Assignments from the last two weeks of SONAR class have yielded positives, I think.

Last week we began to lay out the tracks for our final project, just to get a feel for some of the MIDI elements. I tend to start things at the beginning and work through sequentially, so I put together a very rough pass at the Intro section for Volo Flamenco. This snippet adds just the bare beginnings of percussion and strings – all synthesized via plug-ins, specifically, the TTS-1 and Session Drummer synths that comes with SONAR 8.

Volo Flamenco Intro – MP3 – 256kBps – 2.5MB – 1:21 min.

This week was an overview of sound synthesis, which technically isn’t a huge part of the SONAR course (synthesizers are a course of study in their own right). The idea was simply to understand the various types – additive, subtractive, modeling, sampling, etc. The task I chose here was to manipulate a few existing sounds’ elements – attack, decay, release, modulation (vibrato) – to create new ones. This short bit has tweaked piano, bass and percussion, tied together with a melancholy little melody inspired by the piano tone.

Masque – MP3 – 256kBps – 2.7MB – 1:30 min.

Enjoy!

This week’s assignment for the SONAR course was kind of interesting.

Last week we recorded a MIDI performance into a track – anything we wanted – just to get the hang of it. I chose something I picked out on the (mostly) white keys back when I was about 14. See ‘Organ Part’, below.

This week we had to take that single track and expand it without adding any new recorded material. Just copy-and-paste, edit the notes with SONAR’s tools, add whatever synthesizers and effects we wanted, etc. So I turned the organ part into Ron’s Tabernacle Choir (with orchestra).

Note: everything you hear is being created in the computer using the “software synthesizers” that come with SONAR 8.

Organ Part – MP3 – 192kBps – 2.1MB – 1:27 min.

Organ, Choir and Strings – MP3 – 192kBps – 2.2MB – 1:27 min.

It took almost as long to come up with a name for this as it did to finally get around to recording a scratch copy – again, this is SONAR running while I practice. Kinda sloppy here and there, but it has the basic feel.

This was inspired in part by Steve Stevens’ Flamenco-A-Go-Go (thanks again for turning me on to that, Bryan). I plan to use this file as a scratch track to build a much more complex piece (more guitars, orchestra… the woiks! use your imagination), as my final project for the Producing Music with SONAR course.

It’s pretty dynamic, so if it sounds really low-volume when it first starts (about 8 seconds in, or so), don’t turn your volume up too high. It’ll get louder soon enough. Enjoy!

Volo Flamenco - MP3 – 128kBps – 6.1MB – 6:41 min.

Too much time between the last post and this. Lots of other stuff has provided ample avenue for distraction.

Happily, though, recent developments include pursuing something I should have done decades ago: formalized musical education. As a Christmas present to me I enrolled in Berklee School of Music’s online program: Berkleemusic.com.

Berkleemusic’s programs include numerous certificates and a lot of standalone courses. See the link above for a sample course (I think it’s an excerpt from the Electric Bass course). I decided on the Preparing for Berklee ‘Specialist’ certificate, since it includes topics I’ve wanted to explore and starts where I really needed to start: Basic Music Theory (BME-101). Just finishing that course this week (actually, I’ve completed everything – just waiting for a grade on my last assignment) and I’m happy to say I learned a good deal that would have meant a lot over the years in all manner of situations. Not the least of which, in that regard, would have been an overall reduction of the frustration that has often led to discouragement and lack of, shall we say, “follow-through” with respect to a number of musical endeavors.

Next on the agenda is Basic Ear Training (BME-115), which starts next Monday. I’m kind of excited about this one, as virtually everything I’ve done by way of musical performance and composition has been “by ear”. I’m anxious to learn how to translate that ability into something more structured and (*shudder*) formalized.

