First off, a very late happy new year!
A lot has happened since my last post (sorry!) but I'll try and get everyone up to speed.
First off, the first semester went by with no failed modules (generally did pretty well across the board), which is great! Unfortunately, we have a very different problem now, as I now only have three days where I actually have any lectures on. Now you could argue that this leaves more time to study and help with retaining knowledge, the reality is that currently, there is absolutely no new ground being covered (yet). So I'm mostly trying to find other things to do to try and help improve my skills in a more practical sense. So let's cover a few of those.
Prog rock song project
The current project I'm working on is a more team effort one that is being led by a good friend of mine WellFiredToast, with a few other people helping with insturmentation and composing. I was brought onto the project as an audio engineer/co-producer role. Initially this was going to be delegated to putting all the audio recordings together, mixing, and potentially mastering, however it's been a little more involved. The person originally supposed to play piano has been swamped by university work and other things, meaning they can no longer play for the track. So I had taken up the challenge of taking our demo midi piano tracks, and making them sound as good as I can possibly get them. This is a bit more involved than it first sounds. Because it's not just the sound profile of the insturment (although that did take a bit of trial and error for that) but also altering the midi track to make it sound dynamic and as if an actual human is playing it. This wouldn't be so bad if an actual person had performed the original midi track (using a midi keyboard/controller), however we're dealing with manually programmed tracks, where it's all very "Perfect". To try and combat this, I needed a way to vary the velocity of notes, but not too much, otherwise it turns into an incoherent mess. My solution thus far is to use a tool in Ableton Live that allows you to randomise the velocities of given midi notes in a midi region, but set a specific range that these notes work in, so you can still retain a level of "inconsistency" that a human playing would entail, whilst also controlling the overall volume of a given part of the piano part.
This actually leads quite nicely into my next problem I'm (still) trying to solve.
Live performance across multiple machines
I've started doing live performances on twitch using Sonic Pi and, more recently, VCV Rack. Whilst this has been good, it has a few issues. Firstly, VCV Rack is very thread heavy. I originally wanted to use my PC I built for livestreaming, but the aging 4670K is just not up to the task at all, with very heavy stuttering while using extremely basic patches. Now whilst I was given a MacBook Air from my university for my course, and it would be far more suitable for this task, it has it's own problem: it's managed by university IT department. This means that if I want to install an application that isn't pre-approved by my university department, there's a few hoops to jump through. So we can get VCV Rack running, Sonic Pi, and we have access to Ableton live. Great! But we now have a different problem. OBS studio, while I can install it relatively easily, in order for OBS to access the display capture, it requires it to be explicitly allowed... Which you can only do with administration privileges. And even with that not being an issue, there's a few others that remain. Firstly, on my Linux machine, I can simply route audio from applications to other applications (e.g. VCV Rack and Sonic Pi to individual stereo tracks in Reaper), and then feed all that application audio through an effects bus, (reverb, for example), allowing to extend upon what a single application is capable of. This isn't exactly impossible to do on macOS either, but it relies on third party software that ALSO requires administration access to grant it sufficient permissions. So I made a rather premature and potentially terrible financial decision to buy myself a new computer (GPD Win 4), which cost ~£680. This has been great, but now has it's own set of problems. Ableton Live CAN run on Linux under wine, but I've had a terrible experience using it (lots of stuttering), so that leaves that out of the question. Now my work around has been a little convoluted. I have my macbook air run Ableton Live, and communicate with my Linux machine via a gigabit network switch to sync Ableton + Sonic Pi running on the mac with VCV Rack + Sonic Pi running on my Win 4. I then have audio from the macbook routed directly to an audio interface connected to my Win 4, then stream off of that. It's fine, but obviously rather convoluted. It does mean both machines can now focus on a specific task, as opposed to trying to get one machine to do all those tasks at once. But now I also have to manage a lot more software at once and the BPM has to be manualy adjusted on the Win4 to match the BPM of Ableton + the instance of Sonic Pi running on the mac. Additionally my parents hate me for buying a new machine, so I may need to find a different solution.
I think this about a quick round up of everything so far. Was hoping to be driving a car by the end of Febuary/start of Marchm but that hasn't really worked out with campus parking, and I still have to work about trying to figure out housing for next year (which I have left a little late, but should be sorting out very soon).
That's all, thanks for the read!