknown hours with Slate's support, but unlike Steinberg, they are amazing - in a good way, even on weekends! They have even gone so far as to show me how to create my own "custom clicks" that I use constantly. Jamie from Slate is what anyone in artist tech support should aspire to be. Super knowledgeable about his products, able to explain various "outside the box" ways to make things work, and very understanding of rubes like me who sometimes need things explained more than once... 

Admittedly, I was a bit sad when, after getting comfortable with the Cirklon, I sold my Social Entropy Engine, the sequencer I've been using for the past few years. Engines are really special little sequencers, and are superb for live performance use. I decided to sell mine because, while I expect they will increase in price due to scarcity, I really wanted someone to enjoy using it and I'll be working almost exclusively on the Cirklon from now on.

As of today, the system appears fully operational. Now, let's see if I can make anything interesting...

      

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