Al DeRaan on the difficulties of understanding the "Drum Map Manager" in Sonar 5.0...

giroscope is pleased to present the first post by electronic musician and general nerdy type Al DeRaan. Al has a fast PC, approx £800 worth of sequencers and software synths, some tasty hardware to boot, and still can't get a f***ing drum beat going yet...

He is also Barney Ruddle operating under a psedonym. Well, would you buy a track by somebody called Barney Ruddle? (OK, so you may not be buying any tracks any more due to inventive use of P2P etc, but keep it to y'self for the time being until what Roger Waters once called the "great economic collapse" happens.) I guess Barney could have cut it as a folk singer, but that's not really my bag at the moment.

Al DeRaan first surfaced a couple of weeks bag on this blog, as an idea Hal Berstram had for a character in a remake of Star Wars as a pub-based soap opera, along the lines of Eastenders. A site under a name something like starwarsdownthepub.com will be set up soon (maybe over the Xmas break), with members of the public collaboratively reworking bits of the script, moving slowly towards a filmable screenplay. But in the meantime, Al sounded like a good name for a techno artist :-0

So as usual, the will to create is there, and in the new giroscope studio, the equipment is certainly there: cetered round an Athlon 64 PC with various softare whizzbangs on it, e.g.

• Sonar 5
• Reaktor 5
• FM7
• Battery 2
• Rebirth 2.0

There is also hardware aplenty in the studio:

• Yamaha AN1X
• Novation Super Bass Station
• Korg MS10 (this is just bloody weird equipment - have a look at Synth Site for more info)

So with all this kit, why have no Al DeRaan tracks appeared on the blogosphere yet? Two main reasons. (1) is lack of time, which I won't talk about because we all suffer from it, and so it's not that interesting. Unless I win the lottery or my wife suddenly gets a City job and I can retire (UNLIKELY!) I will have to keep struggling to find strange moments to record. As well as the tunes having to compete with doing other 'creative activity' like this blog, for example.

(2) - more interestingly - is that some of the equipment is so damn hard to use. It's the sequencer, Sonar, that is pissing me off most at the moment. I'm sure most of you music makers out there use Cubase and I might have ended up doing that as well, had I not tried it in 1998, decided it was cack, and gone with what was then Cakewalk Professional instead. (Much of my current musical existence seems to owe a lot to decisions made in 1998 as this was when I first got my shit together for a working studio system. It was a good time to be churning out choonz on the edge of Clapham; more of that another time, perhaps.)

Anyway, most of Sonar is not that much changed from its predecessor program, Cakewalk, but they do throw in some new features with each new release, and they are mostly incomprehensible. For instance, it has taken me 10 months to work out how to use the "drum map". For the techies among you (and anyboy else will have probably stopped reading by now!) this is a virtual MIDI port which allows you to construct a "kit" of drums that can involve as many different instruments as you want, both hardware and software, all controlled from the same track on Sonar and all appearing as one set of drums to the user. Firing up the drum map also allows you to access the 'drum grid' rather than the 'piano roll' view of the track you are currently working on. This is quite important if you want your drums to have names like "Hard Kick", "909 Snare", "606 clave" etc, rather than "G#1", "A1", "A#1" etc. Which is useful when composing. Or would have been if I had been able to use the bloody thing: I spent about 3 months trying to get it to work properly!

I eventually sussed out that you have to route the MIDI track for the Battery drum synth (that's the program I use) through to the drum map rather than the drum output itself. Previously I had set up another MIDI track and routed it to the drum map but I think that caused some kind of conflict and it didn't work. It was only by a combination of sheer fluke and some advice in an article in the excellent Sound on Sound magazine that I was able to sort this out.

Meanwhile, by the time you've got all the equipment up and running, you've lost any inspiration you might have had to write a track in the first place. Being a folk singer called Barney Ruddle might have been the easiest option... but anyway, if I do get some tracks together and can work out how to post mp3s to the blog, then I'll let you all hear them. Careful with the speakers though as there is bound to be sub-bass! (or "fat bass" as invented by Renegade Soundwave... anybody remember them?)