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Re: acid



At 05:05 AM 1/5/99 -0800, you wrote:
>Fellow Loopers,
>
>Do any of you use the acid software?  How do you like it?
>Dan

I like it a great deal. I got Acid Music and Acid DJ from
Best Buy for about $110. You need the Acid Music to get the 
unlimited tracks. DJ has more interesting techno wave files
than Music though. It has Acid Jazz, Dance, Industrial, and
House (I've been told by some techno enthusiasts that the
house waves not truly house style sounds, but I don't know).

I've had a lot of fun with it so far, but after making 6
songs, I've been trying to find ways to make some of the
loops fit better and sound less repetitive. It sounds good
to have some repetition for a while in a song but you have
to change it more often so you can keep the listener paying
attention to the work (IMHO anyway). 

I've made my own waves as well as taken a lot of free ones
off the web to play with (check www.loopmagazine.com for 
3 links to web pages that have free sample libraries). Some
problems I've encountered are getting the bpm adjusted properly,
getting a 4/4 measure out of the loop, and making sure the
loop begins and ends such that it sounds continuous.

What I am having problems with using Acid is trying to whip
up a drum n' bass tune. Most of the drum n' bass CD's I listen
to have several different variations of a similar drum beat.
You can't just lay down one drum loop from the DJ cd and then 
lay down another one at another point, you have to have fills and
the drum n' bass beat has a certain feel to it that cancels
out a lot of the beats on the cd.

Obviously this can't be done with Acid alone (at least not for me,
the novice). So I've been using this drum machine to generate a 
break-beat loop, and then make several changes to it as the tune 
grooves, attempting to give it the energy that a drum n' bass song
needs. You also need to get some good ambient and wah effect loops, 
as well as some interesting bass melodies. I've had problems finding
ambient loops on the web (but I hear it's trivial to make your own.
I even made a few with the qy90).

And still there are problems! I have a Yamaha qy90 and it just
doesn't have enough drums in it to do the deed! Argh.  I also have a Roland
SH-101 I'm using for some heavy bass and to make some noise. I
also have a guitar, 4-track recorder, digitech effects processor,
and a wah peddle, which should come in handy, since I could feed a 
loop from the sound card, through the wah peddle, to a 4-track 
recorder and then play the wahhed loop off the 4-track back into the
sound card. A lot of trouble, but I gotsta have that drum n' bass
feel...

I guess what I really need is an easy to use drum machine that's
also cheap. It's weird, ever since I jumped into this hobby I 
always want to buy more gear...argh...

Anybody have any advice for my troubles?

Thanks,
JM