New MIDI interface

It’s a bit late in the day for my Independent Study – which is due in shortly – but I finally recieved my 4in/4out MIDI interface today (apologies for the atrocious quality of my camera.. this applies retroactively to all my photos actually);

Now this thing cost around £27 imported from good old China. The build quality is excellent with a sturdy metal box, and it bears more than a passing resemblance to M-audio’s far, far more expensive Midisport interfaces. What it bears an exact resemblance to is the Prodipe midi interface, which at around £42 is clearly a bit more outlay for a marginally different logo printed on the side.
That aside, performance seems fine in the basic tests I ran. The reason this is a good investment for anyone controlling a whole band via MIDI is the multiple inputs. More importantly it’s the named multiple inputs – MIDI is a protocol as old as I am so unsurprisingly even your cheap £4 USB midi converters do the job for most applications. The problem when you’re putting them into Cubase or Pro Tools is that they all come up with the same device name, at a gig this is a problem because for troubleshooting purposes you really, really want to know which port is your drums and which is your guitar pedal. Since this interface has 4 inputs all named by port, you know exactly what’s plugged in where. Moreover it is far better constructed in a rugged metal case, and you have less USB cables to worry about too. After testing it I’d certainly add it to the spec of any band setup using all software with a PC.

Live Band Practice – Tool – “Sober” Cover.

So after a bit of messing on and a couple of band practices we got a cover of Tool’s “Sober” to a listenable standard and recorded the session;

We used Amplitube/Superior and ran it all through Cubase, the results were actually pretty decent, although the drum sensitivity needs some work and the guitar tone could do with a bit more beef. Possibly a second guitar line would sort this. The vocal dynamic processing turned out rather well I thought since while I was still figuring out which pedals to hit I ended up moving my head about quite a lot. There were a few mess-ups (mainly on my part) but the end result was a pretty decent demo. We all agreed that at a gig we would most definitely have got away with it blasting out a PA system.

Second practice with the band

Getting bands that are available has proven something of a challenge, so in response to that I have formed my own Grunge covers band with a couple of friends to test out the gear in a live environment. It’s not looking like I’m going to get a band playing an actual gig in time so the next best thing is to test the gear in a similar environment.
 The first session we already had went quite well – more of a ‘setup’ session than anything else, it initially took a while to get going but setting up the drums for our drummer (who is left handed.. actually we’re all left handed!) required us to move the kit about a fair bit. Having said that, some cable issues aside it was relatively simple to get the kit swapped over and working fine through superior.

Once we had the kit set up the guitars once again worked quite easily – now I have a working method for the FCB1010 pedal’s MIDI configuration applying each preset we required to it’s own pedal in Amplitube was as easy as hitting the MIDI controller within the program and selecting a program change number. The only isse I need to address is which stompboxes turn on when selecting a preset – this implies I will need to either reprogram the FCB1010′s behaviour when moving about preset program change values, or simply settle on some solid presets for each pedal and decide my required stompbox settings when they are loaded.

To explain that in layman’s terms – when I switch to another preset, I might want say the tubescreamer pedal automatically engaged. If I leave it on in Amplitube, that’s fine and it will always load with the tubescreamer on as it’s initial state. The only problem is the stompbox pedals on the FCB1010 won’t reflect this until you hit the pedal a couple of times – thankfully you can tell the FCB1010 to engage certain stompbox lights when you turn on a preset, so in order to get accurate visual info about what pedals are on, I need to tell the FCB1010 directly what to turn on.

Moving onto the bass, it was incredibly simple – our bassist Lee specified a sound he’d like and we simply dialled it in like you would any other amp. We could technically do exactly the same MIDI control method as the guitars, but in this case the bass really didn’t require changing sound a great deal, as is often the case with live bassists. We have however decided to add a distortion pedal later to ‘beef up’ the solo sections of some songs.

I also tried routing vocal mics through Cubase and adding effects like reverb and compression. We had some issues getting the gain output levels right while still getting a nice recorded level but we persevered and it all worked admirably.

The whole session was then routed out via a secondary stereo group on the Profire 2626 to a mixing desk, then to some stage monitors which we used as a PA system. At first we had major problems with signal distortion but some tweaking the gain settings on the desk got us working just fine.

System stability was one thing I was curious about as although we were only practicing a few songs it gave a good opportunity to see how well the system works over long periods of time. Thankfully we had zero issues with the software, it was as solid as a rock throughout.

Setting up live software with a full band

Finally I got the opportunity to do some real objective work with a full band – this weekend I got Goy Boy McIlroy round to have a mess on with the gear and set up some sounds -

Glen being subjected to some form of Dave-based ritual.

At first we set up a few sounds – the band are very, very used to traditional analog gear and the drummer was especially wary of the electric kit, so it was interesting to see how well they took to the new tech and how musical the results were. Understandably the drums were the hardest to set up – requiring some shuffling around of the kit and some velocity settings to match Al’s playing style. Thankfully he responded really well to the mesh heads and although it will clearly take some practice to get used to the kit the results were promising. He seemed particuarly impressed at how easy it was to change the complete sound of the kit, for example using completely different cymbals at the touch of a button.

For bass and guitar I first introduced guitarist Goy to the FCB1010 control pedal. Once again as I’d already set up the MIDI values the actual use of this he found just as easy as any other guitar pedal and he was impressed with the versatility and how easy it was to add and manipulate effects. The downside to this is that he didn’t really get into the software MIDI side of things so I still think that many guitarists are going to either need a dedicated guitar tech, or have some prior production knowledge to set this up from scratch. Nevertheless he enjoyed playing with the various amps and effects within amplitube and the performance side went great. We tried to create some sounds based on his favourite acts too – we loaded in some samples of The Black Keys and BMRC, and although we weren’t too close to a true ‘soundalike’ tone, we got some sounds that he was very happy with.

The same pretty much applied to bass, with the exception that this time we used hardware stomp boxes for distortion and modulation, then fed those into Amplitube’s Ampeg bass plugin. Once again we got a pretty cool BMRC gritty bass tone relatively quickly and the bassist Glen seemed fairly impressed.

FCB1010 (guitar) and Glen's stompboxes (bass).

Once we had the basics down I also ran Dave’s vocal through a convolution reverb plugin for good measure and sent that out the main mix too. The results were surprisingly decent for a first practice, but Al clearly needed more time to get used to the electric drums. Goy on the other hand seemed to like every tone that came out of amplitube. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks I’ll get time for another session with the band and we can get some live tracks recorded.

New Laptop Finally In!

After much firewire- and GPU-related issues (which I shall go into later) – my new i7 audio laptop has arrived and is working (fingers crossed) perfectly! I’ll be doing a more in-depth review of the unit anyway once I have time to run some tests and benchmarks, but for now suffice to say it’s a bit of a beast.. Also as a result of previously mentioned firewire issues, I’ve also invested in a new audio interface – A second-hand MOTU 828mk II along with a Behringer ADA-8000 8-channel ADAT preamp. I will of course be testing this over the next couple of weeks specifically to see it’s performance in a live environment with virtual instruments/amps, as well as comparing it’s performance to my similar i7 desktop unit.

Nocturn limitations, stomp boxes, and testing with a real musician

It’s been a while since an update, but there has been some progress with the project – Firstly the Nocturn, while handy, has proven problematic when trying to get it to work in the way I specifically wanted – Although MIDI mode works fine with Amplitube, it doesn’t update the nocturn’s LEDs when switching between presets. Obviously this is a problem when playing live since the idea was to have a relatively easy visual reference for live players.
Possibly if there was an amp emulator with a MIDI output, this would update the display when changing presets, however since neither Amplitube or Guitar Rig have this feature it’s currently difficult to even find this out.
Automap instead works on the basis of ‘automatable parameters’. This is all fine and well for updating the Nocturn’s LED display as it gets feedback from automation levels, however there are issues in both Amplitube and Guitar Rig for using Automap. Amplitube has only 16 parameters which can be programmable, and these are global parameters pertaining to specific modules within Amplitube. Basically if you put one parameter to the gain on say, an Orange amp, that will always be mapped to the gain on that type of Orange amp, no matter what preset you have selected. Obviously this only works if you’re always using the same amp models, because 16 parameters really doesn’t cover a larger rig! Guitar rig has a different problem – Although it has stacks of available parameter slots, these slots are assigned to the preset itself by guitar rig – as of yet I’ve found no way to directly control which numbers are assigned where. The problem here is that if you put modules in a different order in guitar rig there’s no way to tell it to always assign the same control to say, a delay module, or the amp’s controls.