I also decided to ‘jump ahead’ a bit and enrolled in a course that also starts next Monday, but which is not part of this particular certificate curriculum: Producing Music with SONAR (BMPR-177). This is actually the course responsible for my learning about Berkleemusic in the first place. Through the magic of Google Ads, one day last November I was corresponding with someone (using GMail) about some aspect of SONAR and over on the right column, in the list of related ads was an entry listing Berkleemusic’s on-line SONAR course. I hadn’t known Berklee even had an online program, much less that anyone was teaching courses on SONAR (which I’ve used since about Cakewalk Pro Audio Ver. 2 or something). Looking into that, I discovered all the other areas where Berklee provides on-line music instruction, and I decided it was something I wanted to try.

Some folks will undoubtedly note, correctly, that there are all manner of books and instructional material available to learn pretty much everything in Berklee’s on-line catalog. What I’ve found over the years – and something likely at the heart of the delay in my formalized musical education – is that when I pursue learning along those lines I invariably “lose interest” and move on to something else. Sometimes I’ll pick whatever-it-was back up again later, but that’s rare. I just don’t have the self-discipline to study in a vacuum. I’d be surprised if many people do. So the rationale here was that if I paid for the course – which has a very specific calendar schedule for completion – I’d be inclined to follow through. And so far that’s pretty much how it’s worked out. We’ll see how that translates to these next two courses, but I’m optimistic since they’re both in areas of “musical recidivism” that I’ve gone back to several times.

One interesting aspect of Berkleemusic is that the system they use for their online instruction is a highly customized instance of Moodle – an Open Source distance learning software package. Although we didn’t make use of a lot of its capability, or spend much time customizing it anywhere near as well as Berkleemusic has, we used the Moodle package at my last job to manage training for various technical courses on BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) and other related technologies. It was also the system used for administering our Certified BPEL Engineer exam. Kinda cool to use it as a student and see how flexible it is. Patty’s talked about putting the course of study she’s developing (as a doctoral student) on-line at some point, and I may go back to considering that as a system to support it in my next career as “Obi-Ron: Househusband and Tech Guru”… now potentially scant months away.

One final thing to mention, because I personally got a lot of inspiration out of this as well, is the access to stuff like John Mayer’s workshop (students-only, sorry – but there’s a preview there). I’ve always liked his music, but didn’t know he was such a philospher as well – at least with respect to his art – and on top of that he’s able to communicate that philosphy and make it accessible to others. Musical composition and performance is, at it’s core, an emotional activity. Mayer’s managed to rein in that emotion with a kind of enlightened pragmatism that has worked (exceptionally well) for him. If nothing else, it’s enjoyable to watch that expressed in a forum like this workshop, where I think a lot of Berklee students learned quite a bit that they weren’t expecting to. John has a blog – Battle Studies – where he’s intermittently chronicling the development of his next album. Interesting stuff there. He describes it thus:

It’s a house,
in a clandestine location,
that’s being converted into a music studio.
No, not a music studio.
An entire music experience.
A living, breathing, ever-evolving organic space that contains every part of the record making process.
Everybody involved has left their comfort zone. Including myself.
I need to be disoriented again.

I can relate to the need to be disoriented, again. Looking back (as I’m guessing John has), moments of best inspiration and motivation have come from disorientation. The need to make some internal sense of the externally unfamiliar is, I think, a kind of rocket fuel for musicians. I don’t know if The Music Room we keep talking about adding on over our garage would qualify as a disorienting environment. Likely not. But since all my Grammy nominations are in the future, and I can’t afford to remodel an entire house yet, that’ll have to do.

I’ve decided to leave the recorder running when I practice. If nothing else, it gives me a reference for what I need to work on and whether or not I’m making progress in specific areas.

While doing so today I was able to rattle off a somewhat clean rendition of an original composition for guitar called Indiana Fields. The piece is unique in that it virtually played itself out of the Larrivée when I first got it 14 months ago.

This was something inspired by my cousin Alessandro’s current movie project, working-titled Red Gold (more info available here, but you may want to ride the volume control on your computer, as the ambient music is a bit loud, IMHO, and there’s no ‘off’ widget).

The script, which is a love story loosely based on events that occurred at Camp Atterbury, has apparently gone from a one- to a three-hanky tear-jerker since I read the first draft, which was compelling enough in its own right.  Prior to reading it, in fact, I was completely unaware that either Italian or German POWs were held in the continental U.S. at any time. But apparently there were POW camps established in Indiana during WWII. I’m anxious to see the film, once completed.

Anyway, my apologies for the room’s ambient artifacts and low-rez mic. This was taken with the dynamic just laying on my rack setup, not the condenser on a stand. The latter stays in its moisture-controlled container unless I’m actually recording.

Indiana Fields, 1943 – MP3 – 192kBps – 5.5MB – 4:00 min.

Ok – finally got something recorded that I can stand to listen to. This was the best single take of Those Who Wait I could throw down this morning. Not as dynamic as usual, but then I’m playing “sound engineer” while performing, so it may take some time to minimize that distraction. One step at a time…

Those Who Wait (Tommy Emmanuel) – MP3 – 256kBps -10.2MB

Those Who Wait (Tommy Emmanuel) – MP3 – 128kBPs – 5.4MB

Setup:
Larrivée OM-09E -> Rode NT-1 Condenser Mic -> M-Audio AudioBuddy Preamp -> Tascam 1804 -> SONAR 6

Mix:
96kHz x 24bit Stereo Track -> Compressor* -> Reverb* -> Eq* -> Export to 44.1kHz x 16bit WAV -> MP3**
* All Cakewalk effects
** Used AudioGrabber for conversion from WAV to MP3.

Feedback appreciated.

I started this some days back but got distracted with the return on the ’52 Telecaster and then other stuff that’s come up since (still waiting for the B-Bender, by the way – that’s fodder for another post, once I actually have it in my hot little paws). Unfortunately, because it’s now all set up and I really don’t want to go back and start over, this follow-up is going to be somewhat abbreviated from what I had in mind, which was a step-by-step on getting from installation to a clean, direct-input guitar recording. Hopefully this will be helpful to some, though.

SONAR – even my old 2.2 version – was pretty smart about connecting to this unit. Once the drivers were installed, everything just kind of appeared where it needed to be, as I would have hoped. Of course that didn’t mean I could get the thing to record without some work. Here’s what I ended up with. It will at least get you on the air, but I make no claims that this is optimized – or even ultimately correct for all purposes.

SONAR Settings

Power up the 1804 and then start SONAR. The order is important because SONAR detects what’s available when it starts up. Confused hardware drivers can cause BSODs and I prefer not to see those any more than necessary. So if I start SONAR and realize I forgot to kick on the 1804, I’ll shut SONAR down first, then turn on the AI. Call me a namby-pamby. It’s just how I roll.

That done, select Options / Audio… from the main menu. On the Advanced tab, locate the Driver/Mode drop-down list and select WDM/KS to use the WDM drivers you installed with the FW-1804. SONAR may tell you you’ll have to restart the program when you do this. If so, do it, then get back to the Audio Options dialog. Note – you may run into an issue here if your sound card doesn’t support WDM. Most newer ones do. This is just a heads up. I’m not sure of the implications if you have an older card but want to use WDM.

Next, go to the General tab (Advanced in SONAR 2, IIRC) and locate the Wave Profiler button. Click that to profile the new hardware and verify all goes well, meaning no errors. The profiler will assess the AI and any soundcard(s) you have installed.

Going through the tabs on the Audio Options dialog, here’s the settings I’m currently using (these are working).

General Tab – I changed the Audio Driver Bit Depth from 16 to 24, on Rich the Tweak’s recommendation that this increases dynamic range and eliminates the need for compression during recording. I don’t have a standalone compressor, so this seemed like a good idea. I set the Sampling Rate to 44100 (this has to match the FW-1804 Control Panel setting – see below). I also had to spend quite a bit of time getting the Mixing Latency settings correct, and it’s something you’ll probably have to experiment with because the settings will interact with those on the 1804′s Control Panel (again, see below). With these settings, you’ll definitely experience a bit of a delay if you’re monitoring using your computer’s sound card output, so monitor using the output(s) provided on the 1804. I found the headphone output on the unit’s front panel to work just fine for this, and the ability to switch between monitoring the unit’s Inputs, the Computer or Both was definitely a boon.

Advanced Tab – Don’t think I changed anything on this one, other than the Driver Mode setting. If your settings are still at the default, you can check me on this below.

Drivers Tab – Enable what you need, disable what you don’t. They’re in pairs, so my settings are shown below, since I’m going to be recording from the audio interface’s inputs 1, 4, 5/6 and 8, as follows:

• 1 -Microphone: vocals, cello, acoustic guitars, amps, etc.
• 4 – Guitar direct-in: for use with Effects Inserts
• 5/6 – JV-1080: left/right Mix Output, respectively
• 8 – Guitar direct-in: this is the one on the front of the unit, designed for Guitars but with no Effect Insert jack

Driver Profiles – these are as set by the Wave Profiler, and I haven’t changed them, so no screenshot for these. Tweak at your own risk here. Get familiar with the manual(s) first though.

FW-1804 Control Panel

When you install the Tascam software, it places a TASCAM FW-1804 applet in your list of XP control panel widgets. I copied this to the desktop as a standard shortcut for easy access. When you run (double-click) this, you see the AI’s control panel application. The screenshot below shows my current settings, not the defaults.

When you check Compensate for Converter Delays (WDM), you get the following pop-up message:

At this point I of course went back to SONAR and set the Buffers in Playback Queue (General Tab) to 3. Aside from this, as I mentioned previously, the Sample Rate naturally has to match what you’ve set in SONAR. Beyond this, the most time-consuming effort was getting the Audio Latency setting correct. The optimum setting here changes depending on a combination of the Sample Rate (in both SONAR and the FW) and the Buffer Size setting (General Tab) in SONAR, which I currently have set to 90mS. I adjusted this by monitoring SONAR‘s output and/or playing back recordings and trying different settings each time. This was the first setting that worked. I tried a few others unsuccessfully, and went back to this (128). Don’t know what units this setting is in, but since it’s labeled “latency” I’m guessing milliseconds.

The other optional step you can take is to enable “Quick Start” for the FW inputs and outputs you plan to use. I’ll be using input 4 rarely, so I enabled the others to match the list above.

Recording and Monitoring

With these basic settings, I’m able to set a SONAR track’s Input to a given FW input and monitor with no latency through the Headphones jack on the FW’s front panel while recording. To monitor tracks I’ve already recorded I set the track’s output to “FW1804 Analog 1:2″ or to a bus that’s going out to same (set the FW Monitor button to Computer or Both for this). During recording, the JV-1080 synth output is monitored directly through the FW via the Headphones (set the Monitor button to Inputs or Both for this).

For playback monitoring, right now I don’t have standalone monitor speakers, so I simply have the FW’s monitor output connected to the Line In on my soundcard. It’s functional, but I wouldn’t use that for a professional mix. (UPDATE: since modified – I now take the 1804′s outputs and patch them directly to the input on my self-powered computer speaker system. No studio-quality monitors yet, but at least now I have the soundcard out of the loop. It does sound noticeably better, even with this older speaker system, as I’m using the 1804′s D/A converters, not the soundcard’s.)

For direct-input guitar recording, I got a pretty decent sound with the following settings:

• Input 4 – FW Trim @ 4:00; SONAR Trim @ +9dB / Volume @ -9dB
• Input 8 – FW Trim @ 12:05 (just before jump in gain); SONAR Trim @ +9dB, Volume @ -9dB

Initial recordings I did were with the ’52 Telecaster, with its single-wound (noisy) coils. I was able to get the hum level down to where I could easily strip it off later with compression / gating. The hum was more noticeable on input 8 than input 4, which I’m sure is due to the differences in impedance. Later recordings with my Paul II (dual humbuckers) were almost completely hum-free, as one might expect.

Next experiments will be mic’ing the 12-string and cello. Right now I only have the one low-rent dynamic mic to work with, so it’ll probably take some ingenuity to get a clear sound on those. At some point we’ll get a condenser, so this is just learning at this point.

Hope this is helpful.

