At The Horsehead Nebula Short

 

We have been playing around with the Korg MS-20 Mini for the last week and I think it is a wonderfully versatile instrument.  This 40 second short has the lead part using this delayed vibrato patch.

The MS-20 can also make all the weird random noises and things like Thunder and Rain make it perfect for  my uses.  Many years ago I had a Sequential Pro-One when they first came out, but found it very limited. Made nice synth keyboard sounds, nothing outside that. What Roland makes now has the same limitations.  

Another thing about this short is it uses a rhythm pattern from the Korg MINIPOPS7. A vst version of one, anyway. This is the rhythm machine used on Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene and Equinoxe albums.　That stuff is timeless to me.    　

My music is recorded and produced in Reaper. Does what I need, and I only use a tiny fraction of the features it has.  It is mixed for headphone use by applying the dear VR Music binaural panner to each part to position them around the head,  The whooshing white noise is panned with a LFO to move back and forth behind the head.  The lead sound moves between left front and slightly right rear.

The background ships in this were made and rendered in Hash Animation Master '99. I designed and modelled the ships around 23years ago, but making this was the first time to render them at 1280 x 720.  Modern PCs don't have an issue doing that now. 462 frames rendered to .TGA numbered files in 25minutes.  When I designed them, making a tiny movie took many hours. 

Those files where then brought into Moho Pro12 and the space pets, music and text added.  Only rendering stuff at 600x600 as that still fits into the Youtube Short format,  works on Instagram, and doesn't take long to render.

The little creature is sculpted from translucent blue and white FIMO polymer clay. This material isn't as nice to work with as Super Sculpey, but we managed. Only a single image is used. Bones have been added the image and animated using a particle system in Moho Pro 12.

See many youtubers doing talking head videos at 4K, and being pushed to do so, but that is not something I am interested in at the present time.  

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology

KORG USB Driver Win10 with MS-20 and Microkeys37 Fix

 

This was a great help today December 2022!

Even with latest Korg driver, had to follow this video, add alias midi1 and midi3 for my MS-20 mini and microKEY37 keyboard, and KORGUM64.DRV  in the midi1 and midi3 fields under Driver32 after installing the Korg driver today.

The microKEY32 was working before installing driver. Installed it to connect to MS-20mini. Computers are powerful, but so much trouble.

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology

Twitter-plosion, Korg MS-20 and Binaural Mixing.

So, EMusk wanting to buy twitter looked like a really dumb thing to do. He then went and did extra dumb things after doing the dumb thing buying it. I had spent much of my career in software and product development, and for a new owner to come in and just sack all the developers first day was a A GRADE moron thing to do.  EM is no genius. 

But I really don't care what happens to twitter. I met a few people I will keep in touch with, but the other 99.9% of it is garbage.  I can be found on the other sites if you look, including Mastodon (@megacurve@mstdn.jp), but my own website, Youtube channel and Bandcamp are the main places to find me.  Even this BLOG.

Staying away from Twitter is far better for me. Far more productive and happy.

We finished our PART 4 , end of SEASON1, of In The Asteroid Belt shortly after getting a WONDERFUL KORG MS-20 Mini off Mercari here in Japan.  

The KORG MS-20 Mini is a 86% sized version of the classic semi modular MS-20. It has all the cool toys like SAMPLE&HOLD, PINK & WHITE NOISE sources so can be patched to not only make a nice synth lead, or pad, but also rain and thunder.  What a synthesizer is really for. It is wonderful to play.

We have had a long term interest in surround sound, as our still popular SQ Surround Post testifies, but to me that also includes Binaural Headphones mixes.  We may be doing more of this after getting the dear VR Music 3D panner VST.  It is wonderful so far.

A YouTube Short animation with a Headphone mix:

Headphones and phones is the major way people consume music now. No one (statistically speaking) sits listening to whole sides of albums anymore the way I did as a teenager.  This Rick Beato - Steve Wilson Interview says a lot of things I agree with.  And I'm older than both of these guys at 64.

As we come to the end of 2022. we look back and see a lot happened. Big Family things and my own completed projects.  2023 will see more music, animation, illustration and comic projects, and can see myself having a lot of fun and sleepless nights doing them.  

Sleepless as I wake up and think, "I could do this, or that, or how about if this happens" and getting up in the morning to work on them is a wonderful thing. Even if maybe a little sleepy. 

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology

What is old is new again: Puppet Animation

Around 1994 I was involved with, and wrote a series of magazine articles on DESKTOP SCIENCE FICTION PRODUCTION 

And in 2022 it is now a much more viable thing to do.

I have previously written about how I was assigned "Multi-Media" in the mid 1990s (which may have been done to piss me off as much as anything else), and actually found its potential fascinating and developed postage sized movie scenes with the technology of the time.  

