Hi folks,

You helped me a lot with your answers on this forum, maybe I can give something back to you:

Bear in mind that a) I am a guitarist, my kb skills are bad b) I am talking about song composing rather than Live arrarnger gigging as most of you will surely do c) my English is a little limited.

I came from the midjay/psr and the motif es6 side and wanted to speed up things and make them simpler (beware the mo!). hat is more I wanted a system that weighs a lot less than pa1x I had the pleasure to lug around…

I sold all my gear (motif, midjay, dr 880 etc.) in favour of a new tiny laptop (acer travelmate 12” monitor 1200 x 800, 1,73 ghz mobile pentium centrino) which would serve as my portable “studio”. Anyone going this route should be prepared to accept that computer gear will always lose its value a lot – and I mean a lot! – faster than any music hardware will. Along with that goes an external usb-powered edirol soundcard (Midi and i/o) and very small portable usb-powered external logitech speakers – the only ones I found that can deliver something called sound.

I demoed a lot of stuff with different combinations on different laptops form fellow musicians:

Vst Hosts/sequencers: tracktion 2, phrazor, energyxt, plogue bidule, cakewalk project5, the seq. of pg music etc.

Virtual synths/romplers: hypersonic 2, bandstand, ezdrummer, groove agent, plugsound etc.

Midi creation: BIAB, omb, live-styler

Midi creation guitar to midi: guitarsynth and a few others which are all simply unusable

Virtual guitar amps: tubeamp, guitar rig, rock amp legends, guitarsuite (freeware)

Asios: steinbergs asios, edirol, asio4all

Virual midicables: midiyoke, maple midi

Controller: any 3 ocatve KB will do ;-) for a guitarist.

My findings:
1.) Believe it or not: It will take you easily 3 months of continuous trying until you settle for your “personal studio” – I guess 6 months is more realistic until you sorted out all quirks and misbehavings of your pc/laptop system.
2.) You will eventually listen to sounds that will blow the doors of of top arranger/workstation systems. Why not as software takes a multiple amount of sound GBs to rival hardware! If you want to you will have to spend around 1500 bucks for a laptop + external soundcard, another 1500 bucks for software (seq., rompler, vst host, vst efx, etc.). This will give you a way more flexible system, but do not expect to save money really as a decent controller keyboard is not yet included.
3.) You will be Sir tweak-a-lot, no way to avoid it. Single sounds may sound fantastic but the overall mix is a different story. An arranger keybord/workstations sounds might not be headturners opposed to a laptop setup, still it is very difficult to put sounds together to a consistent mix. I guess people with less experience will go through a big learning curve until they can achieve a fine mix of – say – a workstation like the motif es6 – even if single sounds can not compete with a software rompler.

One of my favourite setups for my laptop system is/was:

BIAB (some styles sound more musical to my ear than the psr league. Still a terribly cluttered GUI and a lack of contemporary styles, jazz is fine though.)
+
TRACKTION 2 (hands down the best and easiest sequencer interface, all in one window, but: no multiple track recording possible – you have to settle this with something like plogue bidule or a software midisplitter tool a nice guy of the tracktion forum coded for me)
+
Hypersponic 2 (very easy to handel and cpu friendly, better than bandstand because more sounds and longer loading times, sometimes bandstand can sound a little softer than HS which is a good thing, still not versatile enough)
+
Ezdrummer (way better drumsounds than groove agent no matter if they used analogue tape machines and stuff, but ezd has terrible loading times and eats up 260 MB of RAM with only a few kits – still this adds to a very convincing natural sound)
+
rock amp legends (less cpu power needed than for guitar rig, besides the amps do not drown in efx and give you quite realistic and dynamic tube sounds)
+
Everything tied together with maple midi (not midiyoke as midi yoke had troubles with a few vsts)

So what?
I guess for the time being I will stay with my laptop setup and buy the things I haven´t yet. I am very much in favour of the flexibility this setup offers to me – and the potential sound quality. Sometimes I was not far from letting go the whole story, but I guess I crossed the bridge already. Which cannot be said of my laptop which turned out to have a motherboard damage – okay – these things can happen. Seems like I can go back to make real music after my laptop is repaired and everything reinstalled and so on and so on… Give me a call when a 3 octave arranger keyboard with several vsts included, arp and stuff is to be released – it should not excel 7 kgs though!

Feel free to ask if you have questions.

Best regards

Heinrich

Hello Heinrich,
It all sounds very interesting. How about for strictly live performance? I currently play midi accordion and/or a PA60 with a Master MK4 controller and/or Korg i40m module w/hard drive (I’m in the process of selling my PA1XPRO-super board-just too heavy to lug on gigs). What kind of lap top set-up do you think would be feasible using the midi accordion and/or the PA60/MK4 combination as controllers? Presently, I use anywhere from 30% to 80% midi files depending on the gig. I use Band in a Box files that are edited with Power Tracks as well as many others that I sequenced, purchased or downloaded from the web. Are there programs that will allow you to play “live” arrangements with a controller? I’ve seen a lot of musicians using a lap top, but usually with midi or mp3 accompaniment, I’ve never seen anyone use it as an arranger “live”. Is it really possible?
Ciao,
Jerry

Heinrich,.

Enjoyed your story and you are right about the soft synths, the quality is amazing!

EZ Drummer soumds very interesting, I'll check it out.

Jerry, live soft-synth/soft arranger setups are not only possible but there are a few SZ member who use them regularly. I use this type of system live but instead of a laptop mine is loaded on the Lionstracs Mediastation(linux based). It works very well.

Good Luck with whichever method you try

Richard

Hi Heinrich,
great to hear you got yourself all set up.
Must admit I've become a bit of a BIAB fan , also, though I'm using mine with soundfonts.
Nigel's also given us our own software arranger & softsynth forum.

best wishes
Rikki
[QUOTE]Originally posted by Heinrich:
[B]Hi folks,