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S
& J STUDIO
This is a photo my new D-10 GFI guitar. As you are looking at it, attached to the far left leg is a little black box. This is the electronic Dobro simulator made by Goodrich. It is really neat. All I have to do to switch from the Pedal Steel to Dobro is flip a switch and change bars. The following is a list of equipment that I have in the studio. Most all of it is very portable and I take most of it with me when I perform or play a gig. It is not all the absolute best but it is very good and serves me very well. * GFI
D10 "Ultra" - 8 pedals, 5 knee levers * Twin Toa Speaker Cabinets with horns and 15 inch speaker, including poles * Novation MidiCon Slave Keyboard with MIDI interface (Two octaves with
total 8 * Yamaha Clavinova CVP 87A (Belongs to my wife, but I can use it if I
need 88 keys,
The heart of the system is really the computer. It has three (3) major MIDI sequencing programs; Band-in-a-Box and Power Tracks Pro both of which are produced by PG Music. A third sequencer is The Jammer Professional. It is a very good sequencer, but I have not taken the time to become proficient at using it. It is a lot like BIAB, but has some of its own characteristics. I do not currently have Cakewalk due to the fact that it is considerably more expensive and is more for the accomplished musician and keyboardist. BIAB and Power Tracks Pro do 99% of everything I need to do. I have all of the software that comes with Creative Labs AWE64 Creative Sound Card which includes a WAV recorder. I use the Song Librarian, mentioned on my home page, to organize and play my MIDI files. I use the Roland Virtual Sound Canvas (VSC 3.2) as my tone generator or MIDI player. The VSC 3.2 has excellent instrument sounds. It also has the capability of rendering a MIDI file directly to WAV format in less than 10 seconds. I use this feature to render all of my backup files to WAV format. I use to use the VSC 88 to play my MIDI file backup directly from my computer (I had my computer mounted in the rack), but I found that MIDI players in general do not always play correctly every time. I could not tolerate that during a performance. I decided to render everything to WAV format and then burn it to CD and/or MiniDisk. That way I can depend on it to sound the same every time. I have the Sony CD/MiniDisk Player mounted in my rack and it works much better. I can still add an external MIDI player if I so desire. I have recently added a Roland Mixing Board/Recording interface to my computer system. The Software is produced by Emagic. This system allows me to create professional recordings of my Steel Guitar and anything else I want to record. Here are the components of the system.
Here is a picture of my old system with the computer and CRT mounted on the rack.
Below is a list of suggested software: Power Track - PG Music
This is by no means an exhaustive list. If this has wet your whistle and you want to know more before you venture out and buy anything I would recommend that you visit amazon.com and do a search on books using the key word MIDI. Desktop Musician - Creating Music With Your Computer" by David M. Rubin is an example of what you are looking for, but there are a lot more books available on this subject. Feel free to do a search using this amazon.com search engine. Anything you purchase, books, CDs, Videos, by using this link will help support this site. I think this is a pretty good way to start. You can get by with less and you can certainly get a lot more sophisticated if you don't mind putting the bucks into it. I am always available via email to share what limited knowledge I have. If you wish to email me, please use the email link and not my Guest Book. For some reason I cannot return emails send through the Guest Book. Good luck and have fun. Aloha Please feel free to visit any of the pages listed below that you have not as yet visited.
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This is
where it all happens. I am very fortunate to have a room all to myself that I
can jam and create music to my hearts content. Actually it was my wife's
(Shirley) idea to get me out of the main part of the house. I guess it does get
to be old when you hear it every day. It is a perfect studio for jamming,
practicing, and recording or just hanging out.
