As I’ve mentioned a few times earlier in this blog, I have a small recording setup at home. This mostly consists of an Ibanez RG550 Roadstar electric guitar, a ZOOM 8 track digital recording studio, a fairly good quality recording microphone, and all the necessary peripherals; however, the primary component of this is my Korg TR61 synthesizer :

korg_tr61

Now – the Korg TR61 is a typical modern Korg synth, and as such has an extremely robust operating system. As such, it’s got a fairly steep learning curve. Furthermore, the documentation that comes with the synthesizer (and that’s available on the web) is fairly “textbook” in nature – which doesn’t leave very much room for ingenuity. Since I tend to be fairly lax when it comes to reading manuals (like, almost all techies), this has led to rather long periods of time where my $1100 synth sits on the table and collects dust.

Recently however, I finally found a complete set of tutorial DVD’s that provide an eyeball view of the menus and functions in action at Sudosonic.Com. I bought the DVD for my system and it arrived just the other day. I’m really looking forward to going through the disk and tutorials and adding to my knowledge of the system so I can start recording some of my own music in the near future.

Since I’m doing all my own recording, the synth was originally purchased to take the place of a full band while I concentrate on the guitar parts and singing. I already have several tracks I’ve laid down on my ZOOM recording studio, but they are in rudimentary stages at best. This new development will allow me to begin to refine and finalize them.

On another note – the Korg TR61 comes with an SD card slot for additional memory storage. Out of the box the synth doesn not have the capacity to store songs created in their finalized form (or currently finalized form). It will only save the basics – any modifications you’ve made to sequencing, timing, tone editing and EQ is lost. This is kind of a pain, but it was made even worse because I simply assumed at the time that an SD card for the synth would be a big purhase – $70 plus or more. As a result I simply didn’t even bother to look them up.

Well, I went ahead and did that yesterday. The synth will take up to 1gig of memory on an SD card, so I hunted around for the correct type of SD card. Turns out the thing will accept most types – and the most recommended is a Sandisk 1gb SD card. I checked the price – and the damn thing costs a whopping $8.95! So I plan on picking up a couple of them here in the next few days so I can save the tunes that will be developed in the near future.

Looking forward to it – should be fun.