I still have all the models and puppets. Have them proudly on display here where nobody will ever see them.  And have used them a few times over the decades since.

After doing a few different types of YouTube SHORTS, and not wanting to repeat the same time lapse drawing gags, even if popular by my humble standards, did  a few experiments combining Moho Pro 12 2D animation and images obtained via the stop frame animation software.  

 I think of these as Music Videos, and liked them a lot.  They are however also the worst performing SHORT I have uploaded in months.  The Music and Images may work well together, but it isn't being watched by SHORT viewers, or isn't being shown to them. 

The music isn't compositionally very complex but it doesn't have to be. The Reaper project show here.

And then there was Robotic Existential Crisis. Over a minute, so not a short, so destined to be seen by 12 people at the most. Don't care though, as making this new series has been personally very rewarding.

A cartoon on the Music to PART 3:

And here is Part 1 , a  3.5min "Rock Opera" 

 

And here is Part 2 , 2.5 min 

Part 3  

Part 4

Part 5

And we have also released the SOUNTRACK album on Bandcamp, that contains all the released tracks as a single album side.   

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology

Renovating the Desktop PC

In 2016 I built a PC from parts as Windows XP on the DELL I used was end of life.  I used to always get a new PC at end of life, so I wouldn't loose any work by doing anything to a functioning machine.

New PC had a i7 4 core 8 thread 3.4Ghz in a Gigabyte GA-Z170-D3H motherboard, 8GB ram, 1TB HDD. Bought Win7 64bit, but installed 32bit Win7 as the Photoshop 5.0 I used I knew didn't run in 64bit.  It all worked fine with only 4GB ram accessible back then.

At the time I bought the normal Microsoft WIn7 64bit PRO box, but as I wanted 32bit, the PC parts guy made a 32bit win7 pro DVDR disc for me, you couldn't buy it any more, but that may have helped me last week.  Installed with key from the WIn7 64bit PRO box.

Wasn't all smooth sailing though. On my i7 Win7 machine CorelDraw12 would crash as soon as you tried to draw anything.  It took many weeks of looking for clues on the internet, but it turned out the KODAK COLOR DLL, kodakcms.dll , it used wasn't compatible with THAT i7 processor, but worked fine on others! But luckily, there was a free Kodak app you could download and take a latter version of the DLL from and things were all good!  Things like this is why I want to have the old system around and usable until issues with a new system are resolved. I always want a backup.

In 2018 bought a WIn10 64bit Lenovo i5 ideapad 520  in planning to move back to Japan, and needed a machine I could use as soon as getting off the airplane in a new country. The desktop would take 3 months to arrive, with most of our other things. I had done the same thing back in 2001, moving from Japan back to Australia, when I bought a Cannon Win95 laptop as carry on luggage.

So the last 3 years have used the Laptop with the PC as a backup.  Had to put win10 on the Desktop early 2020 as win7 was end of life. Win10 installed as 32bit, and has become quite a pig in the last 2 years, where even just starting Chrome caused lots of disc swapping. In win10 the antivirus stuff and system just uses most of the memory.  

The thing about the Laptop though is the fan is in your face, noisy, and the keyboard is pretty terrible. So the last 6 months have mostly used the PC.  Unplugging internet, killing off things using Task Manager and enjoying the quiet.

So 2 weeks ago looked at installing 64bit win10 and making it my main PC again. Found I can install win10 64bit Pro and use the original key. 

So bought another WD 1TB SATA HDD, same as existing one actually, and plugged it in instead of the 32bit Win10 drive, and installed new Win10 64bit and authorized it.  My plan was if it hadn't worked, I could just put old HDD back in without loosing anything.

After Win10 64bit running,  put the win10 32bit drive as drive G: and copied all the stuff I needed and reinstalled on the 64bit drive C: . Later I can just use the drive G: as more storage.  I have just never filled a 1TB HDD. The things I make, illustrations, videos, music just aren't very big. 

In the illustration work I do, I end up installing some font just for what ever project, so haven't reinstalled all my fonts. Just the few BLAMBOT bought ones and others I use a lot. Also ARIAL UNICODE MS which was in win7 but removed since then, and ends up in many of my documents I still use. 

It was really usable again, and could use the 8GB that had always been in the machine.  BUT, 16GB is better, so found out replacing memory with 16GB CORSAIR DDR4 Memory Module VENGEANCE LPX was the way to go, and did that a couple of days ago.

Ran memtest86 to prove the new ram was fine. 

So a really usable PC again.

Both my desktop PC and the Laptop are not compatible with Win11, without hacking the Win11 installer, and from what I have seen so far Windows 11 looks like a massive step backwards. So not considering it anytime soon  

Will see what happens by the time Win10 is end of life.  

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology