Don Larsen, retired pro baseball player, is noted in the record books for being the only pitcher to throw a no-hitter in a World Series. As the starting pitcher on the NY Yankees roster, Don pitched his “Perfect Game” against the Brooklyn Dodgers on October 8, 1956. You can read a bit more about Don and his historical game on Wikipedia. Anyhoo, Don is an old family friend and I have some great childhood memories of parties that my father organized with Don.
Recently, Don and his wife were on one of his sports memorabilia tours, and stopped by to pay us a visit. They told me that they had a surprise for me but wouldn’t say anything specific. I thought it might be some photos they wanted digitized, but to my surprise, they brought a complete set of tapes from the radio broadcast of his world series game! Along with the tapes are a set of about thirty 12″ acetates, and an old 16mm reel of film. Besides the recording of the complete game, there’s a reel of interviews from the locker room after the game. Apparently no one else has a copy of this, and it hasn’t been heard since it originally aired in 1956.
I’ve been asked to take on the project of transferring these 50-year-old tapes to a digital format for archival purposes and possibly develop a product for release. The details of copyrights and such have yet to be discussed, but it’s a cool project for the historical aspect alone. I haven’t touched the tapes yet. I’m seeking out the advice of experts who can analyze their condition and possibly clean and restore the moldy reels. let’s hope they will playback - fingers crossed!
Brian Nottingham sent me some excel spreadsheets that contain the file names of every patch in the Reason 4.0 Factory Soundbank. One of these spreadsheets even includes comments and descriptions. This was a massive undertaking - a data entry marathon of sorts, and Brian is generously offering the list to the Reason community. Many Thanks!
Reason 4.0 Factory Sound Bank Patch List
The Patchlist Project is intended to help Reason owners work more efficiently
with regards to quick access to information about the available sounds contained
in the extensive Factory Soundbank of Reason 4.
The extensive range of patches (nearly 3000 not counting the many REX files)
makes it easy to get lost in the “rabbit hole” of endless auditioning. Having a full
patchlist with descriptions helps provide a ready “go to” document whereby you
can quickly scan and jump to a sound that may have the qualities you are looking
for, without having to load and reload the sound, especially if you forget to add it
to your Reason Favorites list within the Reason Browser.
There are two formats of the lists: BLANK lists, where the user can personalize the comments/favorites, DESCRIBED lists, where this user carefully auditioned and analyzed each patch with personal interpretation.
It may prove useful to see the brief descriptions of the nature of each patch.
There only difference in the two “printer version” files is that each page gets a
header row. The two files that do not have “printer version” in the filename have
header rows where appropriate, but not specific to page breaks.
The Ulysses project with Goh has been on hold until we can get back into Tiny Telephone, so he decided to print a new run of his first album “Daylight Savings”. Despite being swamped with another major project, I took on the responsibility of trying to deal with the layout for the production run. The tricky part of this was that it needed to go out by the end of February in order for the product to arrive for his gig on March 18th. This was somewhat important since it was a party for the SF Asian American Film Festival, and there were a lot of people planning to attend.
Nathalie Roland developed the artwork, and my cousin, Tamiko who is very talented with print jobs, offered some color suggestions to balance with Nathalie’s work. The February Deadline came around and it looked like the layout would be finished in time.
But… realized that Goh didn’t have anyone finalize the CD master. So I had half a day to work on mastering the CD. We had remastered his album a couple of years ago, and the Waveburner project was saved on my workstation. The problem was that a few bonus tracks needed to be added and balanced. I was under the gun to get the master finished, and didn’t have enough time to polish things - so i kinda effed up the final.
So on March 18th, the day of the gig, the CDs arrived about 3 hours before the show - just in the nick of time! I was happy that the finished product didn’t look like purple hell, but I was still worried about the audio. People were buying the CD at the show, and we had not even taken a test listen to make sure the replication was free of errors!
I took a listen and it’s not bad. The music is strong enough that people will forgive the inconsistent mastering. That level jump on the bonus track is obvious, but not obnoxious.
Reason 4.0’s ReGroove Mixer is an amazing way to experiment with note timing and exploring rhythmic patterns. It’s no secret that the Akai MPC series of drum machines are legendary for their feel and some even speculate that the vintage devices have more character than the new ones. Included with the Reason 4.0 Factory Soundbank are a set of MPC60 groove templates, and even the new shuffle control features settings that emulate MPC swing patterns. The MPC 3000 groove files might seem a bit redundant, but they do have a unique character.
