Having been asked to make a couple of hip-hop tracks for a friend, I had to find a couple of acappellas to work with until the vocals could be recorded. God bless DOOM and ‘Gunn for including these in their Westside DOOM project.

I dusted off the MPC4000 and got to work with some old jazz records and even older session records. I like the outcome so I thought I would share it.

I also love the artwork – that’s my great uncle in the background, working the bins.

These tracks will no doubt change when I have the new vocals to work with – I may or may not post the results of those.

DOWNLOAD MP3 / FLAC

Download: V50X_IMX458_20201109_V2.0.zip

Unzip, put the files on the root of your SD card. Plop it in your camera and power up while holding the volume up button. The screen will stay blank for about two minutes but you will see the activity light flashing. When complete, the camera will reboot. I think the camera needs to be plugged in and charging during this process.

I’ve hacked together a way of getting my 4x MOTU 24I/Os (and likely all other MOTU PCI / PCI-E devices) working on newer version of MacOS.

I’m fucking pissed off with unnecessarily dropping support for hardware – especially stunningly expensive, niche hardware. Not only would it cost me a small fortune to replace the 24I/Os, but I’d spend weeks rewiring my studio.

Right so, to get these fuckers working on you newer MacOS device here’s what you need:

SOFTWARE

• Download MOTU Audio Installer 1.6 (73220).pkg
• Download MOTU Audio Installer 1.6 (83634).pkg (yes, both)
• Download Pacifist

PROCESS

Open Terminal are do the following: “sudo mount -uw /”. This mounts the System partition of MacOS and makes it writable. This is where we’ll be installing the drivers.

Open MOTU Audio Installer 1.6 (73220).pkg with Pacifist. You should see the following.

Right click on “Contents of PCI_and_PCI_Express_Drivers.pkg” and select “Install to Default Location…”

If you receive any errors at this point, it’s likely that your System partition isn’t writable. Go have a look on Google to see what you need to do.

Next, we need to open the newer MOTU Audio Installer 1.6 (83634).pkg with Pacifist. First thing I should draw your attention to is that those cunts have removed the PCI_and_PCI_Express_Drivers.pkg.

So now we need to install the applications by opening “Contents of Common.pkg / Applications” There you should see “CueMix FX.app”, which for my purposes is required to get my set up customised to how I needed it. The drives should work without this, but you’d be missing some functionality.

Anyway drag “CueMix FX.app” to your Applications folder and restart your computer. After a reboot you should now see that everything is working as it should.

Since we don’t have an app to allow us to change the sample rate of the device now, this can be done natively in MacOS “Audio Midi Setup”

I’ve been thinking more and more about dance music recently. It’s something that I’ve had a fleeting interest in previously but not what I’d chosen to pursue. Having been trapped at home for many more months than I can recall, I thought it would be interesting to push my production in a way that I haven’t previously – as practice and development more than anything.

I got to work with my old broken synths and drums machines, trying to stay clear of cliche and and played out rhythms. I tried to keep the sound of my studio in tact too – given that it was designed with more of an ambient/avant-garde bent it isn’t particularly well suited to this style of things.

All things considered, I think this came out pretty well. There are six (admittedly quite similar) tracks which all sound original enough and interesting enough to share.

I’m happy that the sound of these records is clearly still that of my studio, and the character of that has managed to stay in tact, and that there were relatively few compromises during the whole process.

I’ve probably used most of the gear in my studio, but I think the key elements to the sounds were made using the following: Korg Polysix, Akai MPC 4000 (vocal samples), TC Electronics Fireworks, Toft ATC-2, Vermona DRM1 mkIII, DigiTech RDS 1900, Waldorf MicroWave XT, Novation DrumStation, Yamaha TX81Z, and an eclectic mix of guitar pedals. Oh, and the ART Pro VLA II on the master. Also while not usually being one for VSTs, I did try a demo of some Lexicon reverbs which I found to be wonderful – even if they stressed out the old Mac.

These are still very much demos in my eyes, but I’ve reached a point where I’ve satisfied my need to continue production with them. My plan now is really to strip them back to their individual components, rework them with simpler drum patterns and try some sort of live setup with the MPC.

I do love the artwork.

Downloads

FLAC / MP3

Download FLAC

I just love how the dance hall girls keep dancing’,
In a timing.

Tempa, my God it’s a sound in a tempa.
Feva, my God it’s a sound in a feva.

I just love how the Champion sound keep playin’
Keep playin’.

Analog Bass Drum Module. Does what it says on the tin.

