mauriziodececco

Probably the first "serious" by hear work was finding out the chords of the organ part the Pink Floyd "A saucerful of secrets" on my Farfisa Compat, i probably was around 14/15 Maurizio

I always wondered why DAW do not do this automatically, i wasn't aware that Logic was able to do it. Tons of people use VEP for running huge sample libraries in multiple computers, i think it something still needed; computer history teach that there is no such thing like "enough computing power". Maurizio

Yes. Or UVI Falcon, or Play or other sample player. Leave an available .nvme slot inside, and some reasonable amout of memory (or ram empty slot). My money is ready. Maurizio

My last composition, "Allieurs, un soir", something like "Somewhere else, an evening". Lockdown time :-< https://soundcloud.com/user-74440421-480610805/ailleurs-une-soir/s-ec8UYY7AZZf Maurizio

Surely not a dead parrot :-> Maurizio

A while ago, in a thread dedicated to alternative controllers, we discussed with Tusker the idea of writing a script able to retrigger notes (and envelopes) just with a controller like Touché (or a breath controller) for those virtual instruments that where not able to do it; I finally convinced my software developer brain to work with my musician brain and after sometime dedicated to revise JavaScript, i wrote a first version of it, and we are beta testing it with Tusker; you will find it as a .txt file attached to this message. Before giving some explanation about the script, a few words on myself as a software developer and on what next: i am a senior software developer, and i have a significant past in computer music: in the 90s i worked ten years in Ircam, working with Eric LIndeman on the ISPW, and with Miller Puckette (the guy behind PD) and (a bit) David Ziccarelli, and other great guys on the family of MAX languages. I was in the jMax team, and i am the guy that resurrected it as jMax Phonenix (an open source project) in the 2000s. My day job was in serious (boring) corporate/enterprise development. In 2012 i even tryied to get my slice of the iOS music business with two applications MidiBud and MidiBlob (i can talk about them now because they are both dead since a number of years). I stopped my private software development actvity (commercial or open source) when i realised that i got more views of my music on Youtube that downloads of the software :-). But as a software developper i am still bored, so i decided to get some fun with simple scripts development for Logic Pro and MainStage. This one if the first, i have some ideas about other performance oriented scripts, and i am ready to get any suggestion, either in terms of modifications of these scripts or new one to write; use this thread for any suggestions, i'll continue to post the scripts to this thread. About the first script, controllerToNote. You"ll find it in attachment, as a .txt file. You need to save it, open with a text editor and copy/paste it in the Logic Pro Scripter plugin and press the Run Script button. I haven"t yet tested it on MainStage, but AFAIK it should work as it is. As always, I made a number of assumptions in order to write the script and took a number of decisions based on my experience and using the BBC2 breath controller as my test controller; these two points introduce a bias in the solution. But the script at the end is very simple, so it will be very easy to adapt his behaviour to other controllers if you are patient enough . So, what the script essentially does is to retrigger notes on the base of the controller behaviour. 1) Which notes The decision was to re-trigger notes that are currently held on the keyboard (in MIDI terms, notes for which the script saw a NoteOn but not yet a NoteOff). Another strategy may be used, like retriggering the last played note or chord played on the keyboard, even if it is not held; the previous choice seems musically/performance-wise more natural, but other things may be done.. 2) How NoteOff messages are sent for all the pending notes, and NoteOn are immediately reissued. So the retriggered notes will end when the keys are lifted on the keyboard. 3) What about note velocity Note velocity currently depends only on the controller behaviour; I am not sure that this is what makes more sense, may be the original velocity should also be taken into account to allow making chords with different note velocities. See below for details on how velocity is computed. 4) When This is the tricky point: first naive solution was: when the controller value passes a certain threshold. The problem is, if the controller go up and stay there, are you supposed to continuously retrigger notes ? Of course no; so it is more a stateful thing: when the controller pass the threshold, notes are retriggered and the controller is blocked from retriggering until it goes back below the threshold. But in practice, this was not very responsive and natural; in many cases it was too difficult to quickly retrigger notes (for example, by tonguing on the BBC2). It seemed a good idea to use also the speed of change of the controller: so, currently the script use two factors, a threshold on the value of the controller and a threshold on the speed of variation of the controller: if the controller goes up fast, the note is triggered even if the absolute value is not very high; and the two factors are also used to decide when notes can be retriggered, so if there is a percussive kind of change in the controller value, the note is can be retriggered quickly without the controller going down to zero. There are two parameters shown in the control panel to balance this two factor; their default value match the best values I found for the BBC2, but I expect them to be very different for the Touché, for example. I also used these two parameters to compute the velocity of the retriggered notes; it seemed more natural with the BBC2; there are another two parameters with as default value what I found natural. The final version of the script may have a preset menu, where we can put the fine-tuning values for the different controllers. 5) And now ? Try it, and see if it seems natural; Experiment with the four parameters, and see what it gives you. Anything can change and evolve, the script is small and easy to change; the most difficult thing is to understand how to change it; do not hesitate to ask things. I plan to write other performance-oriented scripts; the next will be an adaptive/smart MIDI delay, that try to extract the tempo from your playing. One last point: being a professional software developer with a foot on the open source world, I am attentive to copyright issues with the code; this script, and all the future scripts I"ll write, state my copyright and it is released under a BSD 2 clause license; this means essentially that as long as you give credits to the authors, you can do whatever you please with it. Maurizio 1937.txt

