In today’s Modern Studio environments there are what I see as 3 ways to play the ‘Keys’. Firstly, there’s the Original – a dedicated hardware Instrument such as a Grand Piano. A standalone piece of equipment that is purely analog. The sound it produces comes entirely from itself and what it is made of, which is predominantly wood, strings, metal plus all those other relevant counter-parts that go to make up it’s fabric.
To record such an Instrument requires the capture of the sound it produces and resonates out of it’s body as the musician plays it. A straight forward process – set up your Microphones and record it.
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For a while now I’ve been contemplating some kind of DAW Control surface as I’ve moved more and more ‘into-the-box’.
On Saturday I finally parted company with my trusty Roland RS-5 Synthesiser. It’s served me well and has brought me endless hours of pleasure and some very pleasant sounds; but it’s just too long in the tooth for todays SoftMusic Environments. (more…)

Over the past couple of years the Netbook has been the talk of the town. With it’s Solid-State disk offerings, Multi-OS compatibility and ultra-portabliltiy; Netbooks have rocketed up the charts of cool gadgets as fast as ipods.
I’ve sampled two of these cute little beasts over the past 18 months. First up was the Asus Eee PC 701. One of, if not the first Netbook offering the full SSD experience. (more…)

The Korg nanoKEY is proving to be such a ‘user friendly’ keyboard we thought it only right to give it a heads up.

They’ve been around for a couple of months now and for about £45 here in the UK you can get one of these wafer-thin USB MIDI keyboards.
Surprisingly tough yet thin as a rake; with 25 velocity-sensitive keys, Octave up and down features giving you access to the full MIDI note range, plus Pitch and Mod wheel features – This little block of black (or white) plastic is a real pleasure to use. (more…)