This is the place for all things related to and about the musical productions and writings of tim p scott, producer of electronic post-rock instrumental compositions since before there was post-rock.
If this is your first visit, welcome. This is the permanent landing page. Up above there are the main (“What”, “Who”, etc.) menus. You can go to the page “Listen” for samples of tps music, “Who?” for some biographical material, “What?” for general information about this site, and “Where?” for contact information. “How” discusses various aspects of (what used to be called) “DTMP” (Desktop Media Production).
All the music from the first 5 CDs are now available on Spotify as well. Just enter “tim p scott” into the search box. (If you subscribe to that service, just think; you’re paying me about a ten-thousandth of a penny each time you play a track. Hey, it adds up!)
If you’re returning, welcome back. Apologies in advance for all the broken links and other embarrassments. This site may not be dead yet. My musical pal and I are planning a launch/relaunch of our sites so maybe having a partner will motivate me to resurrect this. We know that the most important thing about a website is interesting content and **FREQUENT UPDATES** so maybe we can make that happen.
Working full time and trying to keep up an old house does tend to suck up a mass of time. (2022: OK, you’ve NOT been working full time since 2019, so where’s all the new music? :)
Finally; while we try to be realistic and flexible about copyright law (after all, who wants to spend all their money on lawyers and lawsuits [besides certain churches]?), we sincerely hope you’ll at least have the grace to give credit to tim p scott and/or Crow Caw Music Works if you use anything from this site. So please try to do the Right Thing, it no kill you.
(Apologies in advance for broken links; I have a lot of references to old websites/pages some of which have moved or disappeared. Don’t forget to check the Wayback Machine at http://www.archive.org which is a pretty good attempt to save every website that has every been on the internet.)
For instance, today I removed my cool pointer to a short interview with the great Robert Moog as the link disappeared. The curse of the internet….
[ 2024-02-12 Update ] During the COVID year (2020) most piano teachers weren’t taking personal students. But I had just recently retired and wanted to spend more time working on my piano skillz.
Skoove experiences
I knew the basics of piano playing, music theory and reading, and had been trying to teach myself uising books. Although I made a certain amount (small) of progress, it became apparent to me that I needed something more to get ahead with any speed.
When I first looked at skoove, I thought it looked interesting, but I didn’t have a compatible tablet, and my old keyboard didn’t even have USB output — only MIDI. But (again during the COVID layoffs) I had acquired a basic Lenovo Chromebook to do zoom meetings and such, and as mentioned elsewhere, bought a Yamaha CP88 digital piano. Suddenly skoove became something interesting to try, since it ran on a web browser which Chromebook does support.
I started out with the free version which was pretty good. It’s limited on the number of lessons available but gives you a good sense of how the product works. I decided to plump for the licensed version, and didn’t regret it.
There are plenty of reviews out there on web magazines and such. Most of them were pretty positive and rated skoove in the top tier of web-based piano learning software. Of course it’s simple to give it a try. I liked the basic design and the fact that it forced me to sight-read. The song or exercises notation scrolls from right to left and hghlights when you hit the right notes. The built-in piano sound is not bad, but I figured out how to run MIDI into and out of the application so it could trigger my nice Yamaha piano.
I was frustrated that I couldn’t print out the exercises so I could practice when somewhere in front of a real piano, or when I didn’t feel like turning on the Chromebook, logging into the application, etc. I’m sure there were also licensing issues about permitting that. Latency was fine, especially for a beginner/intermediate player like me.
Unfortunately in 2023 skoove announced they weren’t going to support configurations like mine, so I had to regretfully say farewell and look for another application.
Flowkey
I don’t know why I rejected Flowkey in favor of skoove originally. It seems to do all skoove does, but better. It still does support my Chromebook/web setup. One thing it has that’s really good is for many songs you can select a beginning/intermediate/advanced arrangement.
Like skoove, Flowkey scrolls the music from right to left, and you can’t print it. I did mention this on messages through the support part of their app, and I was pleased to see that support people were extremely fast to reply and seemed to care that my questions were answered the best that they could be.
They have lots of songs, but sometimes they’re only brief excerpts. And navigating the song library is a bit frustrating. Skoove had that problem too.
So I did subscribe to Flowkey and at present unless they make some awful changes, I’m planning to stick with it.
Basically I wanted a way to just be able to sit down at my digital piano, turn it on, and with a minimum of extra gear and steps, be able to start playing and capture the MIDI stream. The idea is to move the raw MIDI file to the big DAW for further editing/arranging/etc. Even going to a SSD main drive on my music production PC, it just seemed like overkill when all I want to do is capture MIDI noodling on my Yamaha CP88 electronic piano.
The solution I came up with is not 0-cost, but I already had the $200 barebones Chromebook. All I needed to buy was the $14.99 FL Studio Mobile app (6 stars out of 5!) and a USB extender ($25) since the stupid Chromebook has exactly one USB port (can you believe it?)
Anyway, a training professional will probably vomit at the amateurishness but I can’t spend a million hours making it perfect. I used Nero Video and exactly 0% copyrighted material.
You can check it out on youtube here (it’s about 8:25 long).
Updated 30 Jan 2022 In 2020, I sold my Yamaha G-1 grand piano — even though it was the smallest Yamaha grand, it just wasn’t practical in my living situation. Fortunately, I live near a metropolitan area with a good selection of music stores, so I tried many, many digital pianos. I did so well with the Casio CDP-100, I set my price limit to about $1500 figuring I could sure get something good for that. Well, I was about to give up on getting one I liked in that price range when I randomly played on a Yamaha CP-88 at a Guitar Center. I was stunned at both the incredible feel of the keyboard action as well as the sublime sound of the Yamaha CFX grand piano. Even though this was tagged at about $2500, I pretty much almost immediately decided I was going to have to have it.
All I can say is: WOW. When I purchased it, the firmware version was 1.31, and since then there have been some updates. As of 1.40 it includes complete sample sets for the the Yamaha CFX, CF3, S700, and C7. These are pianos which range up into the US$100K – $180K price range. If you can’t find an acceptable grand piano sound among those…I don’t know what to tell you. There are plenty of electronic pianos (Rhodes, Wurlitzer and others) and a very large range of other instruments… But if you’re looking for a detailed Hammond emulation you need to get the YC-88 which also adds drawbars. Since I use it as a piano 99% of the time I am not too annoyed that that model came out so soon after the CPs.
The list of patches in the instrument included in the update package was hard for me to read, so I reformatted it.
You can get a copy of it as a PDF at the link following. This is current as of firmware version 1.50 which is the latest firmware as of now (30 Jan 2022) The V1.40 list dated 25 April 2021 is also available. I don’t know if these files are relevant to the CP-73,
I think in another post I wrote about the Casio CDP-100 I played before getting this. When I was selling the Yamaha grand, I wanted to have something to play on so I wouldn’t completely lose the little momentum I had teaching myself to play. After trying a number of low-priced electronic pianos at local music stores, I found a CDP-100 at a Guitar Center on the demo floor. I tinkered around with it for a few minutes, and was pleasantly surprised at how good the keyboard felt compared to a real grand, and the piano sound was not bad at all, either.
I really like DistroKid as a route to get my material on these and many other sites (iTunes, Apple Music, Google Play, Deezer, iHeartRadio and many others). I was excited about SoundCloud when it first started, but I don’t think it’s aimed at my needs in it current incarnation.
Spotify: just enter “tim p scott” in the search box, and it will find all my released albums and a few newer things. This is the best place since it gives you more flexibility in choosing songs and albums.
YouTube: I have a YouTube Artist Channel. This is pretty much only a place to listen; there’s only a static picture along with each track. And you may have to look at/skip over ads if you’re on the free signup; not yet sure about that. Anyway, to get started just put “tim p scott” in the search box, or try https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDuhe3CJsVuG2QXUpmUFdnw
Hopefully more recent pieces will get uploaded as time goes by. Also I really need to groom these sites (and this wordpress one too)…
OK, that’s a pretty obtuse headline so let me come clean first. For many reasons you can read about elsewhere I do almost all my composing and producing myself using computers. Therefore it’s really important to me that the system be working and all the software be playing nice together.
Transitioning from my Old music production PC (Colossus; ended up as a Windows 7 Pro system) to the New one (“Guardian”, Windows 10 Pro) has been an utterly frustrating ordeal. If you’ve got nothing but time to read about it plunge right on in.
History
In 2007 I bought a custom built computer in a 4U rack from a company that still exists (www.silentpc.com). It has served me well, from its original configuration as a Windows XP machine through Windows 7. After 12 years and many thousands of hours of faithful service it finally failed, and I realized I was going to have to replace it.
The problem is that current motherboards don’t support Windows 7, and Microsoft is only supporting it in legacy mode (probably because so many corporations around the world have hundreds of thousands of licenses and are running critical applications on it.)
On top of that, many companies that make the software I rely on have notified their customers that there won’t be any support for Windows 7 for new software. All my crucial software (Ableton Live, NI Guitar Rig, Fxpansion BFD, Omnisphere, etc.) still supports Windows 7 but not for updates or new versions.
Finally, and one of the most screamingly frustrating of all my problems, is the “64 bit vs 32 bit” problem which I’ll talk about in a minute.
In other words, I had little choice but to order my new computer with Windows 10 installed. This is a native 64 bit OS, there is no option to install it as a 32 bit OS. That’s OK, since a 32 bit application will run on Windows 10.
The problem is that music production almost always relies on a collection of software working together: generally a host of some kind (Ableton Live, Reaper, Apple Logic) using a host of plug-in effects and instrument modules (countless old and new applications such as u-he Zebra, synth1, Native Instruments Guitar Rig, and fxpansion BFD3.)
So then I spent the next month trying to find a combination of software that would allow me to keep working, since I have many files that go back 2 – 5 years that I need to work on. (I work real slowly since I don’t have any serious deadlines.)
So here is a typical issue I faced. I have a song that uses Reason 4 ReWired into Ableton Live, a BFD3 drum track, and the Perfect Space convolution reverb that used to come with Cakewalk Sonar.
Well, since Reason 4 only works in 32 bit mode, I have to use Ableton Live version 9.7 running in 32 bit mode, as must be the BFD3 plugin. Well, the last version of BFD3 that supports 32 bit is 3.2.3.3, so I’ve installed that. If you install 3.3.0.4 (the most recent version) it only supports 64 bit mode.
Prefect Space is only 32 bit mode. So now I have to decide whether I can spend to money to buy a reverb that supports convolution mode.
The song also uses the Arturia Analog Factory plugin which — guess what — is also only a 32 bit plug in.
Now another song I have uses Spectrasonics Omnisphere. This plugin like BFD3 is only supported on Windows 7 up to a certain point; if you want to upgrade it to get new features and performance options, you have to be running Windows 10.
Encrypting File System (EFS)
This was something I never imagined I’d have to worry about. Anyway, it appears to turn out that some free software I obtained cost more than I thought.
Several years ago, the Loopmasters company made a lot of loops and sample available as a promotion…I ended up with nearly 5 GB of material. Never used a lot of it but it was interesting.
In attempting to copy the files off the hard drive I saved from my crashed computer, I found out to my dismay that all these files were ENCRYPTED. I never noticed it before, since apparently the OS on the old computer had the proper keys to decrypt these sample/loop files on the fly. Now that the files are being read by a different computer, they are locked out.
From what I can clean in internet research, I should be able to use the keys from the old computer to decrypt these. I’ve been experimenting with the command line “cipher” utility in windows, and the certificate manager adminstrative snap in but I haven’t found the secret formula to be able to unlock these files yet.
Because I installed them 3-5 years ago, I don’t think I have the original download install packages to try to reinstall, and they’re no longer available from the provider. Somewhere along the line I might have a backup of the original install file, but it’s not looking promising.
It turns out that there appears to be some methods to recover these files in a situation like this by being an Administrator and creating a “recovery agent.” But experimenting with that didn’t help. Finally, I found a promising piece of software from a company called Elcomsoft. Running the downloadable demo, it appeared to be able to retrieve appropriate keys from my hard drive and decrypt some of my files. Because they’re in business to earn their money, the demo only decrypts a small part of the file to prove it can be done. To unlock the full version of the software would cost me $150. (I do not think this is unfair in any way if the alternative is to lose the files forever or spent another 100 hours trying to see if I can figure out the Windows EFS system.) So I had to ask myself how badly I wanted to retrieve this sample set.
Lesson: be aware of this pitfall and export your certificates if you’re running Windows; you never know when you’ll need them.
[2020-01-02] OK, I was lucky in this case. I traced back to when I got these sample libraries. It turned out that since I was a registered Novation customer, I was entitled to a promotion of these sample libraries. Contacting them and explaining my predicament, they graciously provided me with a link to re-download them (yes, I should have copied the files to a DVD after I first downloaded them.) So now I don’t need to spend the $150 on the recovery software.
Update October 2020
Update October 2020
Well, on one hand Windows 10 is mostly stable and I’ve found workarounds, updates or alternatives to software that won’t work any more. On the other hand I’ve been spending most of my time in the last couple years working on the piano. This is part of my long term plan as a musician, realizing that realistically I’m not going to be that effective a mixer/producer as my hearing gets steadily worse over the decades.
Piano evolution 2018 – 2020
In 2018 a dream I had for decades came true when a beautiful, mint condition Yamaha G1 baby grand was offered to me for a low price. I jumped at this and enjoyed it for a couple years, but the reality was that my living situation was such that even a baby grand was impractical to play at any hour of the day or night. To my sadness and regret, I realized I would have to sell the piano and buy a digital one.
This piano only had one owner, who had bought it in 1969(!!). Once it was delivered and set up in her house, it was never moved for 50 years. I sold it to a music lover in Orange County (Southern California) and I sincerely hope they love it and play it every day.
The quest for a replacement
I knew that I was going to have to settle for a digital piano. So I at least had the fun of researching them. I was delighted to find that there were many more options than there were years ago when I looked into this. I remember buying a 60-pound Fatar 88-key MIDI controller years ago and trying countless sound modules. I will say that I settled on the E-mu Proformance+ half-rack piano module, and that was my primary piano sound for many years. Later on, I used the grand piano sounds from the Roland “Session” expansion card for the JV-*80 synth series. But I knew these were only placeholders, as many of my software and hardware synths were…
OK, I need the collective knowledge of the internet to help me out with this one!
Mystery Sample from “Haborthelem”(4:16) from “Songs in Work”
(click (>) to play)
Years ago in the Csound Book sample CDs there was a folder called “GomiPeace – KazuhikoGomi – SpeechProcessing” that had this file “pareq2.wav” — which I presume was intended to demonstrated parametric eq and a number of other signal processing techniques. But I found it intriguing and ended up building a piece off it
The basic sample just sounds like a woman saying a word that I would transcribe as “haborthelem”. She seems to enunciate it very clearly but I have no idea what language it is or what it might mean. What we need is a google – type search but of an audio file. Yahoo had something like this but they closed it down in 2008. Google doesn’t have it and Shazam, while a really cool way to find out what song is playing, doesn’t do it either.
Roughly related to this, I had a friend share with me a piece of audio that he got years ago from a friend on an old cassette, and never could figure out what it was. It was an approximately three minute piece of a young boy reciting a metaphysical essay with a very simple piano piece playing behind it. By using some keywords from the recitation, I found out it was a Ray Lynch production — I believe the title is “A great and wonderful mystery”.
When you are confronted with an unknown text or song as in this case, if your searching comes up empty, wait a couple years because every year the web adds terabytes of data. This is particularly true if your interest is in genealogy; I have found links in even casual searches that came up blank just a few years ago.
