A Busy Day in the Neigborhood.

Lots of craziness lately, so I thought I’d drop in a leave an update.

First, I wanted to thank all of you who’ve decided to stop in to check out my humble little bloggggg.  Thanks for the comments — I’ll try to keep the videos and whatnot coming.  Honestly, this whole blog business has been occupying my mind lately – thinking of content and direction.

That being said, I have a couple of tutorials/videos that I have in mind.  I want to apologize in advance if they seem random and unrelated – they are just coming off the top of my head.  I’m basically recording them and posting on topics that are currently relevant to me for one reason or another…

What’s Been Keeping Me Busy

1. Organs and Pads – in the never-ending pursuit to find the perfect sounds (and pads) for live sampling, I decided that I wanted to make a Hammond B3 pad.  This idea (which is by no means original, by the way) was motivated by some Hillsong United stuff.  I noticed that a lot of their songs have a B3 in them, but they use it a lot like a pad – with a healthy amount of reverb and delay, it seems.  Well, seeing as they have a real B3 on stage oftentimes, with a keyboardist who is rockin’ the swell pedal on said Hammond B3, they are at a slight advantage.
I decided that I would rather not mess with a swell pedal (and would rather not bother Benji with it, as he’s getting his feet wet with the whole keyboard setup).  Thus, I needed a way to get a B3 soft synth that I have to auto-swell.  The problem with this is that the B3 sampler that I have (Native Instruments B4), there is no way to adjust the attack envelope.  So, 4 hours later, I found a solution to this problem (which ended up being a bit harder to solve than I thought it would have been), and ended up with a great sounding B3 pad.  I’ll share what I found in a video/tutorial – I think it will help y’all out, as you can use it for any soft synths.  I could have made it easier on myself and just used Reason, but I simply could not find a B3 that sounded as good as the NI one, so I made things more difficult for myself, but I was glad to have learned some valuable tools
Along these lines, I am also planning on doing a video primer to the ADSR envelopes – understanding this is important for anyone doing sampling and work with synths.

2. Korg PadKontrol – Benji and I both chipped in a bought a Korg PadKontrol.  This is an amazing little USB sampling pad.  Whats incredible about it is the fact that it has an assignable XY pad…more on that later.  I plan on doing a review on this bad boy, so be looking for that.

3. Plugins - I went on a long search for some freeware plugins/synths.  I found some that I have found to be particularly useful.  I will make sure to share my findings with you guys — some quick reviews and overviews of them.  I’m excited about some of these!

4. DBX Driverack – Our church uses a DBX Driverack to manage our PA.  We just successfully got this guy hooked up to the wireless network…and shazam!  I can pull up the DBX software and work on the FOH EQ, crossovers, delays, etc… all from my laptop.  I’ll post some more thoughts on this a bit later as well.  This is gonna make a huge difference.  A huge thanks to Joe Hohman for hooking it up!
Well, be expecting quite a bit of stuff over the next week…
Thanks for stickin’ around!

~ by mattjhuber on April 14, 2008.