Many years ago I created a file of MPC 3000 grooves which were very popular on this site, and with the introduction of the Reason 4.0 ReGroove mixer, I planned to revisit this project with a set of groove templates. Originally i tried importing the old files, but I encountered some problems. Recently I decided to re-record the beats and reanalyze them for groove extraction. These groove patterns are four measures long with inconsistent timings (see the previous posting: MPC Groove Template Tutorial. The original REX files are also included in the refill along with development files I used to create the set.
Included with this refill are MIDI file extractions which are 1 measure groove templates. These are slightly different and offer a different groove than the ReCycle based groove templates.
I’m still having some problems with the templates. Namely the 74% and 75% swings are not working properly, but everything up to that point works great. For now this is merely a beta version of the patches until I figure out the problem.
The Computer Music Reason 4 special edition is out and apparently available in North America. I contributed a couple of articles to this issue including one version of the granular effect combinator patch. Many thanks to Jeff Bradley, who helped with the REX loop programming article.
I’ve been up in San Francisco for a couple of days working on the mixdowns of Goh’s album - which is now titled “Ulysses”. We’ve been at Tiny Telephone Studios where this project has taken an interesting twist. We’ve decided to bounce a majority of the tracks back to 24 Track tape for mixdown. Tiny Telephone specializes in full analog recording with a beautiful Studer and a Neve desk. Unfortunately this posed a potential problem for us: their pro tools system is equally as antiquated and we would be at the mercy of bouncing the hangar session (which were recorded through apogees) through the crappy mix 24 converters going to tape.
The day before we went in, I was scrambling to find someone who could either lend or rent out a set of decent converters that we could use instead of the old 888 i/0s. Through some amazing luck, I was referred to Steven Jarvis of Area51 Mastering who had 24 channels of Genex converters that I was able to rent for a few days! Steve met us at the session and even teched the system to make sure everything was clocked properly and working. It took ages to get everything going, but finally we were running and managed to transfer most of the album to tape.
We were working with Scott Solter who took the tracks and started shaping the mix into something completely different than what we originally expected - in a great way. The tape mixes had such a different feel from pro tools renders, and Scott gave us a “Bro Bounce” to 1/2″ 2 track which just sounded amazing.
Ulysses seems like an apt title for this project. The production has been a epic tale taking us all over the place and meeting bizarre freaks who still align heads and splice tape. We will be back in March or April to finish things up - hopefully. The next adventure will be finding someone who will master this project.
My NAMM report is still on hold until I can finish up a few outstanding projects. I wasn’t in the best of spirits during the week leading up to annual Music Manufacturers Convention, but I’m certainly glad I went. The first day there was not without a bit of drama, but I learned a very valuable lesson: Never use Hotels.com when you know rooms will be scarce. Basically they took my deposit and did not verify that the hotel would honor the reservation. We were stuck in Anaheim without a place to stay because Hotels.com screwed us. I will never use that service again.
Fortunately we managed to find a place about a mile from the Convention Center, but I didn’t sleep well (if at all). Josh and I were on at 10:30 AM on the first day of the show, so no one was really there to see how tired I was. Unfortunately, the Propellerheads Press Person, Sara, cornered me into doing a little Thor demonstration for the guys at Sonic State. So feel free to have a look at me somnambula-thoring.
I did manage to see a few cool things at the show, and hope to get the photos and reports posted soon. I’m still working on this indie-folk-yacht rock album and will hopefully finish the mixdowns this week!
The annual NAMM convention is going to be a bit different for me this year. I’m slated to present at the Propellerheads booth along with Josh Mobley (Neoverse). We’re going to have a little live demonstration of MPR4. I’ve also put together a little Live PA remix of Narrow Escape which incorporates synth patches and combinators that I’ve made for Reason 4.0. The entire song file is setup to be manipulated in Real-Time from a control surface, making it pretty fun to play with and tweak in a performance. I just need to work on my dance moves now…
Some of these patches, which include a filterbank and granular sampler, will become available pretty soon. The filterbank appears in the January Issue of Electronic Musician:
There’s a link to download the example files and the combinator patch on the EM site. Also featured are some workflow tips with the new sequencer, RPG-8, and Regroove Mixer:
I’ve received a lot of emails about the granular patch, and there’s some good news regarding this one. Future Publishing commissioned me to do a tutorial on the combinator, and this will be coming out in one of their Computer Music Reason special issues in the near future. Keep an eye out for that one.
