My back hurts, but the damned thing is just about working now…
I’m determined not to spend more on this record than I will make from it, which is probably very little, but I do want a nice bunch of sounds and effects to work from. I own plenty of these (virtual computer plug in thingies) but some need upgrading to work with the macbook pro… so I set about getting this done.
I spent about $250 at PSP upgrading the stereo delay, the Vintage Warmer and the Nitro (well worth it, the new N20 is fantastic sounding – great filters – http://www.pspaudioware.com/plugins/multimode_effects/psp_n2o/). And then about a couple of hours downloading, installing and authorsing the plug ins. They all work in Live now, and they are all great.
Spent about $100 at Ohm Force updating – Predatohm and then spotted what looks and sounds like it’s replacement, or big brother – Ohmicide which is just the best distortion unit I’ve heard in the digital world. Checked out their synths, but I don’t think they compete too well with Arturia, no-one does, really.
Re-installed my Camel Audio plug ins – Camel Phat and Camel Space + the Cameleon 5000 synth (one of my favourites – see Rolodex incident). No cost involved.
Tried to reinstall Native Instruments Electrik Piano but their authorisation system is such a pain in the ass, especially if you haven’t worked with it for a while and/or some of your licensed products and older, and one of their installers kept crashing, so I gave up. My time is worth more than theirs. EP isn’t that great anyway, and I hate working with sample based instruments. The kicker was when I found that I could upgrade Live to include ALL their instruments for about $200, and to buy their electric piano thing alone was $120… I just did it.
Which meant YET ANOTHER reinstall of Live.
As you can imagine, I was also moving back and forth between installers and permissions repair but that didn’t seem enough.. around 7Pm the laptop started to freak out (audio output break up) and I had to start up from the external disc. Repairing permissions took about 1/2 hour. This is really not good. Why have installers if they just fuck everything up? I noticed that in the repair permissions log that the problems seemed to be related to Front Row which is mac program pre-installed which I don’t use or want. I tried getting rid of it with app zapper, but the permissions problems persisted. I’m sure if I tried to get into the appropriate folders to delete the problem files I would be told that I don’t have the correct privileges to do so…
So I let it cool down for a while and watched Funny Girl, which was great. Babs can really sing. I didn’t know.
End of the night – re start. All seems well, so I decide to start auditioning the Analogue Lab sounds, after about 90 minutes I hadn’t even finished the ARP sounds… this will take a while. But it’s better to think about sounds first and then the music that you make with said sounds later. I’ll be a week or two (in my spare time between tour advancing and taxes) figuring out a palette.