Well I have officially adopted Ableton Live 5 and Cakewalk's Sonar 4 as my weapons of choice in the studio and I said so-long to FL Studio as well as Acid Pro after being a devoted user for over five years. Not to mention, I finally installed ASIO4ALL and it totally lowered my latency to a very workable level. From their website: ASIO4ALL is a hardware-independent low latency ASIO driver for WDM audio devices. It uses WDM Kernel-Streaming and sometimes even more sophisticated methods to achieve its objectives. In addition, having the ASIO driver lets me run GURU as a stand-alone program so I can just program, chop, and mutilate drums without having to open up a host. Yes, that is a nice thing just in case you were wondering.
For the most part, I'll be assembling my main drums and sequences within Live and then dumping it into Sonar so I can add vocals, scratches, and whatever else pops out of my brain. I know that I can ReWire Live to Sonar but I think that would be too much of a drag on my processor (900 mhz just in case you're a dork like that).
My only gripe is that I cannot control effect parameters via MIDI in Sonar. More specifically I want to be able to play the keys within Antares Auto-Tune (yes, its a very played out effect but it still sounds cool as hell if used sparingly) but it just cant be done at the moment. Maybe this can be implemented in future versions of Sonar, but for now...it is what it is.
So here we are...
Many tape decks, turntables, drum machines, samplers, and synthesizers later, here I am sitting in front of my PC making noise in a way that I had never imagined. I swore by the cassette 4-track and the power of the bounce and overdub. At first I was reluctant to use the PC for anything related to music because from the outside looking in, it seemed very paint-by-numbers. I dabbled around with ReBirth back in 1999 and never really got into it because it seemed too....well, like something I had never used before. Clicking a mouse to make beats just seemed wack...
A year later, this kid I worked with gave me a disk of audio apps and I remember going to my girlfriend-at-the-time's house and installing some shit on her PC (Cakewalk Pro 9 and some crap effects plugins) and well...I still wasn't feeling it. Shortly after, I started dabbling around with something called Fruity Loops and this other program curiously named Acid and slowly started laying down some beats and madness and well...Once I got my feet wet with it, there was no going back.
In 2002, I officially ditched the 4-track and all of her old-school goodness (don't worry, she's still in my flight case covered in a thin layer of dust) and made the PC my main recording vehicle, my studio, and most importantly; my DAW (digital audio workstation). Over the years, I've tried loads of hosts, VST plugins, soft-synths, and just now I found an excellent combination.
With all that said, I guess it's time to step up and drop some serious skillage...Stay Tuned
