Gabby La La plays the Korg DS-10

No, it's not Lady Gaga, it's Gabby La La.



This is Gabby La La performing at the 2010 loopfest in Santa Cruz, California. I don't usually show other people's work on this blog but I'll make an exception because this video shows what I've been waiting to see for quite some time: somebody using the Korg DS-10 alongside "real" instruments (that don't have chips). Yep, if I had to play live, I would definitely have the Korg DS-10 play something in the background and a "real" instrument (an electric guitar for example) play the lead (and not just to have your hands occupied at doing something other than poking a stylus at a tiny screen). It obviously gives a more human feel to the performance on so many levels. Here, Gabby is playing the sitar and I gotta say she's pretty darn good at it. Cherry on the cake: she sings too. A bit of a bummer: the DS-10 is here reduced to loop playing. I would have loved to see the tiny digital synthesizer being given a more prominent role while still being in the background of the sitar but you can't have everything.

I am sure she could have used a lot of other gadgets for the loop so I find it pretty cool and worth mentioning that she's using the Korg DS-10 in her live act.

You can find much more about Gabby La La at Gabby La La official website.

Note: I had absolutely no idea who Gabby La La was until today!

Should my music be free?

Yeah, I am saying "my music" in the title but it could be yours, really.

I used to offer all my tracks totally free of charge (like many other "amateur" musicians) at the internet archive under the Creative Commons licensing umbrella but not anymore. Back then, I chose the "ok to use non-commercially with proper attribution" for everything I made. It's not that I thought my tracks were gonna be used commercially any time soon but it seemed that the "non-commercial" check box was the one that made the most sense at the time. I am pretty sure most people choose that option to somehow protect their work against commercial use even though they are pretty much giving it all away. Anyways, the point is that all my music was downloadable and/or streamable for free on the internet. The "commercial" vs "non-commercial" license thing is just a side issue (I could have easily ok'd commercial use if it meant more exposure) that seems to make people talking a lot in music making blogs.

Then, it hit me like a brick: Why should I give away all my stuff as if I really don't value it at all? One may say: Well, by giving it away, you can expose your music to a lot more people. Oh, really? Nah, not really. I don't think it makes a whole lot of difference in terms of audience whether the music is free or not. Since the beginning, I have put all my music on youtube because I really felt that it was the only way to get a tiny bit of an audience without a lot of promotion. The quality is not as good but the exposure is definitely there (btw, I'd like to thank matrixsynth and palmsounds for embedding my videos on their respective blogs). Without youtube (and especially the Korg DS-10 niche), there would probably be next to zero interest whether my stuff is free or not (it's pretty much a fact). I am in fact learning this the hard way with my non DS-10 musical venture at Ugo Capeto Music.

So, I took all my stuff out the internet archive and I now have gone the physical and home made CD route. I've also put the "Raspberries" album (and all subsequent ones) on AmazonMP3 for the people that can't wait and don't mind pure digital goods (albeit at a lower price). Hopefully, one day, I'll make one sale :) but it really doesn't matter.

And then, it hit me like a brick (again): Why not give away all the proceeds to charity? I would still value my work and you, the buyer, would get a CD and do a good deed, all at the same time. Yeah, that's it, all the proceeds from the sale of my music are going to charity!

This post is not about Creative Commons but I am gonna give you my 2 cents anyways. My view on Creative Commons is quite simple: It's nice if everybody is playing by the rules but unfortunately, a lot of people are not. When I am talking about people not playing by the rules, I am talking mainly about the small time webmasters who take the stuff (whether it's been ok'd for commercial use or not) and serve ads on their blogs. I don't think a whole lot of money is made but the principle bothers me a little bit. You might ask: How about the big time players that are not playing by the rules? There aren't too many as I personally don't think it makes any sense for a reputable commercial entity to touch anything that's under the CC licensing umbrella (even if ok'd for commercial use) as it's pretty much playing with fire. For one, you can never really tell if the guy that uploaded the stuff is actually the guy that made the stuff. It just opens the door to too many problems. To me, CC is there for webmasters to fill their websites with content they don't have and as easily as possible (without asking for permission, which is the whole point of Creative Commons). Again, it can be used wisely or not. All in all, I am not a big fan of the Creative Commons thing but I totally respect the people (givers and takers) that play by the rules of the various CC licensing and have actually read the fine print.

Books to make music with

You want to create some tunes but don't know where to start? Well, you don't really need any book to make music if you have a good ear but it certainly doesn't hurt to know one or two things about music theory and composition.

So, let me recommend you a couple of books.

First one (music theory) is:

Music Theory: A Practical Guide for All Musicians (Music Instruction) by Barrett Tagliarino.

Second one (music composition) is:

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Music Composition by Michael Miller.

There are other books out there about music theory and music composition, but those two have my seal of approval.

You really need to know about music theory because it actually makes things easier for you. Knowing the scales and intervals will help you tremendously when you are faced with the familiar piano roll and a bunch of empty patterns. Chords are a bit intimidating at first but they actually become rather obvious when you know about intervals.

Reading about music composition is not that important if you have a lot of experience writing tunes since it's kinda something you may figure out as you go along. Still, there are some good ideas to pick up and it may save you some time in the long run. Knowing about stable and unstable tones in a scale is something everybody should know about, for example.

FL Studio

Yeah, you know, Fruity Loops. ImageLine had to change the name some time ago because the folks at Kellog's thought it was too close a name to "froot loops".

Well, I am now the proud owner of FL Studio "fruity" edition, which is basically the step sequencer, piano roll style. Korg DS-10, the original one of course, is cool and all but you've got to mix it up a bit and explore other things. Well, the lure of the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) was too strong to resist and I had to give in.