Disclaimer: The one downside of having to present at NAMM, is that I may not have the time (or energy) do do my annual show report. If things Anyone attending, please come by and say “hello”. We go on first at 10:30 AM on Thursday, and you can check the schedule for our other appearance times on the Propellerhead Software website
Goh Nakamura and I have been back in the studio to do a few mixdowns of his new album. After weeks of editing and some last minute rerecording of his songs, we made it back to the Hangar. We have some drum tracks from a session recorded earlier in the year. The drums were ok, but lacked something. While in the shower this morning, I thought about a crazy idea of reamping the old tracks, and rerecording them through the same mic setup employed during our tracking session: D12, D19, and Coles and RCA Ribbons.
I mentioned this idea to Bryce, who came up with a crazy setup using an ampeg and a genelec. We setup a little submix going out to the amps and set up the microphones to capture some of the great room sound at the Hangar. The result was really cool, and gave the drums some life that was lost from being recorded in a small room.
When I get the time, I’m going to give this a try with sampled drums to see what happens. This might make for an interesting drum machine / natural ambience refill.
The Music Production with Reason 4.0 DVD has been available for about a month now directly from Groovebox Music’s website, but it’s just now making it into stores… namely the Prop Shop! This should make it easier to obtain the boxed version for people in Europe! Naturally if you don’t want to wait, the tutorial is available as a digital download directly from the publisher. I’m not sure who is carrying the boxed version here in the US, but google around for the title to find the best deals.
I have a couple of articles published in the January 2008 issue of Electronic Musician Magazine. One article discusses some of the important keyboard commands that make using the new sequencer more efficient. Some important notes about effectively using the ReGroove Mixer, and some cool RPG-8 tricks. The other article is a sound design tutorial that shows some off the features of Combinator 2 and using Thor as a filter device. I’m not sure if these will be available online, but I’ll certainly post a link up if they are made available digitally.
Over the weekend I switched hats to indulge in some serious vintage analog style recording at the Hangar Studios in Sacramento. I’ve been to this facility many times, but this was the first time I’ve had the pleasure of working in the space.
For over a year now, I’ve been helping my friend, Goh Nakamura try to find a recording style that suited his music. Obviously with a strong Beatles influence, the Revolution REDD and RS have been instrumental in achieving the tone Goh wanted for his next album, and after months of experimenting we were ready to finally get this project recorded (to pro tools - but we seriously contemplated the use of tape!)
After months of writing and home recording the base tracks of his new material, Goh and I planned to get his tracks recorded. Goh’s first album Daylight Savings is basically a home recording session of voice and acoustic guitar. The arrangements are very well done, and the unpolished feel adds to the charm of the album. This new project is much different as Goh has been working with other musicians including drummer, Tim Bulkley, Bassist Justin Miller, and pianist Adam Shulman.
Bryce Gonzales engineered our session using a variety mics including some great RCA and Coles ribbon mics. On vocals we used the Wunder Audio CM-7, a U-47 clone, running through the REDD.47 into a RS-124 into a UA 2192 converter. This was the magic signal path! Tim Bulkley had a procured a vintage 1950s Gretch kit with a killer tone, and with the acoustics of the Hanger space, we nailed a great drum sound using a vintage AKG D12 (into a V72) and an AKG D19 running through another Revolution REDD.47 mic pre. We even had to apply some tea towels to balance the levels.
Bryce set up Justin with an old Ampeg flip-top, and employed a prototype of his custom guitar head for Goh’s electric guitar parts. Adam was set up with several keyboards including a Rhodes Eighty-Eight, an old Wurlitzer, and even an Arp Odyssey. The Odyssey was a bit worn down and had some broken sliders (like most arps) but i managed to program a few cool patches on it. I also used some moogerfoogers on the electric pianos which were fed into a fender twin. Adam even worked in a pump organ part on one of the tracks.
On the second day of recording, some of Goh and Tim’s bandmates, Sadie and Han from The Invisible Cities, dropped in an added backing vocals to the tracks. Again we used that CM7 and had Goh and Sadie position themselves at different distances to balance the levels while we tracked them on the same microphone. On a different song we set up a little chorus of five on the mic.
The Hangar is simply a great sounding room, and with the great mics at our disposal we were able to get a sound worthy of the musicial skill of the guys performing. In two days we recorded 9 tracks; however one track was just an impromptu jam session - i punched record while the guys were fooling around and it sounded great. Bryce did a great job with the tracking. We may have spent a little too much time getting mic placements, but mixing this album is going to be easy because of our initial efforts.
Coincidentally, this session happened just as Goh’s Video for “Embarcadero Blues” was featured on YouTube. In a matter of days, his music has been heard by hundreds of thousands of people, and so this new album seems to be coming at a most opportune time. Goh’s PR man, Gary Chou, was busy taking photos and video of the session, and I taped a bit of the behind the scenes action and posted it up:
