This past weekend has been nothing but musical (well in between work and Uni commitments). Films didn’t even enter my consciousness. Yes I know. Bizarre. To set the scene, it was Saturday morning and the weather was perfect. I was strolling along Chapel St soaking up the sun and noticing all the beautiful people walk on by when I caught a bright glimmer in the corner of my eye. At first I thought it was Elisha Cuthbert sending a smile my way but it was actually the yellow Stratocaster in Manny’s music store shop window beaming to me, whispering “come in James. Come in and play me!”. So I had to oblige obviously but as I walked through the entrance, I got distracted. The keyboards were singing to me, begging for a few notes. As I was playing one of the $4000 Rolands, I looked around and saw the much less expensive MIDI keyboard range. I knew I wanted the Edirol setup but I noticed the Evolution MK449C in the far corner. I had been eyeing the Evolution for about 6 months now and was my original choice back when I only had a passing interest in getting a keyboard. It was also a lot cheaper than the Edirol and so I asked the guys in there which one was better. They all agreed that there wasn’t a great deal of difference but I wanted to play each for myself. They had the Reason software set up so I played for a while and really couldn’t tell the difference (although I know pretty much nothing about these instruments so my guess was as good as the next persons). In the end, I went with the Evolution and this enabled me to have enough cash left over to buy this mic. It’s pretty basic but good enough for what I need it for.

I’ve only scratched the surface of what all this is capable of doing but everything has exceeded my expectations so far. It’s money well spent. Reason is just an amazing piece of software and with so many samples to play with, the possibilities are endless. It’s going to take a while to get my head around it but it’s fun doing so. A nice touch is the ability to see all the virtual devices back ports and cords and move them around like you would with a real system. So in other words, you can plug a reverb device through a synthesiser and make some extremely trippy sounds.

I had a few problems with what I thought was the keyboard itself initially, since there was quite a delay when hitting the keys. But that was a computer issue and was solved relatively quickly. A better soundcard will probably improve performance too but I have no cash left so that’s just going to have to wait.

Okay so what does it all sound like? Well I just did something on the fly as I was writing this post since I thought I better provide you guys with something to show. It’s about a minute long, took me exactly 9 minutes to produce and just uses strings and the piano. Basically just an example of what the samples sound like. I admit it’s very, very basic but hey – it’s better than nothing at all right?

You can download the mp3 812K file right here.

Feel free to distribute it, manipulate it, use it for your own projects, or chuck it on your iPod. Expect a few more samples of different styles to pop up on the site when I fully get the hang of the software as well. I haven’t really explored the drum machine yet. Ohhhhh yeahhhhhhh!