I like the sound from a few of the Jomox units, they are quite ‘in your face’ as they say. I use this module for almost all of my kick drums. It’s impressively tuneable for something as basic as kick drum module.

Very well built (most of the Jomox units use the same chassis and buttons), and is super easy to program and understand. Even features a play button, so can be triggered real time. I’ve used this consistently for around 5 years now, no issues to report. Not expensive and an absolute must have for certain projects. If you can’t satisfy your kick drums with this then you’re writing wrong.

I should add that it features midi tracking meaning that you can tune it and use it as a kind of mono synthesiser. I don’t do that shit.

There’s no real story behind this synth – I was bored one evening and bought the cheapest synth I could find. At he time I didn’t know much about Kawai or the K4r. I subscribe to the school of thought that there are no bad synths, and since it was less than £100 I took the gamble.

The Kawai K4r is the rack mount version of the K4, a small hobby style keyboards by a little Japanese (wait, American?) company. I can’t find much information about them, to the extent where i’m not sure if they are still in business or not. They seemingly never made anything iconic or noteworthy as I never hear them mentioned in the same context as ‘the usual suspects’. Sure, there are a few pages on Vintage Synth Explorer and GearSlutz but no real authority has emerged, and the topics posted are all inquiries as to ”
Does anyone in the world still use Kawai?”

The K4r is not a very glamorous looking thing, resembling a bargain basement VCR from the early ’90s. Cheap plastic fascia with tiny, awful feelings and buttons. It has a volume slider on the front and a ‘value’ slider that allows you to quickly select number rather than type them in. Unfortunately the resolution of the slider is so high, and it’s throw so short that actually finding a number takes a bit of finesse and a lot of luck. These are controls that I don’t suggest adjusting on the fly. Oddly other functions (such as resonance) have the opposite issue as the range is only from 0-7, so there is an audible ‘jump’ when changing some parameters. Combine that with a tiny 16 x 2 line LCD, and it can feel quite challenging to program. The rack mount version features and addition six individual outputs, giving it a little more versatility in the studio than the full size keyboard version.

That’s not a major issue as there isn’t a huge amount of programming that can be done. You see, the K4r is a sample based synthesizer – it’s really an evolution of the old original ROMplers from the 80’s (70’s?). It has two ‘oscillators’ or sample engines that can be combined in various ways to create the sound. It has rudimentary control over each sample – things like pitch, filter, envelope. You’ll find yourself sweeping through combinations of samples rather than heavily modifying much of the parameters.

There is also the option of changing some of these parameters through Sysex messages. This seems to work quite well and has eased the burden of trying to get interesting sounds out of it (I built myself a little custom controller to do this). There’s is nothing that cannot be adjusted using the from panel, but it’s so un ergonomic that I found the custom controller essential to enjoying and using this machine.

The K4r does have memory expansion for additional samples and ‘presets’ some of which I have found quite interesting and unique. I like to pickup the expansion cards when I see them for cheap on eBay. There’s a nice novelty about having a basic synth, fully loaded with all the expansion and since it’s not had a lot of exposure, it doesn’t ever really sound over used or cliche at any point. Also a lot of the sounds it produces sit very well in a mix, and have a quite unnatural ‘plastic’ sound to them. The filter is really nice – it fixed at -12dB per octave, but can do really sharp, squelchy resonance style things.

On occasion I’ve used for keys, but where it really found it’s place was with drums. It comes pre loaded with 128 different little percussion samples that can be manipulated and twisted, as well as combined. This can make for some interesting and unique little drums sounds. They don’t mimic any of the well known machines, and they also don’t try to give the illusion of being acoustic. I tend to pitch them down quite a bit in order to get that grungy, hard Nyquist sound. Most of the drums in the vinyl we released recently came from the K4r. Not the kick drum, granted, but everything else was straight from this little unit. I think they sounded great.

The output from the unit is very strong, free from noise or other artifacts. Even using all six of the sub outs results in perfect silence. I upgraded the internal OS to 1.4 (the last version developed), £10 and 15 minutes of time. Build quality is not great from a materials stand point, but it’s so basic that it should last forever. Owned this for about 4 years and experienced no issues what so ever.

For the money, I don’t think it can be faulted. It’s not an essential addition to any studio, but I’ve certainly found it to be useful on occasion, and frequently dig through it for drums. The good thing about buying a cheap synth is you never feel guilty about it sitting there not doing anything. With some of the more expensive gear I really do feel it need to earn it’s keep, by having an impact on most recordings. Buying one of these for peanuts really frees you from that. Best yet, you can get a real synthesizer for less money than some people pay for VSTi emulations.