[ 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.
By A. Person|Comments Off on Skoove and Flowkey piano teaching apps
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).
Minor update 2022-04-09
By A. Person|Comments Off on My MIDI “Listening Box”
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.
The trusty Casio CDP-100 electronic piano
By A. Person|Comments Off on End of search for digital piano!
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)…
By A. Person|Comments Off on Up on Spotify and YouTube!
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…
Minor corrections and edits 2023-08-18
By A. Person|Tagged Computers for music|Comments Off on My band all got sick and died at once (or; woes of moving to Windows 10)
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…
I’m updating this in 2019 to add a few more comments. I’ve owned this since at least 2013 and maybe before. I see from a quick web search that this is still available which should immediately tell you something in this day of advancing technology.
See the outstanding review with photos by Rich Menga; a good takeaway is that he makes this comment, which I fully agree with:
I’m very surprised anyone who records at home doesn’t own an R8.
For various reasons I wanted something very small and portable I could use as a songwriting/scratch pad. I looked at several from Boss and Tascam but settled on this unit. It can actually be battery powered with AA batteries (!); and even supports rechargeable AAs (!!) (see more on this below).
The recording medium is an SDHC card. It ships with a 2 GB card containing a lot of excellent drum loops, but you can install up to a 32 GB card, which I highly recommend, particularly as they are sub-$10 at this point. I copied the loops to the larger card and there is tons on room now for projects and takes. If somehow you fill up a card just put in a new one…but I’d be surprised if you did.
Two tiny condenser mics are built right into the device. They’re obviously not ultra high quality but fine for recording acoustic instruments/vocals.
The audio effects and processing options are very good. In particular, the guitar effects are great for me. With an electric or acoustic guitar, or a piano and your voice you can create really good tracks. There’s plenty of processing options for vox, bass, special effects, eq.
I cannot recommend this more highly! One of the things I’m finding out is that I’m more likely to record a passing idea when I can boot this up in 15 seconds, plug in my guitar or sing (or even take a voice note!) into it. You don’t even need to set up mics, but can play an acoustic instrument or sing right into the built in mics! Later on when the whole studio is booted I can easily transfer the audio files to Reaper or Live.
The included loops and rhythm patterns are surprisingly good. Not only that, but if you have a collection of your favorite loops, you can use your computer to copy them to the R8 and use them just as you can with the supplied ones! Of course they have to be 44.1k WAVs, but plenty of those fit on the 32 GB SD card.
Real guitar players have dissed the R8’s built in guitar effects, but for my money I never use my Pod or Korg Pandora. I never play live so for my needs the built-in effects are outstanding. Not to mention the bass, clean channel, mic channel and mastering effects. (Full disclosure: once I got Native Instruments Guitar Rig 5 I use that for everything; I can even track guitar parts with it and my computer is not that recent or fast.)
(Long digression about the R8 audio interface capabilities)
You may notice I haven’t mentioned its audio interface capabilities but I’m going to change that now (Nov 2019). Due to the demise of my Windows 7 computer, I was forced to buy a new one, and concomitantly I found I couldn’t run Win 7 no way no how any more with most current motherboards, so I was also forced to go to Windows 10. On top of that, motherboards no longer support old PCI, so my audio interface, my beloved m-Audio Audiophile 2496 was no longer usable. The built-in audio in the supposed great motherboard was shockingly bad: at high volumes there is a continual background noise, when when certain CPU operations occur or you use a mouse, you can hear a zipping or tearing noise in the audio.
So I thought, no problem, I’ll just buy a simple PCIe audio card. That’s when I found out that basically there no cheap PCIe audio cards. My salesman at Sweetwater, bless his soul, pointed out “hey, you have your Zoom R8 right? you can use it as a USB audio interface.” Well, slap my fro…I’ve had the thing all these years and never thought of that…well, I didn’t need it. It turns out that it works excellently and sees to sound pretty good (you can use its own software or something like ASIO4ALL, it can to 24 bit at 44.1 or 48k stereo…so: problem solved, with equipment I already had! And I can still play the guitar into it, into my DAW and guitar plug ins, and monitor at the same time.
OK: returning to the original content in this review:
The display is bright enough to actually see!
Yes, some of its functions can cumbersome to access (e.g. trim audio files) but for its size you just can’t beat it. Really, even though Zoom has released some newer and larger versions of these recorders, for my needs none of them are really as good as this one. I was looking at the R16 but I really have no need for 8 track simultaneous recording. The R16 uses 6 batteries too, and doesn’t have the rhythm unit that the R8 and R16 does.
Maybe it’s just my own personal taste, but I demoted my Line6 PodXT off my desktop (and onto ebay, sayonara) and only use the Zoom to record guitar tracks into my computer. Sometimes I’ll use NI Guitar Rig to punch up the processing. The nice thing is that you can record your guitar lead dry while monitoring effects, and bounce the effected part to another track. Then you can import the clean and FX track into your DAW, and add further effects.
Battery powered! Using 4 AA alkaline batteries you can get up to 5 hours of use, per the manual. But I am using 2500 mAh NiMH, which give at least 2 hours and more likely 3 or more depending on what you’re doing. (I’m going to actually measure this and will update the page when I do.)
Quick Pros and Cons list: based on my usage, YMMV of course!
The Amazon “From the manufacturer” section is informative and accurate. Not going to link to them for free though! Like they need any more money to add to their $trillions.
Pros:
Small and extremely light (257 mm × 190 mm × 51 mm, 780 gm) – not sure if that’s with the batteries or not
Boots up in a few seconds
Bright backlight
Built in stereo mics
2x XLR inputs in the back
24V/48V phantom power (you should probably be using USB power in this case)
USB 2.0; files transfer to computer pretty quickly
Usable FX
Simple sample feature
Simple drum machine feature with hundreds of usable patterns included
Up to 32 GB SDHC cards supported
Some of the supplied audio loops are pretty cool (I mean, how impossible is it to make everything thrilled with all the musical styles that are out there)
Quick control surface capability
I love this, I can quickly assign a couple faders to some of my Ableton controls if I decide I need to do some tweaking
Good audio interface (see above)
Cons: a lot of these are pretty trivial, but just to let you know:
This is not a cheap item. Pretty much everywhere will charge you USD299 for it.
Some functions like bouncing and file trim/split are a little arcane, but with some dedicated reading of the manual supplemented with YouTube lessons you can easily learn it
You can only record two audio channels at a time
Be careful; if you are wedded to 48kHz you can’t record with FX at that SR
It will lose the date and time if the batteries fail and you don’t replace them or hook to USB power within a few minutes. (It’s not a big deal to reset the date/time). If you don’t reset the time then new files will have wrong timestamps; I don’t know if there are any other gotchas.
Renaming files is cumbersome using the jog wheel/cursor
Supplied SD card is only 2GB; about half of it is supplied loops and drum patterns.
Setting loop timing on fx comes up in ms; but Rich Menga in his review above shows how to get to the musical tempo setting
I don’t know what I’m going to do if they discontinue this and mine finally dies, but I suppose I will still be able to find them on ebay.
Last modified 23 April 2021 — it’s still going strong!
Yes, there is probably some element of marketing in this, with Lynne about to release new albums, but if anyone deserves to be exposed to music fans it’s Mr. ELO. This guy, besides his stellar career in ELO, has produced Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, George Harrison and the re-formed Beatles (you have to see the documentary for explanation). This is a short (60 min) production but packed with meat including drool worthy shots of (apparently) his home (walls covered with gold and platinum records) with expensive condenser mics and instruments in every room. Yet Lynne comes off (to me) as a modest, hardworking journeyman who just happens to be one of the five best producers in pop/rock music. See it if you can (I caught it on Palladia).
Last modified 2012/10/13
By A. Person|Comments Off on Mr Blue Sky: genius of Jeff Lynne in great documentary
crow caw music works 