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Well, the writing is going well - I've setup a "loop station" in the closet, comprised of the ER-1 MIDI-out driving the Simmons SDS-800 and SDS-9 and the TR-707's audio outputs triggering the newly-acquired Tama TechStar TS-305 drumsynth. I'm a sucker for old drumsynths, it would seem - I'd be all over the Waldorf Rack Attack if it just had a better interface, but I don't see much value in it over the software version.
Speaking of software, the new MPC OS didn't work out nearly as well as I'd hoped. There's still a few crash bugs, for instance, but really my main beef is with the "slice" feature. I mean, it seems so obvious - if I want to sample my basslines, just make a bassline on the synths in the studio, record it into Live, tweak the loop until it's perfect, then export the loop and play it back in the MPC, right? With the 'slice' feature, I should be able to cut that loop into 8 chunks, then play it back as eighth-note samples, it should sound perfect, right? And maybe I can screw with the order of the loops to create new basslines, right?
Wrong. Turns out the feature is optimized for drum loops, and adds 5ms of silence between samples, so it doesn't play back sounding the same as it went in. Furthermore, there seems to be some kind of weirdness with Ableton Live exporting loops, so what sounds sample-accurate *perfect* in Live comes out sounding like it's off by a few ms, which changes the whole feel of the bass.
I've now spent, on *three* seperate occasions, the entire afternoon trying to get stuff that already sounds awesome in Live to port over to the MPC1000 smoothly, and it's just not working out. Live can't export multi-track MIDI files, and the MPC has problems importing single-track MIDI files. If there's too much bass in Live, I can adjust it, too much bass in a sample loop on the MPC requires more tweaking. And so on, and so on. All this silly file management crap is really starting to cut into my creativity.
Anyway - screw it. I'm going to try assembling a live set using Ableton Live as the center piece. I still have a problem with people who stare at their laptops for their whole live set, so I'm going to try my best to keep all the control interfaces... I'm going to try to setup my BFR2000 so that I don't have to touch or look at the laptop at all. I'm still planning to bring out my SH-101, x0xb0x, Nord Modular, etc - the only thing that's really currently changing is that it may well be the end of the MPC1000 in my live rig. :(
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