The move went fairly smoothly yesterday, and the exercise was a good point to clean up a lot of the cruft that has been accumulating behind my desk here over the years. I ended up replacing some long, bundled CAT-5 cables with shorter ones, removed some of the tangle… that sort of thing. Plus, I had an HP LaserJet IIIP sitting on the ‘top rack’ above my monitor (I have an old O’Sullivan Corner Cockpit) that has slowly quit feeding paper over the last couple years (the rollers are just worn out). It’s now history and allofasudden I have LOTS of room to put a growing stack of books on my reading list, plus other stuff. I was toying with the idea of stacking the Tascam and JV up there, but (1) the FireWire cable I have wouldn’t have reached and (2) it would have been virtually impossible to get at the back of either unit to change patches, etc.

I can’t imagine one of today’s HP printers lasting 15 years anymore. Of course they’re about 1/5-to-1/10th the price for what you get in terms of functionality these days. At over 15 years old, I figured I’ve gotten my use out of this one and decided not to take it in again for a repair, which would only be its second. It’s functional, though, so I’ll likely drop it off at the local tech school and let them fiddle with it. Truth be told, I probably have 5 or 6 old computers I should bring along as well. They’re just taking up space. Kind of amazing how many computers I’ve (we’ve) gone through in 17 years living here. I count …

1. Arche Rival 286 Desktop
2. Gateway Desktop #1
3. Gateway Desktop #2
4. Homebuilt (from parts) Tower – Windows
5. Homebuilt (from parts) Tower – Overclocking experiment / Linux
6. Dell Desktop (purchased when I left Meca) – Linux
7. Dell Latitude CPxJ Laptop
8. ABS PC Desktop #1
9. ABS PC Desktop #2 (current -mine)
10. Dell Inspiron 9400 Laptop (current -Patty’s)

Scary. I wouldn’t even want to count up all the CRTs and peripheral crap stuffed in drawers, chests, corners, closets, attic, boxes, basement, crawlspace, etc. The Linux boxes still fire up, as well as a few of the others. None of them older than the CPxJ will run XP or the more recent versions of the various Linux GUI desktops, however. Probably time to take the hard drives out of those and just donate them someplace. If I didn’t throw it out, I may also actually have an old Atari 520 ST (w/upgrade to a full megabyte of RAM!!!) in a box somewhere in the attic. I’m pretty sure I sold my Atari 800. The Arche was the first “IBM Compatible” I ever bought. These days I sometimes almost wish I’d taken the Mac route. Still could, I suppose.

SONAR‘s now updated to Producer ver. 6.2.1. Nice installer. Doesn’t require uninstall or overwrite of your older version (this is discouraged in their Read This First sheet, actually), which still functions fine as far as I can tell. Also does you the favor of tracking down and copying over your previous version preferences and INS settings. This was particularly appreciated, as it’s not a trivial task to get the JV-1080′s INS files installed and set up so that SONAR can make sense of them.

I loaded up the Wannabe Life project, saved it as a new copy (be sure to do this if you ever want to open the original in a pre-6 version of SONAR), moved a few of the outputs around and – after recovering from my initial confusion about the “new” MIDI latency coming out of the sound card (introduced by the Tascam), plugged a set of headphones in (to the FW-1804 monitor) and things sound great! So of course now I’m thinking about a pair of active studio monitors. Since I can simply send the 1804′s analog output to the Audigy card’s Line In, for the moment monitors aren’t really a priority. Although I have a feeling the sound difference is going to be pretty serious, as the 2.1 sound system I’m using came along for the ride with that first Gateway desktop you see up there. I’ll definitely get a pair before trying to actually “master” anything. For now, this works just fine.

Oh, and I’ve decided on Fender’s American Nashville B-Bender Telecaster.

Marking time here.

