It was a while ago I made a post with a lot of reservations. It was regarding hauling out my music stuff and getting back into music. And my reservations at the time were that I wasn’t going to get very far with my initiative because I’d been through the process many times in the past and each time ended up packing everything up and putting it away with nothing to show for the effort.
And, well, this is somewhat the same in that it has not been too productive. I developed one idea I’d had for many years, but haven’t gotten enough to really make something concrete. And while that was developing, I also worked on getting the recording station all set up. I bought a new micro computer, monitor, and monitor stand. I installed and set up my old Cubase software (which is way behind the times and yet more than I’ll ever need). Although that’s all ready to go, I haven’t really started anything.
I knew I would have an uphill battle getting my physical abilities back since I hadn’t played in such a long time. To my surprise, my capability came back faster than expected. However, I plateaued quickly and my stamina was much diminished, so that was a little discouraging.
Instead of giving up, I decided to pivot a little bit and try to get some inspiration and relearn some engineering technique. I have a lot of old music that exists in MP3 format. It should be in FLAC format to be of the best quality. Additionally, some of those songs need a little improvement. One in particular has the beginning sort of cut off and I have no idea why I accepted that at the time. Since I have the "source files" for the songs, I should "remaster" them in a sense and bring them up to a standard where I won’t need to worry about quality anymore.
What does that entail? Well, I have to recreate the recording setup I had back when I recorded them. This is not a trivial matter for me or for anyone who has ever attempted something like this. While my case is relatively simple, imagine an actual professional musician trying to track down vintage synthesizers and recreating the patches that were used on each track. It highlights the need for documentation in a studio. I admit, I didn’t do hardly any – I never really gave it any thought. So when I loaded up one of my old files and got a message about missing plugins, I essentially have to go hunting for vintage synthesizers.
After a certain length of time, there isn’t much hope for me to recreate some of the music as I would need thousands of dollars worth of older synths to do it, but a lot of my newer stuff used virtual synths and I still have that software. I mean, most of it, I do. Some I had to really go out and hunt for as it was discontinued. I still don’t know if I have it all yet. I’ve only worked on a couple songs. Always keep backups of everything.
One of the bigger problems I faced is that I used a synth from the time that was on a sound card – the Yamaha SW1000XG. I do still have that card, but I can’t install it in my new micro PC system. I was able to find a virtual version of the same synth, called the SY50XG, but it had a serious problem where you couldn’t directly select the patches per channel. You have to do patch changes through SysEx messages. That’s not insurmountable, except for the fact that I don’t know the exact patch that I need. That lack of documentation, you see.
So, money to the rescue, as usual. The SW1000XG is supposedly a PC card version of the Yamaha MU80 synth module. I was able to find one for under $150 on EBay, shipped from Japan. When it arrives, I should hopefully have everything I need to recreate the old songs and remix them at full FLAC fidelity. All I should have to do is change the port from what was the SW1000XG to the MU80 and the patch I had selected on the old synth should map right to the new one.
But even this overall process is a real pain. My recording workstation is not comfortable. I have the choice of standing or sitting on a wood stool. The keyboard is a mini keyboard with embedded touchpad, like using a laptop. And all this equipment is in my music room, so there’s no real space to stretch out. I feel like I need to eliminate my guest bedroom and make that a studio room, but I don’t want to do something drastic like that yet.
Over the long weekend, I worked on the project on and off in something like 30-minute increments. Most of it was installing missing software synths and testing them out. The recording PC is not network connected, so if I needed anything, I would have to walk back and forth between that and my regular PC in another room, transferring files on a USB drive (they used to call that "sneakernet" in the days before widespread computer networks). So that process was annoying and exhausting in itself.
But I guess the big positive takeaway is that I haven’t given up yet.
Follow-up edit:
It turns out the MU80 is not the same thing as an SW1000XG. After receiving the device and integrating it with my setup, I tested it out on a track I knew to use a lot of Yamaha sounds. Very specifically, the drum kit I needed didn’t exist on the MU80. Research, which I should have done before purchasing, would have given me the information I needed. One web site gushing about the SW1000XG having 1200 sounds and 46 drum kits, then a Wikipedia article for the Yamaha MU series listing the different models and their capabilities gave me the full story.
The SW1000XG came out in 1998. The MU80 came out in 1994 and had 729 sounds and 21 drum kits. The MU100 came out in 1997 and had 1267 sounds and 46 drum kits. And, you know, even if I was dumb enough to ignore the timeline, I should have given some credit to the model naming scheme.
The end result is I have to buy a Yamaha MU100, meaning I now have an extra sound module that is of little use to me. Luckily, they aren’t that much more expensive than the MU80, but still, double the cost kind of sucks. I suppose I can sell the MU80 and recoup some of that cost.
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