Sound Vacation part 3

My vacation is over as of this week. I've spent enough time in NN-XT sampling an old Casiotone MT-205, although I have just three more voices to loop--I've already trimmed and normalized them. I think I'm going to extend my vacation just slightly to finish that bit of work. I'm shooting for 16 more Thor patches and two more blogs this week before I slow my pace down again. I think that's reasonable, anyway!

I'm also entering another composition contest, and the postmark deadline for that is February 8. So here's a tentative schedule for this week:

Monday, Feb. 1: Finish the Casiotone samples. Revise Mainstage concert to fix problems encountered at last week's rehearsal. Band rehearsal tonight.

Tuesday, Feb. 2: 8 Thor patches, work on Mainstage concert, work on blog after work.

Wednesday, Feb. 3: 4 Thor patches, Korg T2 programming if time permits. Begin editing composition. Spend an hour on Mainstage.

Thursday, Feb. 4: 4 more Thor patches, work on blog in the evening. Edit composition afterwards. Spend an hour on Mainstage.

Friday, Feb. 5: Edit/post blog if not done already, spend at least 8 hours editing the composition, 4 hours tweaking Mainstage.

Saturday, Feb. 6: Take 3 hours in the morning tweaking Mainstage, get ready for gig; spend rest of day working on composition, extract parts; DO NOT SLEEP.

Sunday, Feb. 7: Edit parts, take breaks to write Thor patches, try to get at least two in; print and copy parts, prepare for mailing.

Monday, Feb. 8: Mail off composition score and parts; pick where left off Sunday with Thor patches for a total of 8 patches; begin writing blog.

Tuesday, Feb 9: Post blog if not done already, absolutely NO PROGRAMMING for the rest of the day!!!

At some point from Monday, Feb. 8, through the rest of next week, I plan on taking one day to completely decompress, which means NO MUSICAL ACTIVITY beyond piano lessons. I'd like to add that I've succeeded in not touching Thor at all last week. There have also been days when I only picked up my computer to goof off on the internet. I even got on Second Life a couple of times to say hello to some virtual friends!

While it has been a successful week off from Thor, I've also had this experience that I need a vacation from my vacation. I don't feel fully rested, and I'm not looking forward to getting back to work. The reason is, as you can see, that there's SO MUCH to do. I also received notification that my Akai sampler arrived over the weekend and I'm very eager to get to work on it. I don't think the mail runs until later in the day, so I'm resisting the temptation to run to my studio to get to work on it right away (if it isn't there, what's the point?). I also really want to finish this NN-XT side project so I can get back to work on Thor.

So in wrapping up my vacation, I have a few immediate goals in working with the new sampler. My first goal is to create a large number of waveforms in Absynth that I'll sample with the S2000. I want to try to max out 32 MB, and theoretically this should be difficult to do. I'm aiming these sounds at my own live performances, so forget about stereo samples! Low notes will be sampled at a lower sample rate, no more than 3 wave cycles will be used--really anything to keep memory usage down and still get good results.

I plan to experiment with the Akai for a long time. If I use a single instrument for all 16 available channels, I shouldn't even come close to the 32 MB limit. That allows for layering, velocity splits, and a vast combination of possibilities.

I'll also return to Absynth, maybe when I finish with the initial phase of the Thor experiment. I'd like to use Absynth to re-synthesize sounds I've retrieved from other sources, such as the Casiotone and Thor. And once I have a good collection of those sounds in Absynth, I can--you guessed it!--sample those sounds with the S2000. So it's like sound design/redesign/re- redesign, on and on and on. My ultimate goal is to be an unstoppable force in sound design--muah ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaa!!!

OK, all kidding aside, I'm not looking forward to getting back to Thor. But on the other hand, I feel about sound design much the same way as composition: It's not something reserved for those time we WANT to work on it. It's something we HAVE to do. So I'm committed to the Thor experiment and will see it through to the end. When I finish all 128 patches, I'll take more than a week off! But there will be an explosion of output when I come back to it, and probably more of the kind of work I DO want to do.

I'll be back later in the week with updates on the Casiotone and Thor progress as well any news of the S2000. There are yet greater things to come, which means I've got phone calls to make and emails to write. It's gonna be AWESOME!