Not exactly the same experience, but i tried other knob based controller, and in general things that you use to program sounds (started with Kore, moved to various useless, for me, stuff from Novation and later Behringer). I arrived to a clear conclusion: i am perfectly fine with programming sound with my mouse and keyboard. I am perfectly fine with programming automation on a DAW by drawing things with a mouse and not using a slider. I have been using a mouse even before the original Mac came out; i like it, no problems with it. In the home studio, the only thing i really want is a transport controller, because my eyes can be elsewhere (like a movie). Gigging is something different, going to the screen is not always an option while you are playing ... Maurizio

Convince a sax player - he's a sax player - to learn violin? Not all sax players think the way Ornette Coleman thought. I recall Miles Davis mentioning in his autobiography how pissed he was at Ornette for getting a violin and playing it without proper training. You'll probably have just as much luck convincing a violin player to learn to play baritone saxophone. I realise that my comment was more on the article than the instrument or the inventor in itself. The article talk about 512 notes, "many you"ve never heard before", and "Singh realized this music existed outside of the rigid 12-note structure of Western music, in which he had been trained as a jazz musician.". That is BS, you do not need this new instrument to discover that there are more than 12 notes. If the article said "Singh, as a saxophonist, could not go out of the 12-nore strucutre like his violinist friends", that would have been different :->. Maurizio

Huh. That would be 3. (Trust me on this -- I'm a math whiz.) I'll stick with the 12th root of 2. Ops, you are right, i do not remember what i was drinking when i wrote it :->. I think the paper was about the 19th root of 2, actually :->, leaving out some multiples for making a scale closer a natural one (don't ask me which one . Maurizio

Well, let's says that for me it usually not very difficult to not be the best musician in the group. But even as a student/amateur i always thought that as piano/keyboard player the drummer was the one with which i interact more; it is a kind of marriage. Some drummer story, just for my 2 cents: fIrst of all, the Jazz drummers. The music school give you a lot of opportunities to play with different drummers; they may be the guy that bring energy to the group, or more like a delicate painter bringing his touch. But in general, they listen; listening is probably the one thing that the jazz school teach :-). The best is when the communication flow, the drummer respond to my comping and i respond to his playing, managing (of course, with the bass player) the global energy. Of course, if you get lost, he will get lost with you (we are both students . Then, my jazz/rock/funk drummer. He as a professional past; he is the kind of drummer that is the foundation of the group groove: rock solid, if you get lost, you can go grab a beer, come back, and he will be precisely on the beat, and knowing exactly where you should be in the song. And, he listen, help you when he feel you get lost, just that accent here and there to recall you the structure. Outside rehersal, he is also a great guy, and a great friend. Things get fuzzier with ambient electro group: We have a girl drummer; the situation is unusual, in the sense that she is a beginner; apparently before answering my ad whe played mostly beatles at home. But when she arrived in the group, she brought something special in terms of style and creativity, so the group built around her style contribution. Not without problems; she have self estime problems (as a drummer) and sometime think too much or even worse panic while playing, when she absolutely do not need to. Anyway, with her we have a special relationship: she ask me to help her lock her time, so we work together to build a rhythm structure where she can rely on the piano to be stable; not that she really need it, but she is reassured in this way and more emotionally stable. Then, things go cloudy with rock drummers : Recently (well, just before the first lockdown) we tried to start a new project with some friend, and we played with a very technically good drummer; rich structures, stable and so on, with a big caveat: he wasn't listening; it must be a problem in the rock environment, the game is probably be the loudest possible. The problem is that even as a music student, playing essentially for your fun, this doesn't work; it is just not fun, expecially after my experience with jazz drummers. OK, there is one particular rock drummer (progressive rock drummer) with which i am very happy to play, but it is a special case, he is my brother, and unfortunately we are a thousand kilometer away :->. Maurizio

Bertrand Tavernier passed away today. He was a famous french film director, and from our point of view the important one was Round Midnight, with Herbie Hancock. Maurizio

Nice gadget, but couldn't the guy could just learn to play a violin ? This remember me an Electtronic Music Day in Pisa, a few (ehm, forty ?) year ago, where somebody presented an article on alternative tuning based on the square root of 9, and a student asked: "Now that a computer can play any frequency, do we need notes and tuning any more ?". Clearly the guy never saw a violin, either. Maurizio

As an IT guy, I must tell you a secret that we usually to try to keep within ourself: have ever asked yourself why IT do not work, it is buggy, user unfriendly, and in general, carefully avoid to make people autonomous ? It is very simple: if IT was like that, perfect, easy to use, without any specific competences, without bugs, *WE* wouldn't have a job anymore. No way Maurizio

More seriously, i think: 1) Exactly because of what said above, most of the (small) artists do not actually need big distributors; the technical infrastructure i personally own is largely enough to provide streaming for the 400 listening i got on SoundCloud. It wouldn't be too complex to use distributed technologies to provide a community streaming service to most but the most listened artists; there is some open source software project working on the technical side of the problem. 2) The real point, said above, is curation, discovery, structuring the content and providing a way to find things to people. As many of the people in this forum, i come from the times where Internet (or even before, networks) meant organised communities, and not multinationals. For exemple, this forum is for me the most important source of 'cured music suggestions'; i carefully avoid suggestions given by any stupid algorithms in common platforms. Essentially, i believe that is possible, using Internet today, to create an independent, quality focused, community based and community owned, technical and social infrastructure dealing with music distribution. I am also convinced that this structure will never be better of a big pizza for feeding a family anyway, so it would not be a substitute for a professional activity; but i think it could be a lot more motivating and close to what music actually is that publishing on Internet Giant site. Well, i would be happy to provide my competences (technical competences, not musical to reach such an objective Maurizio

Me too. I also chose to activate Repost by Soundcloud, with the interesting results of getting reports of zero (0) monthly listening from all the major music distribution platforms. Not exactly motivating . Maurizio

I just got it. It will substitute my AR8 in my home studio, works as melodica effects (possibly battery powered) if i successfully start my melodica only project, as keyboard/melodica mixer and audio interface for more complex gigs. What convinced me to pull the trigger as the last software update, adding parametric equalisation, and a number of decent routing options, making possible for example to couple the two monitors out as a stereo bus and send it to the headphone. In the studio allow to gain a lot of desk space, but using it in the home studio was a kind of side benefit; actually i find that the Flow 8 sound better with my Genelecs 1030 than the AR. It is (a lot) less noisy and the sound is more detailed, more defined. I notices that difference because i am desesperately trying to mix and master a new composition with a certain numbers of tracks that require me to develop my limited audio engineers competences, so i am expecially paying attention to the sound in this weeks I haven't used it a lot yet, but i find the non motorised slider easy to use, and the application looks ok. Do not hesitate to ask any question you may have Maurizio

As an IT professional with a past in computer music, my impression is that technological platform discussed in this thread that gave Nord the leadership in the 2000's is starting to be, or is already, a liability more than a technological advantage; as said above, platforms like a Raspeberry Pi or equivalent architectures based on off the shelf components give you plenty of power, RAM, and disk thruput for very low cost and complexity. This is was always happend in IT: specific, exotic architectures giving you a strong technology advantage at a give moment do not attire the kind of investiment that allows standard of the shelf architecture to progress. The results is that any custom solution that is good today will be obsolete and a liability after a given time; in the 90s (at Ircam) i met people building dedicated hardware for making sample streaming from disk; not many years later it was cheaper to do with a PC. All the sample based Nord Instruments are still doing well because they sound good, and the ergonomic of the instrument is especially adapted to a market segment; but what it will happen when another vendor will came out with something with ten or one hundred time the memory space for sample (the Prophet X has already that kind of sample libraries) ? On the other side, the Nord Lead was special and unique a few years ago, now the knobby synth market reborn from its ashes. I love my Nord, and i seriously hope Nord is preparing a new generation of instruments for the 2020's .... Maurizio

Behringer Flow 8, to replace my AR8 in my home studio and to be used as a keyboard/melodica mixer on stage I write a bit more in its thread once used a bit. Maurizio

When i was in high school i financed the construction of my electronic instruments by repairing, between others, the portable Phillips cassette recorders; i got the service manual and i becamevquite good at it; for the other brands, the worse rubbish wasvthe Sanyo cassette recorders, a confused mass of wires. The german Grundig was a work of art and order

Too late for me. The strongest reason i migrated from Cubase to Logic was because i was moving from a desktop to a laptop, with the idea to work on public transportation. In that kind of situation you do not want a dongle that somebody can easily grab and run. But today i am happy with Logic, that suite me better, and i sold my Cubase Pro copy (still have Cubase Element to read old file). No plan to go back. Maurizio

I am 61, and i am lucky that my daily job require learning everyday. Music composition, for me, and for my groups (hoping to be able to meet them again . Other than this, a lot of tutorials on Logic Pro, Falcon, and all the others VIs i have. And finally, the MIT course on quantum mecanics on youtube ;-> Maurizio

I'm listening... She took most of the informations from an italian group on facebook about home pizza. Mostly they use a Ferrari G3 pizza owen, that we have. It is a small, single pizza at a time owen, with a refractory stone, and going up to 400 centigrades. Quite difficult to use (a drop of tomato on the stone require half an hour of eating to clean it up before making a pizza), and it require the good on/off sequence to be at the right temperature when you cook the pizza. I do not know if she have written notes, in case i can translate Maurizio

Without any intention of flaming, or being polemic, i thought that making some kind of reality check on the I/O limitations on current models, based my personal experience (YMMV), could be useful to the discussion. It is strictly a personal point of view, based on a study of my personal experience, that is so biased by my technical habits and constraints (in particular, living in a non Mac professional context). In the last 10 years, i got three Mac laptops: first, a 13" Mac Book Pro 2011, then a 2015 12" MacBook, and now a 2019 Mac Book Pro. Up to the last one, my music machine was a 2009 Mac Pro; the 12" Macbook was a great travel machine, light as an iPad, to throw in the bag and forget, taking metro, trains and planes; it had strong i/o limitations, and that was fine with respect to its purpose, so let leave this one aside. The Mac Book Pro 2011 was my last pre USB-C machine, and i used it professionally, software development, office work and so on. It provided the following I/O: MagSafe power port Gigabit Ethernet port FireWire 800 port (up to 800 Mbps) Two USB 2.0 ports (up to 480 Mbps) Thunderbolt port (up to 10 Gbps) Audio in/out SDXC card slot I cannot answer to the general question about was it better than the current 4 USB-C port, but i can answer for myself, for the use i had at the time: 0) MagSafe port: of course, i used it as everybody. The proprietary connection forced me to pay the full price for a second power adapter to keep in the office (ok, at that time 'proprietaty power adapter' was a natural concept). I think i was the one that suffered more of the occasional accidental disconnections of the cable than gained from the additional security. So, i never liked it. But that is just me, i understand there are different opinions around. 1) Gigaport Ethernet Port: used, but very rarely: in practice Wifi was enough, and in the office anyway i could not connect to the house network. In practice, i used it exclusively to do software updates, that were really slow without a cabled network. So, important, but far from daily use.nToday, cabled network for me is even less important, the new Wifi is as fast as the cable; there is one important exception, when i use my Mac Pro as a VEPro slave. 2) Firewire: never, ever used. It was already a kind of legacy port then, surely needed for people having that kind of equipement. But it did not made a lot of sense to invest in Fireware hardware already, considering also the fact i worked in a Linux/Windows house. Actually, i have a 2Tb firewire hard disk still running connected to a 2011 Mac Mini; i was forced to buy a fundamentally obsolete piece of hardware because of the I/O limitations of the Mac Mini, that have only one Thunderbolt 1 port, where an other disk is connected. Note than when i talk about being obsolete i do not reference the technical ability of the technology, that was great, but about its market adoption. 3) Two USB2: always in use, external HD or USB sticks, or iPhone or iPad, or others. Too few, actually. I had a USB Hub to use when i needed more. 4) Thunderbolt/Mini displayport: used to connect video projectors and external monitors; always with a *dongle*. 5) SDXC card: never used, i prefer usually to connect my photo camera in USB. But again, that is just me. I know that this *is* a need in mobility. So, was my I/O situation better at the time ? Absolutely not. I had three ports that either never or rarely used, and just two USB ports; i already used dongles and hubs, and i already had a cable/dongle/hub compartment in my bag. No expansion possibilities existed other that the Apple Cinema Display, that was a very fine product, but horribly expensive (my wife had it) : thunderbolt docks came out with thunderbolt 2, and they were still very expensive at the time. By the way, docks are not something that was invented for USB-C/Thunderbolt, they existed before in a proprietary and expensive form for Windows laptops, and they were missing in the Mac landscape. So, i was essentially stuck to the I/O limitations the machine had. I largely prefer having four general purpose ports, that i can use as display or ethernet ports when i need them, and as USB in the other cases. I am happy about the large choice of accessorie and docks i have, that i did not had with the 2011 laptop. The fact that they are non proprietary and not model specific allow me to the use a USB-C dock i bought in 2015 for the MacBook with the Mac Book Pro, and use it a second charger and Ethernet connection in one of the place i use the laptop. I am happy i can use a multi port travel charger to charge my Mac when i am travelling, and to be able to charge the family iPhones/iPad with the laptop charger if needed. Nothing that i could do before. There are also a number of possibilities that i am not currently using, as the ability to connect multiple monitors, or to connect an external GPU or external PCI cards (even if with a number of limitations). So, no, i wound't say by any means that my 2019 Mac Book Pro 13" is limited in I/O with respect to my good old 2011 MacBookPro, even if you consider the evolutions of the technical world (at that time, needs were probably less complex than today); on the contrary, for my personal use/experience it is far better. Of course, i would be happy if they raised the number of ports to 6, instead of 4. On the contrary, i would be very frustrated if they instead add a HDMI port that i would use once or twice a year instead. And i would be *really* upset if they remove USB-C ports to make room for dedicated ports as HDMI or MagSafe. About MagSafe, i have a doubt: in the current Apple terminology, MagSafe refer to something completely different than the original one, wireless charging for iPhone. I would be interesting to understand if the rumours make reference to this new meaning. Again, no polemic intentions, consider this just as a single data point. Your experience may be very different. Maurizio

Mike, i am one of those that respectfully disagree with this perspective. Going back to proprietary charging technology ? Today i do charge my Macbook on three different places, and only one of them use a Apple charger; remember when people bought Apple Display only because of the charging ? There are magsafe-like solutions for usb C today. About I/O, i agree with "pituful few"? But today i usb-c to HDMI cable cost less than an HDMI to HDMI cable. I largely prefer having a multi-purpose I/O connector instead of an HDMI (or Ethernet or anything else) connector that i will not use; give me six of them and i'll be happy. There is a notable exception: the SD card slot: that is something that almost be definition is needed in a mobility situation. Maurizio PS: i also love my butterfly keyboard, but that's just me :->

Well, i could die if i had to choose between my Nord and pizza. We also take pizza very seriously, being Italian with a wife from not too far from Napoli. So, my wife studied very deeply pizza making, with a Ferrari owen. Different flours, different yeast and techinques. And i eat every single pizza she prepare :-). Our favorite Pizza place in Paris in unfortunately closed for the pandemic, but you can ask Markyboard about it Maurizio