AmplifierExperts

Yeah, just something to do to unwind after spending a week figuring out income taxes. I don't know why, but I find it more challenging to reinvent someone else's music than to create my own. 'Been giving that some thought and I think it's because of the difference in volatility of an idea in the mind vs. one on a CD. I can play the Vangelis CD over and over and work on a specific phrase until I'm satisfied with the result. With an idea in the mind, often it's gone during the time I spend trying to locate or tweak a patch to sound like what it was I heard in my mental image of some music. And during that time, the melody gets lost. Sometimes I get the melody down, but then can't 'hear' the harmonies underneath it in my mental image clearly enough to get them down in MIDI. A a great tool I often use is the time stretch function in SoundForge. Rip a track to wav file, open in SF, stretch the portions I have trouble with, such as a fast arpeggio, and then by slowing it waaaay down, I can pick out the individual notes. Also making it go quicker is the repetitive nature of the music, which avails itself to cut & paste operations to build measures quickly. I was amazed that I could use factory presets to so this song. I did not find it necessary to edit the patches. My first Kurzweil was bought in March of 2003. By August of that year, I owned three K-series and one PC2R, plus the ExpressionMate ribbon. They are addictive!

Not my own composition, but I just finished arranging "Chariots of Fire" on my Kurzweil synths. Here's a direct link to a streaming MP3. http://www.dv-clips.com/[KurzweilK2600RSK2500RSPC2R-O]Vangelis-Chariots_of_Fire.m3u