In 2002 I got a Yamaha PSR-350 keyboard (no longer sold, resembled the PSR-450 without a pitch-shifter lever) and also the Cubasis VST 3.0 music editing software (a product from Steinberg, no longer supported). I first recorded MIDIs but then as I learned about Cubasis I
made MP3's of the real keyboard sound! All but the first two songs were edited with Cubasis.
In 2003 my apartment got totally robbed (probably by the neighbours themselves) and the PSR-350 got stolen.
Then in 2008 I got a Yamaha PSR S-500, the cheapest model to be able to record 16 tracks internally and be called a workstation.
My basic music production method is to:
1) hook the keyboard to my music editor
2) record multiple tracks of a song within the keyboard
3) transfer the MIDI file to the music editor and work on it some more (I make heavy use of "quantize" which corrects errors in timing by snapping all notes to exact fractions of beats)
4) use the music editor to control the keyboard and play the finished MIDI file through the keyboard
5) record the audio from the keyboard using the same music editor.
THE TUNES (newest on top):
Here is the latest stuff I made with the Yamaha PSR-S500:
Mixes:
I made mixes with various online web sites:
Cosmic Flanders mp3 (cut off at the end) During a few years without a music keyboard there was nothing new going on. But then I went to a web page for a 7-Eleven/Simpsons contest. To fill up their page with stuff to interest people they included a section for "Cool Content" and if you clicked that, one of the things you could play with on-line is the "Brain Freeze Music Mixer". So that's what I made with it. They had some errors: samples were off-the-beat, and their sound output cut off this recording.
There's nothing like the thrill of seeing a piece of music come together with hard-won effort -- but if you're too lazy for that, have some fun slapping a beat-box mix together! GrooveBlender 2 , a Shockwave "game", has sampled loops which appear like building blocks on your screen. String some together and create a rhythmic mix in one of 3 styles: Hip Hop, Funk or Electronica. You can even do a simple mix and ask the program to lengthen and complexify it based on a random patterning of your pattern choices ("blending"). It makes outputs to Windows Media Player audio files. I offer a few mixes I did. Sadly, I did these when GrooveBlender 2 was offered as stand-alone shareware. Now it is limited to on-line Web-based use, and the number of samples appears to be stripped down. But give it a try anyway.
I also have another mix called "Drac's Intruder Mix" which used an old mix program called Beat 2000 and added a keyboard line from me. The sample there is, of course, from the movie TRON (1982), which almost 30 years later is still a fanciful Disney movie about a computer geek who assists a revolution for the tiny inhabitants of a computer.
Dragons with Afros? This next one takes some explaining. Since 1988 on the old pre-Internet Bulletin Board Systems of Toronto my main computer alias has been Draconian, the Purple Dragon of Cyberspace. My smiley-face: >8===:) Draconian is logical, unemotional, vicious, and for him I developed a large fictional back-story. Since the Cubasis VST 3.0 has an audio sample library, I decided to get fung-kay and add a voice-over. Draconian does a 1970's funk-rap about dragons. This number's got ATTITUDE!
Yamaha PSR-350 Tunes:
I had this from 2001 to 2003 until it got stolen!
Here are some recordings from the demonstration songs of the Yamaha PSR-350 keyboard. They are automatic, I had nothing to do with playing them, and it shows the full richness of sound capabilities of this keyboard. NOTE: the PSR-350 and lower models don't actually have a pitch-bend knob, so bent pitches (slides) that you hear were put there using MIDI and XG code-editing, not from the keyboard's own controls. But the keyboard can play back many code effects it doesn't produce itself.
Yamaha is paying me big bux to tell you that a Yamaha portable keyboard is an excellent addition to your family room or basement den with the fake pine panelling. Plays easily, sounds great, kids can learn music from it and they think it's cool...Warning! Overuse of a keyboard or synth can give you an uncontrollable urge to appear under hot stage-lights wearing a black shirt and make-up like Kraftwerk -- at which point you won't care.
The Mission Impossible theme is a particularly good thing for a science demonstration of the physics of sound waves. When played with Windows Media Player, using the "Scope" visualization (a crude sound oscilloscope), the flute part looks like a pure sine wave standing out from the lower-frequency instruments, the trumpets produce triangular waves, and the percussion, particularly the cymbals, create jagged noise.
Here's a Techno number, Magic Hour. I played it in real time on the keyboard and it shows. The little timing mistakes could be fixed later in "post". I was playing with the Yamaha on-board reverb and DSP choices to make interesting stereo delay echoes for a Purple Organ and a Steel Drum sound. The title is a key phrase from the movie REIGN OF FIRE.
Other tunes I made with the PSR-350:
"NOBODY LISTENS TO TECHNO!" --EMINEM. Well, not exactly, Marshall; there are at least this many...After the initial set-up period, since June 27, 2002 you are reader number...
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