Tune Monster

It all started with the idea of getting a full-sized keyboard in order to play while I was on-site in a corporate apartment. Seemed simple enough -- find a high-quality portable keyboard that's good enough to really play (Most keyboards are toys)

I settled on the Yamaha CP-300, which is full-sized, touch-sensitive, and has weighted, solid-feeling keys. When it came, I was thrilled. This keyboard can take everything from a feather touch to a Jerry Lee Lewis pound and scream. Plus it has all these extras and features and such. It does cool things. It rocks.

But, of course, it couldn't be as easy as that. What I really wanted was some way to record music from the kids and send to grandma. Maybe something like a $20 tape recorder might have worked, but obviously you have not met me when I get on a roll. What I wanted was a rack-mounted PC that would serve as a MIDI sequencer and CD creator. Not really a PC, mind you, but another musical instrument. Perhaps with a synthesizer built into it.

And so began the last six weeks of torture. The first week was fun: I got a rack and a power supply and a MOTIF-ES rackmount synth. I was humming. I could use the CP-300 to play the synth, and the synth did all sorts of cool things too.

The next week the train ran off the track. In the mail came all sorts of pieces and parts. First there was a Silverstone rackmount HTPC case (with color touch-sensitive LCD display on the front!) Then came the Gigabyte motherboard, then the CPU (a 45-mm Quad Core), memory sticks, hard drives (4-1TB SATA drives), a BluRay drive, wireless keyboard, and strange copper-looking thing that I was told was a CPU-cooling system. Hey -- a special copper-kettle device to keep the little hamsters chill? That is definitely a cool thing!

Did I forget the sound card? Why of course I needed a very capable sound card that can hook up to all sorts of stuff. So I settled on a E-MU 1616 PCI card. And for the video? Why twin NVidia 8600GTXs, of course.

I think somewhere I might have lost track of the initial plan. Not sure.

The first night, it looked like a Best Buy store had dropped by the apartment and barfed all over the living room. There were boxes, manuals, wires, and styrofoam peanuts everywhere. Somewhere in the middle of all the mess was a man alternately cursing and making promises to various deities to perform mission work in the Congo.

The problem? All of the stuff didn't fit into the box. I felt like Dolly Parton's brassiere-maker. There are some mountains too high to climb. As Dolly herself said once, you can't put ten pounds of potatoes in a five-pound sack.

Note that this realization didn't come to me immediately. Heck no. That would have been too easy. Instead, it took about four weeks of pounding, scraping, whining, cajoling, and bickering for me to figure it out -- these video cards are too freaking big. They're like small battleships. So I bailed out and bought a NVidia 9600 at Best Buy. Works like a charm.

Then, of course, I hosed the power supply. Kept forgetting to plug in the special power cords to the video cards. I guess in the future video cards will come with their own nuclear power supplies, but for now, you have to buy special power supplies and run special cables to them.

And cables? Homeboy's got some cables for you. I got SATA cables, IDE cabes, USB cables, DVI cables, power cables, audio cables - I got cables for stuff I can't even figure out. Somewhere in my stack of cables I probably have pieces from the Space Shuttle for all I know.

So after a mere six weeks, I got the box together and running. You almost can't make out the duct tape when it is all put together (I am serious here -- duct tape is the answer to most of mankind's engineering problems)

To top it off, I bought SONAR, a software package for creating and managing music, and a couple of microphones. Hey -- maybe Britney will drop by and need to lay a couple of tracks. Of course with Britney, "laying tracks" might not be related to music.

The Tune monster is now complete. Do you think I could play it?

Heck no! Now I've got all this cool stuff -- cool video cards, cool software, cool wires, cool connections, cool software and cool hardware synths, etc -- I got so much cool stuff I'm frozen up like snowman. It'll take me another 2 months just to figure out enough of this crap to actually do anything useful. I've got around 4,000 pages of manuals to read. Then there's actually putting that knowledge to work.

Gee -- I'm really glad I just didn't buy that tape recorder. That would have been a real waste of time.

But I am making some progress. For example, here is a one-take version of Chopin's "Prelude in C Minor", one of my favorites to play.

I could play this a lot better, but hey, I don't have time for practice. I've got manuals to read.