| I love the sound of your guitar. What kind of effects to you add to get it to sound like that? |
| I play a Takamine
Santa Fe model DSF48C. All I do is plug it in and go. I never add
any kind of effects to it because it sounds so good just the way it is.
I came to this guitar seven years ago after watching John Cunningham
play in |
| It’s called a feedback buster. It’s a $6 piece of rubber you can pick up at any music store. It keeps the guitar from feeding back when you’re standing in front of the speakers. You can see a description at http://proaudiomusic.com/accessories/feedback-buster.htm |
| What kind of strings to you use? |
| I use D’Addario EJ-16 Phosphor-bronze strings all the time. I’m not an expert on strings at all. I buy these because I can get them cheap and they sound good. You can buy them anywhere guitar strings are sold, but since I tend to use a lot of them, I buy them from Musician’s Friend in a 3-pack for $14.99. This breaks down to $5. for each pack of strings. |
| How often do you change your strings? |
| I don’t have a schedule for this. I just change them when they start to sound dead and lifeless. During the cooler months, this is typically about every four or five gigs. During the summer, when I sweat a lot, I have to change them after every one or two gigs. Three hours of heavy perspiration kills them dead. My strings normally sound brilliant and crystal clear. When they stop sounding like that, it’s time to change. |
| Do you break a lot of strings? |
| You’ve probably noticed I pound the daylights out of my guitar. This leads to broken strings all the time, notably the G and D strings. I’ve had the guitar looked at for sharp spots on the frets and had some work done on it to reduce the problem, but I still break them. Sometimes I can play all the strings until they all need changed without a break, other times I can put a new set on and have two strings break the same night. There seems to be no system to this. I’ve gotten pretty fast at changing them without stopping the show. This requires me to sing and change at the same time. Neat trick, no? |
| What
kind of |
| Up until July of 2002 I used an Emu Proteus 2000 sound module and triggered it with a Yamaha MDF3 Midi Filer, however most recently I've been converting my midis to MP3s and playing them from disk. This conversion to audio allows me more flexibility for adding effects and or/ background vocals. I still use the Proteus 2000 for most of the sounds, but I no longer have to carry it with me. I have a little studio set up in my office at home where I do all the work. I also use the Edirol Virtual Sound Canvas DXI that comes bundled with Cakewalk's Sonar 2. It's an excellent source of midi sounds and very easy to use. The Edirol module has several great sounding general midi drum kits which the Proteus doesn't have (Proteus has great sounding drums, but they aren't in the GM format and must be mapped to each individual song). After burning the songs to CD, I play them back using a Numark MPCD3. This is a professional rack-mounted DJ rig that plays regular CDs as well as MP3s. |
| What do you use to program the MIDI sequences? |
| I use Cakewalk Sonar 2 (Note, Cakewalk released Sonar 3 in September 2003 and Sonar 2 is no longer for sale on their web site) to polish everything, but I don’t actually sequence the stuff myself. I purchase my midis from Midi-Hits.com. These guys are the absolute best at programming sequences, and it's worth every penny of the $9.00 you pay for each song because it would take me days to do it myself. Read the endorsement letter I sent to Midi-Hits for more information. By the way, I did sequence one song on my own: Garth Brook's When You Come Back To Me Again. It took me three weeks and over 60 hours. I never want to do that again. |
| What do you mean you polish your Midis? |
| The big thing is this: the Proteus 2000 that synthesizes all my instruments is not General Midi compatible (You can learn about GM here). This means that whenever I download a song (whether I purchase it or just snag it off a free midi web page), I have to assign Proteus sounds to each of the midi tracks. For example, if the original sequencer (the person, not the machine) played a sequence as a slap bass, I have to tell Proteus to assign a slap bass to that track, otherwise it might play a tambourine or something. I knew nothing about midi nor about GM when I bought the Proteus. I just bought it because a musician I respect suggested it to me. It's a great machine, but I had no idea what the lack of GM was going to mean to me in terms of time. Take it from me, if you're going to buy a sound module, buy one that has a GM bank. I also have to mix the tracks down. Because the Proteus has different volume levels from the original sequencer, I have to mix all the volumes to suit my own ear. Most of the time I also have to change the performance key. Many songs are just too high for my vocal range, so I use Sonar to drop the key a couple steps. Nearly every song has a few bad notes that the sequencer missed, so I fix those too. The entire process from purchase to performance is a time consuming effort. Even though I don't sequence my own midi's I spend two or three hours tweaking each of them before they ever make it onto the CD for performance. |