Part two of the Tascam adventure will need to wait a few. I really wanted to redo/document the steps I used to get a clear, low-noise, direct-input, simple guitar recording, but part of what I was doing was to get the difference in tone ‘on tape’ and the pickup switch transient finally just pissed me off. So the Telecaster is on its way back due to the electrical problem. I really couldn’t see spending the time and effort to ship or bring the thing in for a warranty repair after having spent that much on what should have been an excellent git, out-of-the-box. I know, Fender quality isn’t the greatest. At this point I’m willing to accept that sometimes getting the right instrument requires a few tries – or spending lots of time (which I don’t have) playing multiple guitars in lots of stores.

Hopefully the Paul II will be back from the shop soon – it’s having it’s first mechanical tuneup/setup (after well over 10 years, it deserved some love) – and I can continue the process with that while considering the next move on acquiring a nice Telecaster.

After having seen what was done (by Fender) with the Vintage ’52, I have to say that, ultimately, I wasn’t very impressed – except maybe with the remarkable tweed case! Anyway, I think I’m leaning back to my original plan, which was the American Series Telecaster – Natural Body / Maple Neck model (0118400721), although I’ll definitely be putting a single-ply black pickguard on it. The white just doesn’t quite cut it, IMHO. The hitch at this point – and this is something that’s been in the back of my mind all along, ‘cuz I’ve toyed with the idea of getting one since I first saw a Bender back in the ’70s – is whether or not to choose the Nashville B-Bender. The options are to get a nice, basic model – like the American Series – and have it refitted later by The Man (Gene Parsons), or get the factory-installed Nashville model straight from Fender.

The former choice is quite a bit more pricey, but in the long run probably a better way to go in terms of quality and – though it’s not really a consideration at this point – resale value later on, having been installed by the Master. The question is whether or not the difference in quality will be noticed by a relatively mediocre player like myself. Also the Nashville Telecaster Fender ships with their factory installed Bender seems much more versatile, tone-wise, than the simpler American Series model that I’d probably have refitted: extra pickup, 5 tone combinations instead of 2-1/2. Most importantly, those combinations include the ‘standard’ Tele’ pickup selectors, so it would seem you get classic Tele’ sound plus others as well. Maybe one of the local shops has one to try out. Downside: it only comes in black and 3-color sunburst, no natural. Upside: black is my second color choice (with a single-ply, black replacement pickguard, of course).

On the writing front, I’ve gotten the chorus, bridge(s) and the bulk of the first couple verses put together for a rewrite of Hard Road Down – something I started and actually finished quite a few years ago, but was never totally satisfied with. I have always felt it had the potential to be a ‘great’ tune, but lacks in the area of compelling lyrics. They’re just so-so, IMHO. Workin’ on that, and now I have motivation and inspiration in the form of the stuff needed to do a “full-band” recording for it, complete with a cello/guitar duet instrumental section I’ve been noodling on. Most likely it’ll be me playing everything, so it’ll stay pretty simple, but the important thing is to finish it, for the sake of finishing it, and get it down for posteriority.

Recording-wise, back when I got to This Page in Rich the Tweak’s awesome Guide, I took him up on the challenge there and actually started putting down the basic drum/bass tracks for Wannabe Life, another tune that’s only ever been heard by the demons in my head. When they’re listening. Which isn’t often. There are some nice vocal “Doos” in the Vocal expansion I have in the JV-1080, so I put down some (super)scratch vocals just to hear what the harmony might sound like with a little pseudo-B3 along for the ride. Here’s 30 seconds’ worth – everything centered, no mix, no effects. Progress on this has been interrupted by EDLI (every-day life issues), but things are settling a bit, and so once things are hooked together tomorrow, I can get back to it.

So, tomorrow is a minor Moving Day. The JV – which right now is kind of neatly buried in my corner cockpit desk here – will get a new home over there underneath the Tascam so I can use short cables to connect them. After that, install SONAR 6, which arrived this week, and get back to tweaking!

The Tascam FW-1804 Audio Interface has mixed reviews here and there. What originally drew my attention to this unit, frankly, were threads like this one and Rich the Tweak’s comment here:

One of the best deals, if not the best deal, for a Mixerless rig in terms of bang for the buck.

