Otis Wilkes Sr's Page

Moin, Otis,

great, this will be a great pleasure for me.

The basic thing I decided to use here - to enable my worldwide musical interaction - is simply stripping down my own productions (the ones you already have found in my page player) to single tracks - either one track for each instrument or in some cases one track for a group of instruments.

To make those tracks available to everyone I simply convert them to mp3 (my DAW software has direct support for single track mp3 export) and load them up - as discussion group attachments - to the Sawubona group "Musicians Wanted!" I have cited before. If you want to go there from your page, click "Groups" in the navigator above, and look for the group name there.

If you then download the mp3 tracks, they can be recombined in any music (or even video) software that features multiple tracks for editing (like Logic, Cubase, Cakewalk, Samplitude etc.). All of my tracks will start at the zero time marking, so it should be trivial to get them in sync.

Against the theory, I nomally export the tracks not fully dry (i.e. w/o effects). I tend to leave out the group and master effects, and in most cases I keep the tracks effects, esp. if they are used to define the sound, e.g. the guitar distortion, the delays etc...

If you don't have the possibility of multi tracking, then we should talk about what you want to do, and what you'll need.
I could easily make any kind of karaoke-like tracks, i.e. bring up a mix that contains all instruments except the one you desire to perform. Then this special mix could be played on any player (WAV, mp3, CD....), while you are recording the result of your instrument (exclusively, i.e. without the original mix). I then could remix it all with your additional track.

On demo production level, this way has proven to provide sufficient quality and comfort - lust lately I made a remix on Andreas "Soweto" song, who had also given me all of his single tracks for it, and I had no difficulites in setting it all up in my DAW sw.

Don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions or demands!

:+) Carsten (+:

Moin, Otis,

how about getting our technology home park to work a bit?

If you like to bring in your unique guitar sound, you are invited by heart to join any of my songs.

For a quick start, I could recommend "Back of the Bus" and "Monica". Both are already available in single downloadable instrument tracks at the Musicians Wanted, and for the latter I'm seeking to employ another singer at the moment.

"Are you ready for the change?"

:+) Carsten (+:

...yeah, that's what I did, their videos appear to be hosted by Youtube, and I even noticed it's available here in Germany - though I've never noticed them before :-) But since there's not many hardware tone generators / Midi sequencers on the market at this time, I'm sure they will find their admirers.

Just this summer, I spent my incentives on a replacement of that 20 year old SY77 - which is still operative, yet the 61 keys start showng clear signs to fail precise velocity action - no need to argue after 20 years of music dungeon grease. I got an S90ES of the same corp., which was ideal for my actual specs: Half a real stage piano, half a real synthesizer, with adeqaute 88 hammer action keyboard for my next 20 years - I hope. What can I say - I did not expect much from the 384MB of ROM while competing with libraries roughly 300GB on my PC's HDD - but I got really surprised for the warmth and livelyness. There is so much really sophisticated equipment out there today - and I am sure for you it is the XD3.

One thing - if you have any means of a direct wire to the Ketron sales team - to my eye it seems they did a poor job in mastering the audio track of some of the videos - and should be told so. They appear to be using a master compression which drives the sound right against the wall like Tom the Cat folding like a dry wallpaper from the door after Jerry Mouse had thrown it closed during the race :-))) - that's no good if you want to demonstrate the sound quality of the tone generators. For example, if you listen to the piano sound on the first video - I'm sure the device itself will have a marvellous grand, but the compression makes it sound like some fixed velocity setting. Sometimes there are over-encouraged media producers who use their personal "failsave-for-what-we-have-always-done-for-other-customers-setting", that cripple the sound while transcoding for the web server - other customers might not sell tone generators.... But maybe I'm a little bit over-sensitive, what do you think?

:+) Carsten (+:

Moin Otis,

thank you for the kind words on my music - I am sure if you listen long enough you are likely to dislike some of the pieces ;-) But that's ok, my target groups vary with my styles ;-)

I checked out the XD3 on a youtube demo - seems to be the perfect fit four your demands - to prepare it all easily for the real-time performance. You will find it much more easy to carry your music to the stage than me. Actually, Andreas can tell how much I had to suffer from preparing for our Sawubona live gig last year...

[The story goes like this: When I composed "Ben" and "Back of the Bus", I had in mind we were founding a community that would show up many brilliant guitar players like you at once - so I thought "well giv'em something worthy to play" and arranged some "rich" chords, first to be played and strummed by that sophisticated NI Kontakt 2 - Scripted Guitar plugin (they are still in until someone drops by to replace them by real guitars). But - in fact we had quite many songwriters and poets in the project, but almost no instrumental performers (still astonishing to me). Suddenly I had to practice and play all that stuff (I had composed for real guitar heroes) myself on stage :-Q Well, if you dig deep enough in the Videos section, you might find some recordings of that peculiar "IBM Nightshifters" gig.... ]


When I started my journey into home recording 20 years ago, I had similar needs like you - thus I first started to accompany my songwriting with an Alesis HR-16B drum machine (one that still has a great groove building philosophy to me - should set it up again, once). I programmed all drum patterns and chained them into a song - which worked perfectly for years. Later I used my Yamaha SY77 built in sequencer which was great with 16 Midi tracks at that time, and synced it to the HR-16B.

Rather soon those days, I found it was nevertheless more comfortable to edit Midi on a computer, so I bought an old Atari 1040ST from a friend and started Cubaseing there (must have been version 2.0 then).

Later, I think it must have been 1995, my diploma mentor sent me a spec sheet of a brand new software - one which could multitrack to HDD on a PC - but above that which claimed to be able to make "convolution of signals" to feature room simulation and things - up to that point I had asked myself for years what on earth those convolution mathematics and theories could be good for in real life - and suddenly there it was: Mathematics that did nothing but create superb sound and consume lots of CPU power - those days in 16 Bit Win 95 on a 486.. :-) That's the story why today that Samplitude software is still my DAW, though all the others use the same mathematics today as well :-) And yes - working at home and performing live are quite different worlds in my music.

How about doing a mixup between our work?

:+) Carsten (+:

Moin, Otis,

indeed, I'll be looking forward to hearing your song without that distortion. What do you use for recording / mastering / transcoding?

You see - I'm not really an evangelist about music equipment - for me that Hurricane guitar happend to have the best touch those days, so I bought it without asking for the brand, background or the hardware too much. Today I simply appreciate the possibilities today's technology opens up for me, to be able to do any music and style that comes to my mind without physical boundaries.

While not being specialized on guitars, I happen to have 3 synthesizers from Yamaha, which is somehow a question of workflow, in any parallel universe I could be happy with Roland or Korg as well... I like to handle devices with similar user interfaces, that's why I also tend to save money over time to buy VSTi plugins in complete payoff-bundles rather than selected one-by-one.

While being in search for cooperation esp. with African musicians I tried to avoid to focus too much on equipment questions here - I thought some people in the economically-not-that-much-privileged-world might find it bold if the "industry nations nerds" come around loaded with tons of must have gadgets - while not necessarily making the better music :-) Meanwhile I think that question is beginning to fade, for most seem to be quite happy with the music they do, their possibilities in reach, and the equipment they have at hand.

I even produced one real "no-cost" song ("Christmas Always"), to demonstrate you could produce acceptable demo quality with a plain cyber cafe PC and some free-of-charge software for recording and sounds, say "to make and record music out of thin air". To my surprise there was little interest on that question, leading me towards the conclusion I mentioned.

If I get some spare time, I might shoot & add some pictures of my music dungeon, with that counterpart to your wall :-) Ah wait, parts of it are already visible here, at the Sawubona page of my son Jannimann, see first picture of the downmost slideshow there!

:+) Carsten (+:

Moin, Otis,

just had about an hour of your tunes on my speakers while doing correspondence - I am deeply impressed of your work.

It is great to have a sound that is no inch behind the modern David Gilmour - but it is even greater to be in real sound innovations and to dare even some sounds that might be considered unpleasant. Congrats for that!

As I said my "wall" won't stand comparison - the best horse in barn is a "Hurricane Limited" (can be seen on an 80ies record cover of hard rocker Jason Becker, a friend showed me after I had bought it) - with OBL humbuckers and doubled single coils at the bridge - that is the one for heavy tunes without compomises ;-)
And a Yamaha 12 String for rich accompaniment; a no name western 6 string for friendship bonfire action, my wife's old spanish one, and an old 60ies vintage e-guitar that used to look extremely ugly in red plastic coating, until my father wrapped it in dark broun suede leather (!) - with a home baked plastic cast beatboard - not great sound but uncompareble unique style ;-) my son's 3/4 spanish, and last but not least my very first plywood spanish refurbished from scrapyard, with those John Lennon stickers covering the most heavy bruises - that one is stii the guitar I use most for composing. Even Andreas knows it, for I had it in our rehearsal before last years' Sawubona concert, not to have the 12-string under the fingers for all those hours before the concert :-)

After all I don't claim to be a guitar player - you will easily judge that from my songs - I just play them to put up the demos. You might curse me for that, but I'm now even into using skripted guitar plugins for accompanied soundcushions - fast to apply and good enough for demos - but a curse once you are asked to perform that song and those fancy blue chords on stage when you never have played it on a real guitar before :-)

One more thing: Your first track "Jam" is starting great but appears to have some strange distortion e.g. on the bass in the louder part - it might not be the sound you desired - please check!

:-) Carsten (-:

Hi Otis,
great to hear that you are playing Pink Floyd! Good choice!
Welcome to MUSIC WITHOUT FRONTIERS!
I hope you will give an interpretation of "Songs of Good Hope", too!
cheers, Andreas

Moin, Otis,

great to have you here!

Funny, that line up of your guitar wall is the same interpretation of that famous term "Wall Of Sound" that I have here in my dungeon right next to me (though your instruments appear to be much more sophisticated).

Will listen to your songs once I'll have some minutes of rest.

:+) Carsten (+: