New Track - Astarte

Dug out the Yamaha EX5  the other day.  I have had to downsize several times over the last few years and so this unit has been parked in storage along with my ancient General Music S2 Turbo.  Oddly they are about the same size, though I think one is short an octave.  Regardless, I have been in a bit of a musical rut of late, so this was a good time to add a new item to fiddle with.

Ruts usually end up with me doing research and practice.  There are a couple of online instructors who have videos that I have found to be interesting and useful.  The Stitch Method is a first stop followed by Eric Haugen. 

These are my two favorites followed by an assortment of other folks.

After dragging out and setting up the synth it was nice to play keyboards again.  Super rusty, but did manage to finish Astarte. Along with resolving that piece, more or less,, I have started researching VJ software.  My version of MAX/MSP is back at Max 5 which is pretty old.  Since I use Ableton for my DAW, I plan to upgrade both Live and MAX at the same time.  There is so much obvious functionality (a freakin realtime Pitch Shifter would be nice) which would be fun to have that can be easily programmed in MAX.  Before launching an upgrade fest though, I decided to look at what is being offered elsewhere for visualizing music.  Found RemixVideo Pro which is relatively cheap and has a bunch of integration with Live.  Not quite as responsive as I'd like and since I would be suing it with my own music, I have to go through and kill the built in audio on each track.  Still it is interesting and the Demo is pretty full featured.  I have noticed the rendered video is not smooth, so more research.....  here is the link for the initial results of that Video Here