For my setup, he’s right. And I spent a lot of time reading, learning, thinking and looking over specs, etc., to come to this conclusion. The only other contender, for my needs and budget, was the Presonus Firebox. That probably would have been fine, but it didn’t have effects insert send/returns. Plus ideally, I’d like to have four inputs just for the Roland JV-1080 (Dry L/R and EFX L/R), although 2 will suffice (MIX L/R). So, for an additional $30, the 1804 lets me experiment and has expandability for later. I wasn’t too-too concerned about preamp hyper-quality. When we get there I’ll get an actual preamp that does nothing else. In the meantime, it’ll be a long time before I need anything more, so I decided this was the best deal for my needs.

Some folks have actually taken to replacing “Tascam” with “Trashcan” (some with domains like gearslutz.com… erm…). I’d seen all this stuff before purchasing and although it sounded like a few had genuine beefs with reliability or Tascam support, quite frankly, many of the negative reviews were so inarticulate in terms of the real problem that I wrote them off to simply being unwilling to read the manual, etc. “WORTHLESS PIECE OF CRAP!! I COULDN’T GET IT WORKING!!!” doesn’t do much to describe the actual problem. At least not a problem with the gear.

I see this daily in my Tech Support position, though I’m thankfully no longer responsible for coming up with diplomatic responses to such screeds. Remember: the customer is always “right”, even when they’re blatantly, inexcusably wrong. It’s usually easy to identify the people who install a piece of complex software – one that’s designed to simplify the use of a complex standard (in this case, WS-BPEL 2.0), which is in turn based on a bunch of other complex standards – and who dive right in with no training, none of the peripheral or prerequisite knowledge and no time spent reading the thousands of pages of documentation, tutorials and examples we created to support it.

The questions these kinds of folks post to the support forum tend to be rants rather than real questions, and they sometimes even get indignant if you suggest training, reading the manual, going through the painstakingly constructed tutorial (at least once, fer crissakes!) or simply checking the text of the standard to resolve their confusion. They seem to want to be able to jump right in to using it with no real investment in time. I see this most frequently with college students working on “theses” and other school projects. Most of these folks, basically, want YOU to resolve their issue (i.e., do their homework for them).

Seems like many users of Audio Interfaces (in general) fall into this category, i.e., they see a CD, an interface unit and one cable going into the computer, and they think “Huh. Just like a USB external drive!” Uhm… no. Sorry, you can’t simply plug one of these into your SONAR-equipped computer, stick a guitar into the “Guitar” input, turn the Trim up to +40dB, open your mouth, throw back your head and start recording that last wailing track of Black Star. It simply won’t work. No doubt at least one or two (ok, probably more) of the neg reviews on the Tascam (and others!) resulted from exactly that sort of scenario. As it turns out, one needs to work at it to get any sort of sound at all… let alone something acceptable. In my case this took a few hours of reading, installing, tweaking, reading, thinking, rewiring, tweaking and then some more tweaking.

Here’s the basic sequence I used, including some of the wrong turns, to get what is (so far) a very nice electric guitar sound recorded on a track in SONAR using direct input – with and without a distortion box. I’m using Windows XP SP2 and SONAR 2.2 (yeah, I’ve heard a million times that it’s old – bite me – 6 is on the way). Be sure to follow directions specific to your system if you’re using Vista (god help you) or a Mac (lucky bastid). These may seem a tad too meticulous, but I’ve learned not to trust anything anymore – especially when it’s manufactured in certain parts of the world (anyone had a pet made ill or killed by supposedly “safe” pet food in the past year? ’nuff said), which most stuff is these days.

Read Everything First, THEN Start Tweaking

• Whatever documentation you get with your unit, read it all before you install any software or take the twist-ties off any of the cables.
  • Tascam has entered the 21st Century, and graciously makes these available as PDFs at their site. You can get copies for the Tascam FW-1804 here:
    • Owner’s Manual
    • Setup Guide
    • Applications Guide

• Get a soda (or a pop), go back, and re-read the parts you didn’t understand the first time.
• Make sure all the A/C adapters, parts, cables and CDs are there. There’s typically a list (with pictures) in the Owner’s Manual.
• Unpack the A/C adapter. Plug it into wall outlet. Verify that it doesn’t blow a circuit breaker.
• Unpack the main unit and connect it to the A/C adapter. Turn on the power. Verify that the lights stay lit. Punch the buttons, watch the lights change.
• Plug a microphone into one of the inputs (or a guitar into Input 8, which has a duplicate input marked “Guitar” on the front panel) and plug a set of headphones into the Phones jack. Verify that you can hear sound in the headphones when you speak/play.
• Power the unit off.

Software Drivers for the new Hardware

Dealing with hardware drivers in Windows (any flavor) is always “fun”. I’ve already gotten at least one BSOD since installing this unit. Though it occurred just after a SONAR crash during a “Remove Silence” command, it was while the unit was connected and powered up. If it had anything to do with the Tascam drivers, I would guess that it was because the hardware wasn’t gracefully informed that the client application (SONAR) was no longer there, and cacked the system trying to interrupt a nonexistent process (i.e., the error message was the standard IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL, or however Micro$oft spells it – “IRQ” stands for Interrupt ReQuest). BSODs are a part of using software that gives your computer a workout. Hopefully SONAR 6 will be better behaved.

• Create a Windows XP System Restore Point in case you need to back out any driver changes. Never done this? Time to go read/learn about it.
• Determine which FireWire inputs to use. If you’re like me, you’ll probably have at least two: one on the motherboard and one on your sound card. Follow the instructions in the Setup Guide and locate your FireWire interfaces using the Device Manager. Don’t have any? Well, you probably should have checked before you bought the unit, huh? Sorry. Time to shop for a sound card with a FireWire port.
  • Here, I decided to use the one on the motherboard and disabled the one on the sound card. Why? My theory is to remove latency whenever and wherever it can occur. In this case, why have the data go through the PCI bus, through the circuitry on the sound card and out the FireWire port (and back!) when I can have it go to/from the FireWire port connected (almost) directly to the CPU? Couldn’t think of a reason, so I’m using the mobo port. Since I won’t be using the sound card’s, I disabled it to free up any resources that might have been allocated to it.
  • To determine which FW port was which, I looked at the Properties for each and disabled the one whose Location was PCI Slot 4. Your mileage may vary.

  

  • Note: I didn’t say plug the 1804 in yet.

• Install the driver software.
  • In the 1804′s case, they instruct you to install the drivers BEFORE hooking up the unit. Be sure to do this.
• The install program will probably suggest that you reboot. Do it.
  • I’ve had mixed combinations of success and BSODs (failures on reboot) when I allow the installer to reboot my system. Interestingly enough, this happens most often with Micro$oft’s Update Manager, which is not really a surprise. So I’ve gotten in the habit of responding “No, reboot later” to this sort of dialog and then immediately powering the system down (using Start / Turn off the Computer), then back up. This makes sure EVERYthing gets power-cycled, and when you’re installing hardware drivers and enabling/disabling things, this will often make a difference. For me, it’s just a habit now.

• Once the computer system is powered back up, check to make sure everything still works okay. Run WoW, Tomb Raider, SONAR – whatever gives your system hardware a workout, just to make sure there was no conflict with the driver installation.
• Power down the computer and the 1804.
• Locate the physical FireWire port on the computer and connect it to FireWire #1 on the back of the 1804 using the cable provided.
• Power up the computer and get back to the desktop.
• Power up the 1804. In a moment, you should see the standard XP dialogs coming up, telling you how excited they are that they just found new hardware and can’t wait to install drivers for it. Follow the steps in the Setup guide, as written.
  • When I did this, the installer actually went through discovering two sets of hardware and installing two sets of drivers. The Setup Guide isn’t specific about this and, again, your mileage may vary. I believe one set was for the 1804 FireWire control interface and the other was for the WDM/ASIO/etc. sound drivers. I answered ‘Yes’ whenever the dialogs asked if they could install a driver “automatically”. This worked for me.

• Everything OK? Okay, power your computer down, then back up, one more time. Check to make sure everything that used to work, still works.

Next time: Connecting to SONAR