OK, first up is the Yamaha Studio Connections Recall template for the Eventide Eclipse. I am NOT going to write extensive documentation on how to install this and get it running. You should be able to figure that out for yourself. Assuming you have Studio Connections installed though, you should unrar this download into “C:\Program Files\YAMAHA\SM2\GTRC\Devices” and then use the GTRC Manager to enable it.

This Eventide Eclipse template only supports dumping of the current edit buffer. That means that when you send back the dump, the current program will be replaced, but not written to memory. For my purposes that is fine, but you may want to write the program to a user memory location if it’s important to you. The Eclipse’s Setup parameters are not touched.

Any problems leave me a comment here and I’ll get back to you.

Download the Eventide Eclipse Recall Module.

For some reason, I’ve totally overlooked Yamaha’s Studio Connections until now. Being a fairly heavy weight Cubase user, you’d think I would have come across it before, perhaps discussed at cubase.net or nuendo.com. Or perhaps mensioned on other forums. But it seems that Studio Connections is a dark secret. Very few people even seem to know what it does.

I’ve been exploring the “Recall” side of things, which is essentially a sysex librarian. It’s easy to see why nobody understands this because Yamaha’s website doesn’t even mension the word sysex.

What happens is, the Studio Manager (pictured above) allows you to request sysex dumps from your external gear, and stores it until you next want to send that back. This is integrated into Cubase, so you can store sysex dumps within a Cubase song file. There is a standalone version for non-Cubendo users too. The great news is that it genuinely seems to work and it’s a more elegant solution than recording sysex dumps at the beginning of your song.

It’s pretty easy, if you know a little about sysex, to come up with working templates (they’re called GTRC templates - Generic Total Recall Component!). In a week or so I’ve written templates for the Evolver, Korg Karma and Eventide Eclipse. Plus I’m using the excellent Kurzweil K2600 template made by Jason. I’ll put these online soon.

The K2661 is taking me a long time to get into. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking love it, but it’s deep beast and the learning curve is high.

That said, I’ve had some fun programming it, and here are some of the results. 20 patches, all with a very ambient and filmic edge. I haven’t delved too deep into the VAST algorithms yet, but there are a few nice tricks I’ve discovered (check out the ‘Symphonique’ and ‘Sunset Fade’ patches for some nice random elements). The KDFX is the key to all of these patches, providing some lush long reverbs, so make sure you have the appropriate settings so you can hear the intended KDFX studio.

None of these patches use samples, just the stock K26xx ROMs.

One more thing to mension is that most of the Pad sounds use the Data Slider to alter the Amplitude Envelope times. A good place to start is to put the Data Slider somewhere near the middle.

So prepare to hold some long chords…

Download my K26xx Cinematic & Ambient Bank Here

Or have a listen (all patches recorded straight from the Kurz outputs with no additional effects)…

Demo mp3

p.s. check out the new VAST PROGRAMMING forums over at cunka.com. There are some very knowledgable and friendly folks there.

I’ve spent about the last year putting this bank together. Not full time of course, I do have the other things to do occasionally, but this bank represents many late nights nonetheless.

127 brand new sounds for your Evolver (I left a default patch at the end). They mostly fall into the ‘dance’ category (electro, house, drum and bass, etc etc). Lots of big basses, leads, crazy fx and sequences. There are NO ’sequencer’ patches (like some of the factory patches that just play sequenced loops regardless of any keyboard input) mainly because I find those kind of patches of limited use, so ALL of my patches are fully playable on the keyboard. Also make sure you try the mod wheel and aftertouch as I try and program something interesting for these 2 controllers in most patches.

It should go without saying that I think the Evolver is an amazing synth. Everyone should own at least the desktop model. The bang-for-the-buck factor is off the scale!

Anyway… without further ado, here it is. I hope you enjoy it.

Download my Evolver sound bank

So once again it’s been ages since I last updated the site. Well, here’s why:

I’m a lucky man. She’s fantastic. :)

So my post count has been way down of late, mainly because I’ve been taking a massive hiatus from my computer, at least in a musical sense. In this time a few interesting pieces have come into the studio. The first of them is this:

The Kurzweil K2661. Kurzweils are somewhat of an anomaly in the keyboard workstation world. Whilst other manufacturers bring out new and updated keyboards every couple of years, Kurzweil have pretty much sat on their VAST based line of keyboards for nearly 20 years. There have been revisions of course, but nothing like the cash cow onslaught of other companies. As someone who has owned and made good use of many worstation keyboards over the years, I think this is because Kurzweil got it right in the first place.

The good points? - The sound should be top of the list. Although many of the preset sounds are a bit dated now (who the hell spends £1700 on a keyboard to use the presets anyway?), a little programming goes a long way, and I was quickly making bang-up-to-date sounds from big Hollywood strings to downright evil distorted DnB basses in no time. Points should also be awarded for KDFX, Kurzweil’s multi-FX system. I’d heard good things about this, but it exceeded my expectations by a long way in both its flexibility and its sound.

Any bad points? - Well the depth of the instrument can sometimes be daunting. I read somewhere that no two Kurzweils are ever the same and I can see why. The flexibility, not only of sound creation, but also of the control you can have, means that the Kurz can be setup to fit into your studio setup in ways you probably haven’t even considered, and whilst this is a good point, it does mean that you can feel a little alone because every Kurzweil ends up different, and as such, it makes it harder to connect with other Kurzweil users in a ’support and share’ kind of way (although the Sonikmatter forums go along way to help).

Oh it’s been aaaaagges since I posted anything. How piss poor. Well, to make amends here’s a fun sample set I made of a circuitbent Speak N Spell. It was my only foray into circuitbending. Quite fun whilst it lasted, and reasonably sucessful too.

So here are two sample sets. One contains unbent letters and a few words, and the other contains bent, single hits. As my current obsession with the Akai MPC2500 continues, I’ve included PGM files for these, so you get the samples nicely mapped over your MPC pads. For anyone without an MPC, just ignore the PGM files and use the WAV files in your favourite sampler.

Download the kits here

Another bank of Imposcar sounds here. Alot of BOC style plucks, some electro type basses and a few nice pads and sound effects. A mixed bag I guess. Enjoy.

Download the fxb file here
or download as VST3 presets for use in Cubase 4

My new (ever changing) studio is almost complete. The major new addition is a Mackie D8B (cracked plastic side panels kindly supplied by the courier company - grr!). I don’t quite know where I can put the Mackie Control now, so it might have to go. Still, with all the new channels I have on the D8B, perhaps I won’t miss it so much.

Click the pictrure for a larger photo, or if you want to fish about and see what’s what, click here.

I saw this bad boy on ebay and couldn’t resist. I’ve owned a mono evolver desktop for some time, and had struggled to get on with it. It sounded amazing but somehow trying to navigate round that little programming matrix whilst playing your patch on a master keyboard just didn’t feel right. So I thought I’d gamble on the keyboard version, and I think it payed off.

Finally the Evolver feels like the uber-synth it really is. Having dedicated knobs for almost all parameters makes it easy to program. The keyboard is great quality and has the nicest aftertouch response I’ve ever used. The only real downside I can see is that I’ll be lusting after a poly version now!