Yeah, synths are nice but, you gotta admit, samples open up a whole new perspective in music making. FL Studio has a pretty nifty sampler called DirectWave and you can download a bunch of sample banks - DWP program files - for it. For now and for quite some time, I am only interested in real instrument sampling and it seems that the free DWP programs should keep me busy for a while.

FL Studio is pretty easy to use although you may want to watch a few tutorials on youtube and/or get a book about it (see amazon). Unlike the DS-10, the step sequencer is polyphonic within each channel. This means you can play several notes at the same time - like play the lead and the chords - on the same channel or voice.

My biggest beef with the Korg DS-10 is the sound quality, especially when you play around with the velocity (volume) within the sequencer. Yes, you can typically get clicks at the beginning of the note being played - quite annoying. Well, the other problem is the synth engine itself. Having just 2 oscillators, a LFO and a bunch of effects is not something to write home about. After a while, you need and want more. Should probably have considered the DS-10+ on the DSi as the next step but I still wouldn't be able to use samples, so why not go straight where I need to be with a real DAW like FL Studio? Exactly.

Now, a potential problem with FL Studio and the other DAWs out there is that there's so many things that you can do that it becomes overwhelming and you end up doing nothing. Personally, I will keep doing what I have been doing on the DS-10, that is, work one channel at a time layering up to 4 voices (channels). Because you can do proper chords, you don't have to use the layering technique to write songs. You can do the harmony (chords) first and the melody second, or the other way around, potentially using a single channel. Not a big fan of this classic way of making music but you never know.

The Korg DS-10 still rules all though.

Magnatune

Among the many music sharing/selling websites out there, there is one that really sticks out for me. It's magnatune. There's some really good stuff in there and I've made getting into magnatune my (long term) goal. They apparently accept 5% (I think it's even less than that) of submissions. That's actually a good thing, I mean, why bother with a net label that accepts everything, right?

So, it started back in December 09 when I submitted Track 32 for their enjoyment. After a few days, I got this:

You recently sent music to Magnatune for us to listen to.

Unfortunately, while your music is very good, it isn't the kind of
thing we're looking for.

Sorry!

Alright, no biggie. Better luck next time. The "your music is very good" is a nice touch though and without it, I might have stopped my musical journey right after reading the message. So, thanks!

Well, next time has arrived and I've just submitted Track 45 for their perusal. Haven't got any reply yet but will keep you posted (hopefully, they will say something if it's rejected so that I can post about it).

The stuff I submit is pure Korg DS-10 but I don't disclose it anymore although my email address kinda gives it away (for my next submission, I won't be using my DS-10 email address). We all know the sound quality is not the greatest coming out of the DS-10 so I might have to do some post-processing on the audio (oh, the horror!) in the future. Yeah, those guys are pretty picky regarding the cleanliness of the tracks, audio wise, and it might be disrespectful to send them raw DS-10 audio files. Fortunately, I've got cool edit pro in my arsenal of audio tools.

Eheh, just got the reply from magnatune and it looks very familiar:

You recently sent music to Magnatune for us to listen to.

Unfortunately, while your music is very good, it isn't the kind of
thing we're looking for.

Sorry!

Cool, my music is still (very) good, and that's all that matters. They don't know it yet but they haven't heard the last of me.

How to do a cover song?

Maybe I should have titled this article: How to reproduce a tune on the DS-10? but it doesn't sound as good.

Reproducing a song can be pretty overwhelming especially if you are not too good at isolating tracks (lead, bass, etc) within a song and, most importantly, if you are unable to figure out the notes within a track.

Well, don't despair, because there's a way to do it rather painlessly.

First, you need to find the midi file corresponding to the song. For that, go into google and type something like "visage fade to grey midi" if you want to cover this overly famous 80s anthem by Steve Strange's Visage. Note that there exist search engines just for midi files (google "midi search engines" to find some). Now, don't get your hopes too high because there's definitely not a midi version of every song ever made but if the song is/was a hit, it's likely there's gonna be one. There are wav to midi converters out there but I am not too sure how well they work at isolating the tracks (probably not too well).

Second, once you have the midi file, you need some software to load the midi file and show the notes (pitch and duration) for each track within the song. There are quite a few programs that can do that but you have basically two kinds of midi tune loaders: those that show the tracks sheet music style and those that show the tracks piano roll (letter notation) style. As a side note, it's kind of fun playing midi files because they sound like tunes that were made on 80s computers.

If you are very familiar with sheet music notation, well, you are probably not reading this but I would still recommend NoteWorthy Composer from NoteWorthy Software. It's not free but the evaluation version is. Finale NotePad from Finale can do it as well (the Finale Reader is free download). If you want to go that route, you're gonna need to "translate" from classic sheet music notation to so-called letter notation in order to enter all that data into the Korg DS-10 sequencer.

Why bother with all that extra work when you can load the midi tune and get the tracks in letter notation directly? I know Able Midi Editor (free evaluation version for 20 days) from Widisoft can do that but there are probably many others (let me know of free and good alternatives).

Finally, you need to convert the notes and durations given for each track to the DS-10 sequencer and, most importantly, figure out how to synthesize the sounds for each track with just 2 oscillators. The latter is really the fun part (I think).

Is it worth doing? You'll be the judge on this. It's not very creative but I think you can learn a few things in the process, like ... how to layer tracks to create a song (I think it's important). As they say, you should always learn from the masters.

PS: it is usually frowned upon to do covers based on midi data. Obviously, it is much more interesting/challenging to do it all by ear, assuming you can, eheh.