I reckon your is an interesting post. I've been recording and using midi
to run a studio since drumatix and Creator sequencer for the atari came out. After installing three million thru boxes, owning tens of modules,
samplers and all the other hardware to be the front end of the midi setup,
finally I gave it all away. I sold the lot piece by piece, and started dabbling
in purely software music creation tools. hundreds of such tools I have dl'd bought, tried out, and basically none of them really replaced either a decent midi rig, or a decent guitar and amp for making music.
So I drifted back into just playing guitar, bought a nice old roland jazz chorus amp and that was that. But then I got a note saying storm 2 was
available, and since dl'ing it, my life has changed a lot. (for the better).
It's the closest thing to jamming music I've ever had access to.
I can just site down have a coffee and play around, write a few riffs,
then save them as ideas, come back , have a listen, do a bit of arrangement, go have some more life, come back and bingo,
I have some nice music done! It's really like, civilised.
I remember when a single akai sampler was us5000. With storm 2
I can have 8 samplers running if I want using rewire. I spent thousands on real to real tape recorders, now, I just press a button and storm records my song or riff or seperate parts out, it's just stunning.
I reckon lots of people think that storm 2 is best for doing dance / techno music, but hey, that's just not true, I use it for doing soundtracks and
other forms of music that don't have the structural timidity of most of
the dance stuff around.
In the old days even if you had a sampler, preparing loops for it was a major pain in the butt, now, storm generates them with perfect accuracy
in micro seconds.
My point is, that storm 2 is exactly what the doctor ordered for people who wish to make music and not spend hours and hours screwing around
with protools / cubase / midi setups etc.
For me, storm 2 has revitalized my ambitions to make contemporary music. I can't wait to get some classical samples into h30+!
I only wish that storm 2 had been around when I was a kid. But it was not.
For a budding composer or brian eno type, there is nothing
in the same league as storm 2. And, talk about simple to use.
The sequencer is whickedly simple. Arrangement is a breeze.
It's all there, (EZ track needs fixing though!).
Storm 2 is a vision of the future of creating music on a computer,
it's a beautiful sports car, a fantastic creative tool, the fact that
not everyone is aware of this is weird, but, it was written
to be useful for musicians, and I reckon it's the best piece of
music software I've ever bought, and it has brought back the joy of the process to me, which after years of midi studio time, I had almost lost.
So my advice would be, forget the dongle, forget the patch bay,
fire up the storm 2 studio and make music instead of getting depressed!
