Am back to music full-time until school re-opens! Am working on a couple of musicals (arrangements) as well as awaiting the arrival of the first episode of Milly, Molly Season 2.

Here's a modified setup of my workstation: I'm using a desktop for my music needs, which is much more powerful than my laptop. I can easily run a couple of programmes simultaneously on the desktop without causing any of the active softwares to hang. In the picture you can see that I am able to run Acrobat Reader at the same time as Reason, hence eliminating the need to make printouts when I have to reference sheet music whilst doing arrangements (saves some trees!)

The desktop does not have Internet connection (I intended not to do so), so I have to transfer files via thumb drive. My 2.5-year-old laptop thus serves as the portal to the world. I have to do a virus scan on the thumb drive before I take it to the desktop - the desktop does not have anti-virus software installed on it because it's absolutely useless when it can't be updated regularly since it is not connected to the Internet. Troublesome, but I've gotten by it.



Above: me working on the Beatles' 'Hard Day's Night' for Calvary Assembly of God's Christmas musical The Greatest Love Story Every Told. Yes, I'm still using Reason 3! I refuse to use Reason 4 as of yet because the sequencer's interface is massively different and I can't get used to it. So no go for work, can't spend time pulling hair trying to find this function, figure that button and suddenly realising that I've just wiped out an entire chunk of what I've just played!



Dang! My pitch bend malfunctions! If I do not tape it up, the pitch will go off by itself. So I'm really getting atonal music :P. I have to use the mouse to drive the pitch bend from the software. It's happened since The Tooth Fairy, I just need to replace the tape once in a while, the tell-tale sign appears when the pitch bend begins to run amok once again.


Audio hardware:
1. Digidesign MBox 2 audio interface
2. M-Audio Keystation 61ES MIDI controller
3. Yamaha MSP5 active monitor speakers

Audio software:
1. Sibelius 2.0 (music notation software)
2. Reason 3.0 (music programming software, using software-based samples)
3. Pro Tools LE 7.3 (audio tracking and recording software)
4. Cool Edit Pro 2.0 (audio tracking and recording software)