UPDATE!!!
I got a new cool novelty light by LavaLamp.
It's over here:
Also, check out my new keyboard! It's an Evolution MK-461C 61-Key Advanced Mobile USB MIDI Controller...
Also, I have to say, I've started using Magix Audio Studio 7 Deluxe and I am really enjoying it.
I never could get the Magix midi program to do what I wanted, but the mixer program is excellent.
It has some features I don't have with Acid that I really love.
This combined with the new keyboard and all the freeware synths and my digital recorder and I am one happy musician.
END of UPDATE
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And now, back to the old stuff:
This is my office with the lovely view of the house across the street. Hmm... Not so good. So, I covered the walls and window with cool stuff to look at.
I share office space with my husband, so what you see to the extreme left behind the metal lamp belongs to him.
Yes, my icon is now safely in the house. She was next to the driveway for years and years, but after the last few hurricanes blew through and we lost one of two trees we decided to bring her in.
Ha ha! No, this isn't my keyboard. This is one Cliff uses during his guitar lessons to help students.
We do have a nice Yamaha. It's a midi keyboard so Cliff has it hooked up to his computer with an Edirol USB interface cable.
He also has a Washburn guitar. I used it in "War Stories", though I'm obviously not a guitar player.
This Chromaharp is on loan to us from an another local musician. I've used it several times, the most recent being "The Long Long Wait".
We have a sad tambourine I never use, but Cookie likes to sit in it, and I have a metal lamp from the 1930's that makes an excellent percussion instrument like a low deep bell. I've used it many times.
This depressing old piece of outdated archaic technology was all I had for years to record on away from our computers. Any sounds you hear up to and including "The Lighthouse" were recorded on this thing and transferred to the computer. I was fairly satisfied with it for a long time, but it began to power through batteries faster and faster and it started recording the ticking of it's own gears spinning so I was starting to look for a replacement when it finally died all together and I had to abandon it.
Now I have this cool tiny little digital recorder I got for my birthday. Much easier to keep with me at all times and much easier to use on the fly. (I got ducks flying over our house the other day!)
In the software department there's lots more to see....
Sonic Foundry kind of started it all for me like a lot of indie musicians today. If you go back to my earliest music you are hearing lots of store bought loops and wavs mixed in with my tape recordings. All I did back then was drop the sounds in and put them together. That was in the year 2000.
Though I have used other wav editors like Goldwave in the past, once I found Cool Edit I stayed there.
My next big musical adventure was with Modplug Tracker. This particular version is the fan supported and modified one, but I also have the original one on my system. This thing is much more powerful than my version of Acid is in a lot of ways. Most of the songs I've done over the last two years have been built or finished in Modplug. The first song I ever did on Modplug was at the insistence of another mp3.com artist in France. It was the tune "Impossible" and I called it "Impossible" because the program was so new and hard for me to use at first. But, of course, I did figure it out.
Somewhere along the way I discovered Anvil Studio. The more I used Modplug the more I understood music and finally I just had to give real composition a try. So I did a search and discovered Anvil. I tried many other notation softwares, but this was my favorite for a long long time.
Now I've found Finale and bought Finale SongWriter. There are many limitations, but frankly, the darned thing makes midi sound beautiful.... I had to have it.
I forgot to mention dbPowerAMP. This thing is indispensable. I use it literally everyday.
At the beginning of this year (2005) I discovered something called Savihost. Savihost makes it possible to use freeware VST Synths without a program like Cakewalk. You can use the synths and record them in Cool Edit and use them as voices in Modplug, or just play a cool piece and record that in Cool Edit and use it in Acid. I've done both. ASET 2121 is one of my favorites.
Crystal is my newest one. It's just fantastic.
If you are familiar with my tune "Um Kala", this is where the voices came from. There are no live human voices in that tune at all. I generated them all right here in TalkAny. You have to play around with it to get it to make the voices sound realistic, but it is very cool and sounds great recorded and used in a song. Again, I would get the voices right and then record it in Cool Edit for use in another program. I also used this to make the child voice in "Strange World - No Fear".
This is Tuareg. And, this is the freeware version. This thing is really much more useful and powerful than what I use it for. I only use it to generate the occassional beat. Speaking of which, I don't use much by way of drum beats in my music anymore. That was something I just didn't feel I was very good at. I try to go back and do it a lot but with little or no success. That's something I guess I need to work on. Anyway, this thing generated the beat you hear in "Lockdown", the weird metallic chain thing using sounds I recorded.
This is Sounder. I haven't bought it yet... This is the demo version. I actually used it a few times to make music. You can hear a little of it in "Strange World - No Fear". I used to use it when I wasn't feeling particularly inspired, but I wanted to make music anyway. It's a lot of fun to use....
And this is a list of a bunch of other stuff I use straight from my Windows explorer "music programs" folder. Lots of freeware synths and such.
Earlier this year my husband and I decided to invest in some really great music software. We didn't have a lot of money, so we looked for what we thought would be the best bang for our buck. What we got was Magix Music Studio 7 Deluxe. It was a very bad choice. The documentation is useless and I can't get it do anything logically. I know what it can do, I just can't figure out how to get it to do it. I finally gave up and went back to using what I know best.
Here's the screenshots:
This is Magix Audio Studio 7 Deluxe. You're looking at the demo song that came with the software. I never even used it so I couldn't open one of my own tunes in there to screenshot. It does the same stuff Acid 3.0 does and it's much harder to use.
This was what I was looking forward to when we had ordered the software and it was on it's way. This is Magix Midi Studio 7 Deluxe. This thing is just so difficult to wrap my head around. I figured out Anvil Studio and Modplug with no help. I think I'd have to take classes to sort this thing out.
But! The reverse side of that coin is this. This is Magix Video Deluxe 2.0. Now this thing is cool. All my music videos were created using this and Swish 2.01. I even did some music in here that went on to become tunes... "Drive" is one of them. The video came first, then the tune. The same is true of "The Watertower", "Sky and Land", "Places" and maybe a couple of others.
And finally this is the other half of my music video production, Swish 2.01. It's a flash program. I also used it to create my Soundtoy for Orphic Endeavors and for a long time I had the entire huge website built in flash, but it was too difficult to keep updated so I turned to CSS and abandoned building flash sites. You can play with the soundtoy... There's a link on the Orphic E. page up in the top menu at the far right. It was fun to build.
So, that's it. The Orphic Endeavors' music studio. I don't know if anyone cares but me, but it was fun working on this page and giving homage to the software and equipment I use the most.
Thanks for checking out this page.
-Bonnie
back to http://orphicendeavors.bpgisme.com/