I definitely hear you. I'm basically in total quarantine because I'm in the high-risk category. Since late March, I've been in my home studio a lot. Mostly practicing piano on my Kurzweill via Pianoteq on the Scope box. I dusted off my KORG PA600 just for fun. I had to re-learn everything KORG workstation. I had already set the audio outs and midi to roundtrip via an Edirol UM-880 midi patcher. (so I have 5 controllers: The Kurzweill for a piano feel, and ancient but fantastic Roland MKB (a heavy beast that it is) for organs, one Roland A-500 by the daw side of my setup, an A-800 by my scope setup and the PA600 under that). The Roland A's have a great feel for anything especially superb for synths in Scope and VST. I need the keyboard feels to be right!
I picked up the KORG PA600 workstation last year. I sold my PA60 that I used on one-man gigs. I had completely reprogrammed that with my own styles, sequences and it took Triton samples and installed a hard drive. I really haven't looked much at the PA600 since I took it out of the box. Their new RX and DNC samples sound really pretty good (not as good as a Ketron) but when played right, it's actually pretty amazing. I paid around $1000 for it at the time (the Ketron was like $5000 - should come with license plates!). The audio outs are also pretty good. The sequencer is great and it will play wave and mp3 besides the midi.
I started to mess around with it routing it through my Scope box into my DAW machine via ADAT. While I knew the PA60 intimately because I used it live, there was a learning curve. I also had to remember what midi was connected to what (MIDI-OX helped me out on that).
In any case, I've been goading my wife to sing again for forever (back in the day, before we got married) we had both worked at CBS in the studio. We didn't know each other because she was in San Diego and I was in NYC. She did Santana, Cal Tjader, and whatever they gave her. I did some A&R and studio work and got to hang out with Richard Rogers and Elmer Bernstein. Okay, so we met in NYC and like got engaged in two weeks. At first, we did a lot together. Jazz lounge stuff as a duo then we got day gigs and the kids came, etc.
With us being in quarantine she finally gave in to record something. I think her chips are pretty good! We rehearsed some jazz tunes with just me on the piano until she was game enough to record, even though she was reluctant to put anything out there.
So I put the PA800 to use. I had a nice arrangement in a midi file of Bobby Caldwell's What You Won't Do For Love. It had lousy Standard GM instruments so I redid all the instruments with the much nicer Korg samples. Did some panning, eq, and effects in the PA800 and passed it through Optimaster into Cakewalk. Then I recorded her in Cakewalk. I made a nice vocal strip of VST's personalized for her (learning curve!, I have collected 1475 VST's over the last 20 years) and we recorded it. I sent her out and back to Scope through Optimaster. This is what we got:
<a href=”
https://soundcloud.com/soundassets/what ... love-final” >Doris & Ron doing What You Won't Do For Love</a>
Then she wanted to do "When Sunny Gets Blue" acapella totally "a piacere" (no set tempo). So I recorded that. Then I wanted to add piano. (Pianoeq through Scope) That was a bitch as she was all over the place. I must have tried a thousand times. Here is the best one. Not perfect on my part, but she sounds pretty good.
<a href="
https://soundcloud.com/soundassets/when ... -doris-ron” >Doris & Ron doing When Sunny Gets Blue</a>
What I don't like about all the gear and software is it's so freakin' technical! New stuff is a bitch. The intuitive hype is just that. YOU have to get intuitive and you can't do real music at the same time as you're trying to figure all this shit out. Sometimes I think it's easier to learn a Bach or Chopin etude than playing around with the gear. But once you get it down, especially the real-time stuff, it's fantastic.
Here's wishing all of my comrades here, good health and a long life to keep on truckin'.