Ended up making a bid on and winning a second hand RME 9632 on Ebay durin the week. A bargain for 175 bucks. As a replacement soundcard for my 1820 I was alittle nervous being that its over ten years old but as its made by RME (known for providing the most reliable audio drivers in the business) and is still being sold today I thought twas a safe bet. Unfortunately input wise its a step back from my 1820 but I’m hoping the routing and reliability will more than make up for it (Cubase has been crashing fairly often since I’ve upgraded the OS to Windows 7 due largely to EMU going out of business and thus not providing windows 7 drivers). Although the 9632 doesn’t provide any onboard DSP effects is does ship with a very nice set of audio analysis tools which’ll be well handy for checking phase related issues and nasty sub bass.
Did alittle more work on Monster this week, settled on a new key for it; Bb minor which has a nice dark/comic vibe about it. Most of the time acoustically thou I was trying to iron out the creases in Black Crow. I could’nt get the bridge or instrumental sections to sit right so I ended up reversing the chord flow in the verses and writing a new progression for the chorus. Sounding alright at the moment but I’ll see how it feels after a few more plays. Have added a few more sounds to the latest electronic tune too, a heavily distorted brass ensemble staccato patch from Symphobia and a lofi woodblock from a retro toy bank in Kontakt. The song has a slow feel, thinking some lyrics might work well on it but this’ll probably change once I try recording a loose vocal track (going by past experience I don’t much like the sound of my voice on electro tracks or maybe in general…).
Did alittle work on styling the new Wax Botanical online store, gonna need to do alot more testing before it goes live as there are some issues with the theme I built the site with and the plugin I installed for product/shopping cart functionality. Looking forward to having it up and running thou, gonna have a blog there too, on the designing/making of WB related stuff :)
