ZAR recovery program, and reading the orphan .bkf format on Windows 7…

March 8, 2014 – 8:05 AM

Updated 2015-04-12

  •  ZAR Recovery Program

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…

Zoom R8 recorder — my favorite gadget

November 10, 2013 – 1:19 PM

…(awesome) lap-sized 8 track recorder…!

[ 2025 update ] Believe it or not I am still using this box as my primary audio interface to my Windows 10 audio production system. It turned out that some of the buttons were actually wearing out. An electronics wizard friend of mine found the same buttons for sale on ebay and actually did the rework to fix it.

But I depend so much on the unit that I searched for either new old stock, or a nice used unit to keep as a backup. I found one from a Japanese seller, which I bought. It turns out to be in beautiful condition, and has a serial number in the 60,000s, e,g, about 30,000 higher than my previous one; e.g. quite a bit newer.

So that will be my third one. I broke the first one because I took it with me on many business trips, and finally dropped it one too many times.

Incidentally, I looked very carefully at the Zoom R12. announced in 2022, which is supposedly meant to replace to R8. After researching its features and reviews on the Web, I determined that I couldn’t use it.

Notes on 1.17 firmware upgrade – problem and solution

[ 2025-03-01 ] After I don’t know how many years, Zoom has put up a new version of the R8 firmware on their support websites. The original version was 1.00, and a 1.02 patch was released long ago. (1.02 fixed an occasional problem where the mode where the R8 memory was a USB device didn’t always work right.)

When I first upgraded one of my units to 1.17, I found that the audio interface function was totally broken on my Windows 10 machine. In all applications, attempting to use the R8 audio interface would fail as follows: when playing audio, for some seconds it would play correctly, then the audio quality would degrade to an unusable degree. Nothing I tried could fix that, and unfortunately I could find nowhere on the internet where there was 1.00 or 1.02 firmware to downgrade to.

I finally got in contact with Zoom support in Japan. The helpful advice they gave me was to make sure the Windows Zoom audio driver was also upgraded to the version that was included with the new firmware (this is 2.6.0.11 I think).

This solved my problem and I can now use the R8 with any applications – Ableton Live, Reaper, Sound Forge, Izotope Ozone, VLC player, you name it. Incidentally, I still use ASIO4ALL for my ASIO wrapper (as I have been for what must be 10 years.

[ 2019 notes ] I’m updating this 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

Due to the demise of my Windows 7 computer, around 2019, I was forced to buy a completely new one. I wanted to keep running Win 7, but new computers no longer support old PCI cards, thus my beloved m-Audio Audiophile 2496 was no longer usable. I was sort of forced into Windows 10.

The built-in audio in the supposed great motherboard was shockingly bad: at high volumes. There was an audible continual background noise, and 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 were 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..

It turned out that it worked excellently and seems to sound quite good…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 (tiny electret condensers at the front left and right corners of the unit)
  • 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. Still cheaper than any of the interface cards I looked at.)
  • 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 was worried what I was going to do if Zoom discontinued this (which they did) and mine finally died (which it was in the process of doing). It turned out that the internet saved the day, once again.

Last modified 21 Mar 2025

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic Music, Electronic music: production | Tagged | Comments Off on Zoom R8 recorder — my favorite gadget

Mr Blue Sky: genius of Jeff Lynne in great documentary

October 13, 2012 – 5:01 PM

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 | Posted in Electronic Music | Comments Off on Mr Blue Sky: genius of Jeff Lynne in great documentary

Lost gems: Sami Takieddin tracks from 2000-2001

September 1, 2012 – 2:33 PM

In the early 2000s there was a site called mp3.com. An artist whose work I discovered there named Sami Takieddin released two albums of really great new-agey tracks. Digging around a bit I did find a third one “Stories” on last.fm. Outside of that I don’t know what happened to him.

I would like to make a couple of tracks available for you to hear, but I don’t own them. I’ll try to track the artist down and see if I can talk him into this…they say the internet never forgets but I am not sure that’s really 100% true…

Updated 4 Jan 2014

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic Music | Comments Off on Lost gems: Sami Takieddin tracks from 2000-2001

What the hell am I doing? Nothing??

July 7, 2012 – 7:36 PM

update 2024-11-11

I’ve gotten excited about a cover to Alcest’s “Sapphire”. Really an atmospheric piece. I spent more time than I like to admit trying to figure out the lyrics. I understand the band is French but the words didn’t sound French to me. If I have read correctly, the singer just improvised phonetic sounds over the arrangement that felt right to him. That I think is awesome. And it works.

