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Africa Midi with sound


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On a fun scale to 10, this should be 8: the assignment was simple enough. Get a MIDI from the internet covering Toto's "Africa" (this is all for non-commercial use), play it thought the Kurzweil PC3, and make it sound a bit believable.

 

Some may have tried and be even experienced fiddling with their sequencer and the loading in of the resulting midi into their Kurz machine. Usually, it will work after checking out volume, sound and track stuff if you're experienced enough, but OTOH getting a nice bass heavy sound with realistic Rock feel out of the machines somehow appears impossible, and usually it will moan and sigh in the process, for usually not clear ROMpler reasons.

 

So here's my resulting sound, first the midi rendering recorded digital from the PC3 playing the file which is downloadable from below:

 

africa3c.flac 25MB 16 it 44.1 kS/s lossless (agin like last time: my server's internet connection can handle a few real-time players only)

 

Play this file in it's full 16 bits resolution, preferably no resampling, and with the output to your DAC at -10dBr or less for the best result. After the song ends, I play two or three of the separate sounds shortly.

 

Not bad I think without getting to pro in the settings choices, or rending better tracks, etc.! Of course I used my "corrected" sample reconstruction prepared altered presets for the tracks, which are included in this "song++" PC3 file you can load into your own machine if you feel like it:

 

africa3c_sqmaprch.pc3 119 Kilo Byte , free for non-reselling and non-redistributing use

 

The sound is exactly from the above song, except I added some Lexicon Percussion Plate effect (prest 20 from the MX400 with 3 msec delay, filters at 20kHz and 24 % effect), and I used the digital output for that, and recorded digital, with possibly some slight re-sampling going on (I'm still not completely lcear on what the Lexicon Omega does for digital input on a circularly synced USB and TOS connection graph).

 

The built in DAC from the PC3 and probably other models is a bit different, and would preferably get a little different tuning from my elaborate sound correction from AUX-2 and Mastering Eq and Multi-compression. Nevertheless you can use the sounds yourself, and there's an added piano on a muted track people might find likeable, use it ("Horowitz Grand0a" track 5, set volume to exactly 110 (*it won't be at first*), with me that was sound #1820), which will play at a normal volume and gives an idea of a "corrected" sound through the exact settings in song mode as provided. Again using these sounds out of the song mode with this song having loaded the mastering effects it does, and all the tracks having no locks on program and volume (check your master mode) etc is useless, they won't sound such that you want to spend time with them. If you simply play the correctly loaded song as is, with everything having loaded up, it should sound like the above example audio, except for a little Lexicon and the slightly different built in DAC.

 

Essentially, you shouldn't change anything at all except for small volume changes on the tracks, not even much change in the AUX-1 reverb send would work great because the whole rig up in the song mode is tuned to sound all-right with all those mixed tracks, and will not just work with just about any other setting, seriously. To many things are connected for that, which is a strange concept at first sight, but it's like digital processing which makes your DAC oversampling filter happy doesn't just grow on trees; it requires very specific sound elements to be used just right, and in exact combinations or it will fail quite a bit at the first change in the chain.

 

SO, have some fun

 

Theo V

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Why not ?

 

It's not hollidays just every day, you have to take advantage when you can!

 

I have another mystery to solve before I hack away at midi files on the Internet

 

A friend tells me Steven Wilson is not well known or popular in Netherlands.

 

If true, I find this surprising. Appreciate your insight. Thanks !

Why fit in, when you were born to stand out ?

My Soundcloud with many originals:

[70's Songwriter]

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Theo, is there a DAC that can make midi file playback sound somewhat engaging, not flat and lifeless? I sometimes use midi files like these to learn songs, but they are torturous to listen to otherwise.

A misguided plumber attempting to entertain | MainStage 3 | Axiom 61 2nd Gen | Pianoteq | B5 | XK3c | EV ZLX 12P

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  • 2 weeks later...

So, I'm working like I said on a video rendering this PC3 song through my studio processing, and in the process of improving on that dull and always wrong-ish YT video experience I thought I'd work on my movie making skills. So this is a test piece of the video I'm working on about this song in the kurzweil and, uhm, it's a little psychedelic! Most here are somewhat of a musician, so that should be ok, right ?

 

SO if you feel like seeing some combined (free !) Davinci Resolve 16 (actually run on Windows 10 Pro) and Cinelerra (on the same machine, but Fedora Linux, also freely avaiable) experiment, which is clearly not done yet, here is a little fun:

 

[video:youtube]

 

T

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