[sdiy] Modular - sound or song

[Seb Francis]

Oakley Sound wrote:
> I love the fact that all mouse movements can be stored and then 
> tweaked again and again. I also love the fact that those very 
> movements can then be undone again and again. Or copied, or translated 
> to other parameters, or even used in other projects.
>

Yeah, I'm with you on this Tony.  Automation in modern sequencers just 
opens up a whole new world of possibilities.  Any when you want to tweak 
something analog in realtime then it just takes a click to capture it to 
an audio track.

> I'd like have patch recall on the whole studio. I can almost do that 
> now. The benefit of this is that one can work on one piece and then 
> move onto the next, but still having the chance to go back to the 
> previous piece without having to go through notes or try to remember 
> where everything was.
>

This is exactly how I've got my studio now, and it's a joy to be able to 
work on multiple pieces of music and instantly switch between them.  I 
still have a whole room full of hardware (a quick count makes it 14 
analog + 2 digital synths plus a few choice bits of hardware outboard).  
The key to getting instant recall was to get rid of the mixer desk.  
Every piece of hardware has its own dedicated I/O into the computer and 
all mixing, routing, inserting is done entirely in software.  Cubase 4 
supports this really nicely - adding a hardware synth or outboard effect 
is exactly the same as adding a soft-synth or soft-effect.

The only thing I have to be aware of is if I'm working with particular 
piece of analog hardware in one piece of music then I can't be doing 
something different with it in another piece of music.  Once I'm happy 
with a particular part I tend to bounce it down to an audio track 
anyway.  And once I think I'm finished with a piece of music I will 
bounce down all hardware synths and outboard to audio tracks, and thus I 
can open up the tune much later on and it's exactly as it sounded 
before.  And given that I probably only use a couple of pieces of 
hardware on any given piece of music, there's usually still a lot of 
flexibility for remixing and re-arranging even long after all the 
hardware has been re-used for some other purpose.

Seb