Follow up 2019-11-05 – well, a year and a half has gone by and I am no closer to solving the problem. I need to find a “speech-to-text” project or a “audio search engine” on the web and submit to file to those…
After clearing up the “studio housekeeping” problems I am back working on songs. I have a few things currently in the works, early versions of which I hope to offer here soon.
I’m interested in extreme and death metal lately, which means guitar playing. I have been wrestling with my cheap electric solid body for a long time: with mediumweight strings and all 5 springs installed on the tremolo I still have too high strings. So finally a huge light bulb went off; I detuned all strings by a whole step and I get perfect action and a nice fatter sound.
I have been agonizing over guitar amp sims too, trying every demo in sight. The problem is that I’ll dial in a sound that seems perfect, then come back in the morning at hate it. Currently my strategy is to layer the fabulous free Dirthead 0.80 and Voxengo BoogeX as a group in live, tweak each plugin for a different part of the sound and then mix them. I also find myself returning to the built-in guitar processors in the humble but might Zoom R8 recorder. So maybe I won’t plunk down money for a software guitar sim for the moment….
Meanwhile let me recommend the interview with Oneohtrix Point Never in the latest (December 2015) issue of Electronic Musician. His process is intriguing and I note with satisfaction that he is also an Ableton Live exclusivist.
OK! After attacking all the bad smelling stains in my studio I have reassembled it and moved back in. It’s a much more pleasant space to work in now.
In order to avoid actually working on music, I spent a week experimenting with overclocking my PC. I can’t afford new computers right now. Cats are too expensive.
I got my home built PC with a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quad CPU overclocked and running stably at 3.2 GHz. That’s like buying a newer computer for free.
The next step is for me to clean up this site. The design that I thought was so nice 5 years ago is badly out of date now, and needs to be streamlined. But maybe even more important than that, I want to at least make sure that the sample tracks on other pages at least play correctly.
It’s all on the schedule to be done before I die! Stay tuned…
When I trashed the directory structure of my music computer, I knew I was in big trouble. Fortunately I had another hard drive I could use for the boot drive so I was able to CAREFULLY try some public domain and even Linux software to attempt to recover my precious system. I could probably have reassembled it from a huge collection of DVD backups but I had the feeling only the file system structure was damaged; not the data itself…
Since none of this was urgent, I had the luxury to try some various approaches. I have to say that the Linux tools approach did not work for me, although that doesn’t mean it won’t for you.
I ended up actually paying the nominal cost for the “ZAR” recovery software. I must say that it definitely worked like a charm. It took many, many hours to recover the gigabytes of data, and some sectors did show up as lost but by and large I am hugely satisfied with it.
BKF format – good news update
Updating this in April 2015; some ingenious person discovered that you could indeed read .bkf files through a very simple process. Basically you get the ntbackup.exe file and two other .dlls from an XP system and just put them in folder on your windows 7 system, and launch the .exe. This brings up the old faithful backup/restore application and I proved that it works fine. Unfortunately I don’t have the names handy of the .dlls but will put them here next time I get on the other system.
Microsoft claims to have a solution which is in one of their knowledgebase articles Windows NT Backup Restore Utility for Windows 7 and for Windows Server 2008 R2 (“http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974674”) but it did not work for me. I downloaded the fix files that were supposed to allow manipulation of bkf files but they didn’t work. The application appeared but as soon as you tried to execute any function it crashed.
Here’s my original comments on this issue:
Another problem with Windows 7 is the infamous .bkf format problem. From everything I read, basically there is no support anymore for reading files created by the old Backup tools. Again I have many GB of files in that format. Once again the third party vendors have created programs that unscrew that format, and Microsoft has no help for your whatever. I wish ZAR had a program in that category since I would love to give them additional business. So far I have decided that since I have recovered my old HD largely successfully, I don’t have an urgent need to decode the old .bkfs.
Page#21/last modified 20150412
By A. Person|Posted in Windows maintenance|Comments Off on ZAR recovery program, and reading the orphan .bkf format on Windows 7…
crow caw music works 