I came up with at least some form of workaround to these issues the other night, when I had a friend and fellow guitarist round for a jam and songwriting session. Since he’s purely a musician as opposed to an audio engineer I thought I’d try out the FCB1010 footswitch with him to see how he reacted to using software. The results were pretty encouraging, he had no problem getting how the stomp boxes worked and amplitube’s interface seemed fairly intuitive too once I’d showed him around the controls. The first question he asked was “Can I use the [expression] pedal for a pitch shifter? I hate wah pedals” and a few moments later we did indeed have the same thing controlling the pitch shifter with pretty decent results.

A practical use for the nocturn became apparent once we started playing – it occured to me that being able to adjust the amp controls with the nocturn wasn’t really all that necessary compared to tweaking effects pedal controls. Providing you generally put a bunch of ‘favourite’ effects modules in front of the amp this becomes a more viable option – giving guitarists the ability to easily manage a few common controls such as delay time or distortion level. These would of course reset to their default levels if the preset isn’t saved after tweaking, but until IK decide to give Amplitube a LOT more automation parameters available it’s at least a workaround that gives the nocturn a practical use for the time being.

Finally another thing we did was putting an actual pedal (in this case a boss DS-2 distortion) in the chain before hitting the software. This had pretty much the same effect as one would expect – it worked in exactly the same way as when putting it before an amp. So there’s another option for those guitarists and bassists wanting to use their own effects chain as well.

The Novation Nocturn (and Amplitube 3)

While getting my Behringer FCB1010 foot pedal working with guitar software, it occured to me that it would be handy for a guitarist on stage to also have access to some form of control over his amp settings. Now there are many controllers out there with all sorts of MIDI-based knobs and dials which could do this job, but since most of these either feature keyboards or are relatively large, I went looking for something a bit more portable. At first the Korg Nanokontrol seemed an obvious bet – a cheap, small and simple controller with rotary pots I can control my amp settings with. However after a further search I found Novation’s Nocturn to be a better contender. Why? Because of one nice feature; LED feedback from the pots. I figure onstage a guitarist could quickly reference the levels of various amp controls with this feature without resorting to wandering over to the PC screen to bring up amplitube and check.
 Thankfully this decision also coincided with Teesside University holding a seminar by Ian from Novation, during which I got to ask some questions about the unit (as well as the more desirable yet more expensive Novation Zero SL MkII) as well as get my hands on one. Inevitably this resulted in my dear, long suffering girlfriend getting me one for Christmas.

 So – my new present is unwrapped and now the Christmas indulgence is over I’ve been having a go at controlling amplitube with the Nocturn. There were some issues – firstly the realisation that Amplitube has only 16 assignable controls available with Novation’s Automap Software. Quite why IK multimedia thought this would be sufficient is anyone’s guess – Guitar Rig 5 has literally hundreds available. This means that using Automap with Amplitube, you can only automate 16 parameters – and that’s not 16 per patch, it’s 16 full stop! Obviously if you’re using the same amp type all the time this isn’t such an issue, but a guitarist switching between different amp models and effects often would find this situation unworkable.

 Thankfully, the Nocturn also supports standard MIDI CC mapping, which Amplitube does work with well on a patch-by-patch basis. You do need to enable MIDI within Automap in it’s settings (hidden down in your taskbar, in case like me you’re going WTF? at the all-but un-clickable automap main window). Obviously assigning CCs not also used by the Behringer FCB1010 is a good idea too so you avoid any conflicts.

Once I got a MIDI user preset set up in Automap, and used a MIDI track in Cubase to send information from the Nocturn to Amplitube, it became a very simple matter to assign some CCs to the Nocturn’s controls in Automap and learn them in Amplitube. The main setup for now is simply to have the Nocturn’s rotary pots control the levels of the main amp controls, although one cool thing I thought to do was to set the Nocturn’s cross-fader control to move the horizontal position of the microphone in Amplitube’s virtual cab section.

Although originally there were some issues (that kept me up till 5 in the bastard morning actually) with the LED feedback not working via MIDI, the next day they had magically dissapeared and all was well with the Nocturn LEDs showing the correct values for their assigned parameters.