| If it's that much work to use MIDI, why don't you just buy prerecorded audio tracks? |
| Good question. This is another one I've batted around a lot. The reason I went with MIDI instead of karaoke-type tracks in the first place is that I wanted to have a sound that was as close to a live band as possible. karaoke tracks tend to sound more like the stuff you hear from your stereo. Anyone who's ever heard a live band knows that there's a big difference in the way a song sounds live as opposed to hearing it on the stereo. This is because live sound tends to be heavy on the bottom end and not nearly as compressed as prerecorded music. I didn't think I could get that kind of live quality from karaoke tracks. Another big issue was the inflexibility of prerecorded audio. You can't change the key and you can't change the performance. You're stuck with whatever you have. MIDI gives you total flexibility over all of this stuff. MIDI is a lot more work, but the result is much better for a live performance, and as I said earlier, midi can be exported to audio and burned onto CD giving me all the control I need.. |
| I'm still learning, but the steepest part of the learning curve is past now. I spent a solid two months, six or seven hours a day learning. I knew absolutely nothing when I started. I had to search the net for definitions of basic terms like bank, sequencer, sound module and tracks.. I had to research equipment, and then finally learn how to use it all. It was a very, very frustrating two months. The most agonizing thing was not knowing what to buy just to get started. I had already spent a month of agonizing work before I learned that I could actually download presequenced midis from the Internet. I did all this in the summer of 2000. By the end of summer I had successfully coaxed about 30 MIDI tunes onto disk and had started performing with them. |
| Tell me more about Midi-Hits. |
Midi-Hits.com is the company that sequences nearly all the midis I use. Last year I wrote Midi-Hits a letter telling them how much I liked their products and they posted that letter on their web site. Now I get letters from musicians all over the country asking me questions about my experience with them. One of the most frequent questions I get is about the quality of the midis themselves. The Midi-Hit songs are extremely, expertly well done. The people at Midi-Hits are very accurate at getting all the notes in the right places. Much better than any of their competitors. I love them, I use them exclusively, there's none better.... BUT! If you're going to use midi, you need to be aware of the limitations of the medium itself. Once you get past
the accuracy of the midi notes themselves, the quality of playback for
any midi song is directly related to the quality of the sound module
you use. If you just download a song and play it back through your sound
module (or heaven forbid... your computer's sound card!), it will never
sound as good as a song that has been mixed in the recording studio
using real instruments. You can get very close, but it takes a lot of
work. Midi-hits does a rough mix that is usually suitable for most situations,
but if you want your songs to sound as close to the real thing as possible,
you'll have to do some remixing yourself using Sonar
or Cubase
or some other editing software. I do extensive remixes on all of my
midis. I don't have to do anything with the notes, just assign better
instrument patches and adjust the volume for each instrument. Many times
I'll export a track to audio and then use audio effects on it, such
as some delay on a snare drum. I've had less than
desirable dealings with HitTrax.
I believe that, unlike Midi-Hits who has their own in-house production
team, this company obtains their midis from third party sequencers all
over the world. This leads to holes in their quality control. The three
midi's I purchased from them all had to be extensively reworked in Sonar;
bad or missing notes in all of the songs, and one tune even completely
lacked a bridge that was in the original. If anyone else has had a different
experience with them, please let me know. I want to believe I do! I
do! |
| Back |
| What do I need to know about licensing songs for my new CD? |
| There are two kinds of monies that must be paid for songs: 1. The right to
record a song (CDs, TV shows, Movies, etc) The right to record
music is owned by a song's publisher and must be licensed by the publisher.
So if you want to record Britney Spears' latest song on your own CD
(yech!) you'll have to find out who owns the publishing rights and pay
them. My best suggestions for aspiring recording artists:
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