So being a different person, I get a different feeling from the music, so I am writing lyrics in English that fit the melody. Trying to learn the guitar part — harder than it looks. Also the piece is in G# minor which caused me grief until the light bulb went off: transpose it up a step in Ableton and voila, it’s now in A minor which is cake.

update 2012/05/11

Well, as the grave draws ever nearer I am stuck in an obsessive-compulsive loop working on a couple of new pieces. Besides Life As Usual, the main thing delaying progress on these works is my attempts to play parts that are way beyond my musical abilities. But the good thing is that I believe I have SOME perspective on my own work. My best technique is to put aside a piece for one or preferably two weeks. When I return to them, I strip out whole chunks of them or even abandon them.

update 2012/02/18
I did buy a beautiful 25 inch LCD monitor from Fry’s Electronics in San Diego. Of course, within a week or two there were 27 inch models for less money. But I guess I can’t chase technology around forever.

I really like this monitor. Now I can see more stuff in my DAWs with less eyestrain.

update 2011/10/22
The good news is that I have a full time job = income again. The bad news for finishing songs is that it’s a full time job. I am not looking the gift horse in the mouth. For one thing I finally was able to afford upsizing my monitor again. As I get older I need larger and larger screens!

I’m in too-many-choice-hell again with Ableton Live. I have been working on a piece for about a year, it has 50 killer riffs and leads in it, and I just can’t seem to prevent myself from adding new or better ones. At least I’ve got it mostly arranged. But I think the years of 1 album per year are not to happen now unless I win the lottery or retire…

update 2011/10/22
Since finishing Pangur Ban I revisited some older tunes. And I’m wrapped around the axle on those as well, partly because I am obsessed with not throwing anything out. I got the bright idea of not working on anything for a week or so, hopefully when I get back to work I will hear pieces with new ears.

The other thing that I do that’s a huge time waster is spending a hour on a snare drum sound, or half a day of a 2 bar rhythm groove. I think it’s pretty obvious at this juncture I would not really be capable of writing anything to deadline…

update 2011/09/12
No one ever accused me of updating this blog too often. Since March 2011 I have actually had a full time job. Really more than that as I am averaging 10 hour days. Not so easy for someone of my advanced years. But it’s nice being able to pay my bills without draining my meager savings. At last I have finished my piece called “Pangur Ban”. For more info and a link to a player for it, see this page. And here’s the background on what Pangur Ban is from Wikipedia..

I’m content enough with it. I gave it its own page since I think it has some interesting production aspects. Briefly, it started with a sample from the OLPC that I thought was interesting. When I slowed it down like 75% it revealed an interesting melody — sort of reminiscent of something you’d hear out of the Buddha Machine. So I arranged, orchestrated, looped and generally mangled it into the new piece. I’ll try to get it loaded on SoundCloud soon with a link to it here. update 2010 11 30Yeah, even though I have time I have urped out nothing new in too long a time. Well, I’m trying to finish this piece:

46-channel Ableton Live set

Well, that and buying some new toys for my studio… update 25 Dec 2010 OK, I finally finished “Haborthelem” (what does that mean? I have no idea but I probably should.)

update 11 jan 2011 The good news is I have more time to work on music. The bad news is that I don’t have any more income for the time being…

update 17 feb 2011 Yesterday I attended a lecture on Pd. This is the Open Source software reminiscent on Opcode’s venerable Max audio programming system. It’s sure come a long way since I last looked at it five years ago or so. At that time it was only partly ready for prime time, but the current version appears much more stable and functional. I’m going to update my comments about it on the “Free or cheap music software” page.

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic Music, Electronic music: production, Electronic Music: tim p scott | Comments Off on What the hell am I doing? Nothing??

Long overdue review of 19 A.D.D. “Dead River”

March 18, 2012 – 10:05 AM

19 A.D.D. “Dead River” cover

19add review (odt format)

19 A.D.D. “Dead River” (2010, 36 Records)

Is your favorite music the likes of, for instance, Lady Gaga, The White Stripes, MGMT, or Arcade Fire? Then stop reading now since you are definitely in the wrong place. However, if bands like King Crimson, Tool and Mahavishnu Orchestra get you excited, then you are in for a huge treat.

19 A.D.D. is a trio from Colorado mainly playing electric guitar, bass and drums. With that seemingly conventional instrumentation they have hammered out a monstrous, fire breathing set, one of the very best I’ve heard from a long time.

To try to get a point of reference, I suppose you could characterize it as “instrumental progressive/experimental jazz/metal.” Besides the bands named above, in my opinion it contains elements of Dysrhythmia, Liquid Tension Experiment, Black Light Syndrome and Attention Deficit, but is not by any means imitative or derivative of them. The songs are primarily complex, joyously loud and brutal, and leavened with odd little sound sculptures and breaks just to add interest and variety to the mix.

The 45 minute release consists of 15 tracks. 6 of them are short sound collage or experimental pieces (one sounds like a 50s Ken Nordine riff) , mixed in with 9 somewhat more conventional pieces. Conventional is probably not the operative word, as the band manages to throw in countless tempo, key and time signature changes into their tunes, still managing to keep the flow and power moving.

Musically I give them a 9 out of 10—I feel like they’re still going to get better.

If I had to carp about anything, I guess it would be the hypercompressed mastering. For their style of high power music, I know it’s common and does make sense, but I can’t help but wonder what their material would have sounded like with the limiters backed off a tad. The CD release not surprisingly sounds better than the MP3 versions, but both have plenty of beef. Obviously…you must have this. On top of that, the CD artwork is beautiful. Don’t just rip or get the MP3 of this, actually go out and buy the CD.

(As of late 2011 their second record GAIA has been completed. More about the band etc is at www.19add.com)

Track list

1 0:57 Siddhapur

2 3:46 Diadem

3 3:45 Spoim

4 0:40 Patan

5 3:48 First World Paine

6 4:33 Sailing Blinde

7 8:37 Slomosexual

8 0:56 Umari

9 3:45 Tendre Crotch Play

10 1:08 Danta

11 3:24 Carnivalium

12 0:53 Jamhuri

13 1:21 Khapan

15 2:52 Bikarni

You should get this and Gaia! Highly recommended.

Updated 4 Jan 2014

By A. Person | Posted in General announcements | Comments Off on Long overdue review of 19 A.D.D. “Dead River”

NWEAMO San Diego – Feb/Mar 2012

March 3, 2012 – 8:32 AM

I feel really blessed to have this wonderful event just a few miles from my house. Sometimes I think it’s a pity that more people from the community don’t attend.

This year there is a very nice article, mainly based on an interview (with a handy description of the festival schedule) with festival adjuvant Dr Joseph Waters, that hopefully will raise the series’ profile. But unfortunately it is still 90% music students from SDSU attending.

Tonight the Partch ensemble is playing; I only hope it will not be sold out before I can buy a ticket.

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic Music, General announcements, Info for musicians | Tagged | Comments Off on NWEAMO San Diego – Feb/Mar 2012

Spotify and Pandora

July 31, 2011 – 10:45 AM

Update 2018 Jul 11 

If you wait long enough lots of things happen. I revisited Spotify a couple of months ago and it’s improved enough that I’m actually paying the $10 a month for the premium version. What’s changed?

Even more zillions of tracks. Want to dig into regional 60s psychedelia? You can spend the rest of your life exploring there.

I didn’t think I’d punt Pandora but at the present Spotify has the edge if I have to pay something monthly.

I thought I’d hit the jackpot since Spotify Premium touts a download facility which allows you to keep tracks on your devices that aren’t network-connected. Well, yes and no: it downloads an encrypted file which you can only then play on devices that have a Spotify player. So it’s useless on my FiiO media player, for instance. I think it’s false advertising, since claiming you have download privileges but can only download an encrypted file seems like a lie to me.

Incidentally, check out the more incredible every noise at once website. This is apparently managed by one of the Spotify engineers and has a gigantic map of every genre that Spotify identifies, with a sample for almost every one. By pinning down the genre of your favorite artists, the theory is that you can find similar acts. It actually works quite well.

So I enter “Carbon Based Lifeforms”, one of my current cool discoveries, and I find out they’re classified as “psychill, downtempo, psychedelic trance, ambient, electronic”. Yup, I’d buy that. So I click on the psychill link and a page comes up with a big cloud of similar acts, some of whom I do know and like such as Eat Static and Shpongle, and some I have not heard of, life H.U.V.A. Network, Desert Dwellers and AES DANA. So…time to explore.

The free version will get you roped in, but at some point those ads are going to either drive you away or drive you to the paid version.

Update 2011 Nov 18

(This is old now, but I’m just going to keep it here to maintain perspective.)

I still had the free Spotify account. So this is supposed to be the future of streaming music? Well, let’s give it another spin.

I sign in and the first thing it wants to do is connect me with Facebook. Besides the fact I quit that service, I can’t understand why I should care what other people are listening to. Why on earth should I want to do that? Furthermore, why should anyone care what I’m listening to? Is this really such a big deal to people?

So I skip that screen. I say to myself, let’s listen to some Ozric Tentacles…one of my all time favorite bands. Search the name, wow, quite a few tracks and albums show up. Impressive. Wait a minute, “Epicus Doomicus Metallicus” is not an Ozrics album! Yup, they have a Candlemass album (which happens to be a metal act I do love) listed as an Ozrics album. I submit a problem report.

Finally the song ends, what’s it, 4 minutes? A chirpy female voice comes on with some kind of long message about scrobbling. I don’t care about scrobbling, but I can’t listen to anything else until that message ends.

Spotify? You have got to be kidding. I’m so out of here. Premium service is better, you say? Well, then I’ll go back to Pandora. I would like to be able to specifically choose albums and songs, but not that badly.

Original post

I got an invite to sign up with Spotify this week. I’ve been hearing all this buzz about it, so why not?

It has a lot of tracks. Not everything but a lot. It’s nice being able to hear tracks from artists I’ve heard about for free.

Naturally being ad-supported, the free version has limitations.

It will only sync up the tracks on your local machine with an iPod. It might not work with generic mp3 players, but in any case I don’t care.

You can’t download the streaming tracks. Not too surprising.

You can queue up tracks.

However, after 10 minutes or so of listening it plays commercials. You can’t fool the commercials by muting or even turning the volume down low; the timer stops until you raise the volume. That’s mega annoying.

For my kind of listening Pandora was much better. It now has a big enough library that you get a good variety of new tracks once you set up a station.

I suppose Spotify is better if you know pretty much exactly the artist/album/tracks you want to hear, Pandora if you want to find out about new things (I stumbled upon Animals as Leaders, set a new channel up with that and have already learned about a dozen incredible new post-rock outfits.)

last modified 18 Nov 2011

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic Music, Electronic Music: listening | Comments Off on Spotify and Pandora

Scary developments

July 27, 2011 – 7:23 PM

update 2012/02/19

Well, that turned out to be a false alarm. I’m back to my version of black metal compositions for the time being.

I still reserve the right to do vocals some time in the future. Maybe I can be the Gordon Lightfoot/Leonard Cohen of my generation (*snerk*)

original post: 2011/07/27

OK, confession time.

Probably giving my age away pretty badly; in my rotation of CDs to listen to during my commute, I pulled up my old Talk Talk collection.

The embarrassing admission is that I actually sing along to them in the car. So what the hell? I thought. I hooked up a mic on an improvised stand (adapted from an old camera tripod I had), hooked it to my ART preamp, and sang along with a bunch of songs on “The Party’s Over” and “It’s My Life.”

So far, I am persisting in my folly but I’m sure reason will return before I make too big a dope out of myself. My plan at the moment is to take one or two tunes and cover them. Basically, I’ll gradually build the track back up using my own tools around my own lead vocal.

This is a lot of fun, even if the tracks never see the light of day. For instance, one track I want to slow down just a few percent which is not much easier with the better elastic audio tools available in most decent DAWs.

Meanwhile I’m also working on a couple other tracks I started as long ago as 10 years which I hope to finish before I get too old to know what I’m doing. Hopefully there will be more frequent progress reports than I’ve been making.

(posted 2011/07/27; updated 2012/02/19)

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic Music, Electronic music: production, Electronic Music: tim p scott, General announcements | Comments Off on Scary developments

“The Producers Conference” notes: San Diego 14 May 2011

May 14, 2011 – 5:44 PM

This was a great little one day session put on by Propellerheads, makers of the Reason software package. The web page that described it is gone now, unfortunately, but you might be able to see its ghost via the Wayback Machine.

This was well worth the nominal $35 admission fee. It’s difficult to get good technical and business information about the music industry so these rare events are very welcome.

This seminar struck a great balance between technology and industry. The first two presenters, Matt Piper of Line6 (Reason’s US distributor) and Kurt “PEFF” Kurasaki (Reason expert from its earliest days) concentrated on technique, focusing on the Neptune pitch correction tool and advanced compression methods in Reason 5/Record 1.5. Even for producers not using Reason this was valuable info.

Ted Breuner then spoke about his journey into the innards of the music industry from his days as an amateur songwriter in his hometown band to working with L.A. A-list artists. At first I thought he minimized the business aspects in favor of “touchy-feely” concepts, but what he was trying to get across was that, if you enter the business to get rich it will be a miracle if you do, but with passion, commitment and persistence you will be rewarded. You could argue this point but I wouldn’t with someone as experienced as him.

Finally, dance music production wizard Jake Stanczak of Kill The Noise showed some secrets of producing monster tracks using Reason. But with his intensity and commitment, he could probably make fantastic tracks using a handheld cassette recorder and the contents of the average kitchen. Props to him for sharing so generously of his experience as well as his techniques.

I hope there are more of these sorts of events in the San Diego area.

It’s ironic how pop music production seems to have returned back to L.A. again just as it was decades ago…

Last modified (repointed web link to archive.org) 2024-11-11

By A. Person | Posted in Electronic music: production, Info for musicians | Comments Off on “The Producers Conference” notes: San Diego 14 May 2011