Topic: Experiences from Sweden

Podium to the test, in Sweden
Not long ago, I visited a friend of mine in Sweden who has a very respectable synthesizer arsenal.
We decided to have a go at doing a remix of Jean Michel Jarre’s “Equinoxe part 3” only using analog modular synthesizers for all the monophonic sounds. Podium was, for me, the natural choice. Not only because I really wanted to learn how it works, but also to have a go at it in a hardware studio enviorment to see what problems might arise.

And yes, we discovered a few problems. Basicly, these problems made it impossible for Podium to satisfy it’s demands for our situation. In the end, we lost patience, and tragicly the project was never completed. However, none of these problems was the direct cause for putting this project on ice.

While we worked on this project. a desire for the following functionalities was noted:

– Undo record
– SMPTE/MTC synch in/out
– A dedicated button to send an “All notes off” command to kill “hanging notes”.
– Optional: Stop should always disengage record. (Default behaviour for the Mackie HDR24/96 Hard Disk Recorder for example)
– Optional: Undo history (GIMP/Photoshop-like)
– Optional: Turn off record for bounce-enabled tracks automatically upon project shutdown to prevent accidental overwriting of bounced audio.

1 Poly MIDI track -> X Mono MIDI tracks?
I see Podium as a great tool for making polyphonic recordings from a monophonic synthesizer. With multiple recording passes, you can build up polyphonic sounds by recording track by track, harmony by harmony respectivly. This may sound like a long haul, and it is, it’s still worth it when you have create all the tracks from scratch anyway…
But what if you import a MIDI-file which already has polyphonic tracks? Then, you’ll have to manually seperate each harmony and create one track for each of them before you can record. We though maybe there is a way of doing this automatically, so that polyphonic MIDI tracks will convert in to multiple monophonic tracks in a automatically created subgroup? A sort of “Prepare track for monophonic MIDI device” command? Too ambitious? 😆

Say what? 😮
These things does’nt quite seem right.

– Recording MIDI doesn’t work when recording is started within punch in/out range, whenever punch in/out is enabled.
– Impossible to assign a preset for the effect version of VAZ Modular (VAZModularEffect).
– Impossible to change Podium’s metronome audio output routing?
– Automatic audio event creation upon bounce? It doesn’t seem to work consistently.
– Move selected events possible, but what about resize (note on as well as note off for instance)?

Yet still…
I hope you don’t get discuraged by all this, I still see Podium as a great product with fantastic potential! 😀

Best regards
/Joachim