Jerkatorium

Jerkatorium

Friday, July 24, 2015

No Rush posted at Song Fight, working on No Good Can Come of This

Jerkatorium's "No Rush" is currently posted at SongFight.org, please listen and vote for it if you like the song.  Chumpy and I tried to channel The Cars.

We are currently working on a submission for the upcoming "No Good Can Come of This" Song Fight, which is due Sunday morning 26JUL2015.  I think it's coming along pretty well.  One of the things that is really helping me with the song is this new (used) piece of equipment:


It is an Evolution eKeys 49 USB controller that I bought used, super-duper cheap.  I plug it directly into my computer and I can use it to control software instruments in GarageBand.  Before this controller I was using "musical typing" for software instruments, which involves using the computer keyboard as the controller.  To give you an idea, the interface window looks like this:


Musical typing is better than nothing, but it is clunky and far from ideal.  It only gives you one and a half octaves, it takes up space on your screen while you're trying to use GarageBand, and of course the feel of the piano/organ keyboard is completely absent.  The eKeys 49 is making things a lot easier and more comfortable for me.

In general, buying used electronic musical equipment is not a good idea, especially the way I did it:  this type of keyboard doesn't have speakers so there was no way to tell if it worked without plugging it in to a computer (which was not available), and the power cord (9-12V adapter) was not included so it was impossible to check to see whether or not it would even power on.  I took a gamble and bought it, found an adapter in the box from my old Fostex 4-track cassette recorder (which I'll never use again anyway), plugged everything in and it worked great.  But I realize that was just dumb luck - I cannot recommend that anyone else try the same sort of thing.

1 comment:

  1. I'm really enjoying "No Rush", btw. I don't really hear the Cars influence (beyond the intro, I mean -- the intro has it in spades), but right now "No Rush" and "Deep Sub-Reddit" are my top two favorites of your oeuvre. (It sounds like the competition for "No Rush" is pretty steep -- best of luck with the voting.)

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