Live Performance & Home Recordings

Greetings everyone... new to this forum and hope one of you have an answer for me.

I used to do live solo-performances in clubs, using a roland xp80 keyboard as my "back-up" band. I spent long hours tapping in drum beats, bass lines, and piano fills to reproduce top 40 cover songs. My reproductions on this keyboard were almost exact due to the LARGE sound database the roland has. I never really looked into other technology until now- when I saw another solo artist on a cruise line using his LAPTOP as his "backup band".

I used to have a Roland vs1680 digital recording studio - and recorded a few cd's with it - and recently someone said I could have done the same thing with my home pc.

What I'm looking for is a software application that could be used for live preformances as well as home recording. Can cakewalk or Home Studio do BOTH? - or will I need 2 seperate applications? Please post your reccomendations for both. Has there been aftermarket software written to expand the amount of drum kits, piano/synth, and bass sounds? What I liked about the XP80 is I could buy modules to give me another 20 drum kits, and 30 differnt bass styles. I can see using a pc for all of this as an advantage by cutting/paisting and using loops - rather than tapping in the entire drum and bass line for various cover songs.

Lastly- can the files I have created on the XP-80 keyboard be imported into these home studios / live concert applications?

thanks for your imput-

brian

Now some specifics... You'll need DAW software, what around here we call a 'host'. That's the software 'bed' for your system. It acomplishes the audio and MIDI i/o, tracking, and most of the editing.

In the old days, it was just MIDI i/o on the computer, which drove external MIDI gear. You could initially set up your Roland that way. But the modern way is to use softsynths. They install and 'plug in' to the host (that's why they're called 'plugins', or just 'plugs'). They act just like external synths but run on your PC. Compared to the hardware synths, they give you about 10X the value (i.e. they cost roughly 1/10 what it would to get the equivalent functionality in hardware). And you can use as many different or multiple plugs as your CPU can handle. And these days, it's a lot.

Regarding live use, folks around here have configured setups that work, but it depends on what you want to accomplish. If your set is fixed, then you could just record a two-track mp3 and just play that. But if you need something more 'live', like dynamic arranging etc., then you should look into Project5 (or maybe Ableton Live, but seriously look at P5).

Like I said above, you could start with Project5 and Sonar 5 from Cakewalk. Project5 will give you more of an interactive experience, and so may be better-suited for live use.

I think Sonar would work just fine for both, as for the song modules and drum kits it actually unlimited on a computer. Sonar supports both VSTi and DXi software sound modules as well as rewire for stuff like Gigastudio (big honking sampler). You can add as many sounds and as many sound modules as you can afford. Todays computers have a lot more power then that old keyboard so you can get more realistic sounds. Loops can be used also be you can't fine turn those like you can midi.

As for your existing songs check to see if there is a way to export the sequences in the roland xp80 to standard midi file. That would be handy because you could import them into Sonar and at least have all the performaces that you could use to drive the XP80 to record audio or even send to a software sound module to create updated versions of your songs with better quality sounds.

If all else fails maybe you can get the XP80 to output midi for Sonar to record or get it to sync to MTC. If it would respond to MTC then you could at least record each track into Sonar as audio and keep them in sync.

A standard midi file would be best, just make sure you set the tempo in your Sonar project to the same tempo and time sig as you used on your roland xp80 sequence before you import it. After that you can do all kinds of cool stuff like send each drum to a different module or split the parts out to tracks by channel, anything you want to do.