Category: Music

I remember when I started playing guitar, that was 200x… wait, was it 1999? 🙁 :old-man-yelling-at-cloud:…(nevermind the year, that’s not important)…I had no idea what pedals or had any interest in them, mastering a barred chord was actually the goal and the dream.

A few years later, my brother got a Zoom 505II (At this point I actually went into a 15 minutes sidequest to try to find one to buy) and that was THE pedal to have and love, it had it all. It is a multi-effect with a great range:

If you’re 15 and just discovered what an electric guitar and distortion can sound like, yeah, this was heaven. To be honest, more than 20 years after, I do not even remember how it sounds, but it might have marked me more than what I remember.

In April 2020 (The dark times [COVID]) I decided to get a pedal that had been in my head for the past few months, it was around 450€, but who cares? We were all going to die anyway. That’s how I ended up with the Empress Zoia, very similar to the Zoom 505 II if you think about it.

It’s this rectangle that can do basically anything. Do you remember the ‘You wouldn’t steal a car’ commercials? Well, this let’s you “download” pedals/effects created by others. If downloading a pedal is a crime then … you can’t prove that I’ve done it!

It has a firmware that can be updated, modular construction of patches and collaboration. This is a programmer’s dream…Although, I must recognize that I usually do not create my own patches, I mostly have modified other’s to my needs.

In the patch storage you can find recreations of existing pedals and unique creations. The Zoia shines when we are talking about creating textures, it is one of the reasons I wanted it, that’s my go-to type of composition.

It can process audio and also be used as a synth and be controlled with external MIDI and/or send MIDI to a different device. It’s really a Swiss army knife.

Apart from the Zoia, I had no other remarkable pedal, maybe the Big Muff Pi but honestly I had never liked how it sounded on my recordings. I was actually missing a bit part of every guitarist sound, a great tube amp.

Problem: I live in a small apartment. My neighbors would hate me if I cranked a tube amp.

Solution: The Simplifier X

This thing is powerful. It can take a weak line signal and transform it simulating a Marshall, AC Vox or Fender amp. Is it the same as a tube amp? Not sure if I would call it the same but it is possible that most people would not be able to tell the difference, it is that good.

Yeah, of course it is not a Kemper, it is not a Quad Cortex either, but it costs 1/3 of the price, so definitely not a bad deal.

If I had to go to war with a Zoia and the Simplifier X, I’d be happy. Or at least, I’d have a great sound.

Back when I was studying music I almost never used a DAW. Most of my time was spent editing sheets in Finale or handwriting music.

For a few projects I had to use Digital Performer (which at the time was..bad, not the re-vamped version there is now) and had a few courses for which I used Pro Tools.

When I started recording my own music, whether it was with VSTs or using real instruments, I looked at Pro Tools again and quickly went away from it. The interface was dated, the resource management was just awful and it is too damn expensive. I am not saying it is not good, probably I was the one that could not make it work and not that it has no value.

Then I gave the chance to Logic. First thing that I noticed is that using the same machine I could create projects that were larger to anything I had achieved with Pro Tools. Automations and managing plugins is fairly simple and straightforward (hey, just what I need for my small attention span). The UI is easy to follow, like everything Apple does.

The only thing I can see missing is a bit of ‘Project version control’, maybe it is just the coder in my that would like to save automations, takes, etc, and switch between version from a single click. I know folders/stacks exists but I don’t think it takes care of everything.

Music for film has always been my dream.

From what I have been told Cubase is a mix of Pro Tools and Logic and Finale/Sibelius. Could something be so awesome and true? There must be a catch.

A few of the features that caught my eye were mostly related to how Cubase manages beats (beat estimation? beatguesstimation? guessbeatation? All pending ™) which is very useful when working with hits/actions for a video/film and how you can also reference the sheet effectively, not like the sloppy the Logic editor.

So, is Cubase the answer to all of my problems? The Pro 14 version is 579€, far from the cheap 230€ for Logic. Since I am not really working in music production I cannot justify spending that much money in software given that I already have a good working solution. But, yeah, I can complain and dream…