OAS / OAX Sound Demo – Tune#7 – Part2

OK, this one turned out to be a bit of a problem child. As I mentioned in Part1 the MIDI file didn’t play correctly on OAX. The audio demos below are in basically the same as all the others in this series of posts.

1. OAS version.
2. OAX version that doesn’t work correctly (It’s missing the drum track). When the bass line starts (at 17 seconds) there should be HiHats playing. I only uploaded enough of it so you could hear what I’m talking about.
3. OAX version with more than just the volume changes we’ve made on some of the earlier files. Read more about that below.

 

This is where it gets interesting. In the first screenshot, I circled track10. Notice that area is blank. Normally that should show the sound selected for that track. When I saw it was blank I clicked on it with the intention of selecting a drumkit. What I found was that I was not able to select anything on that track including the Edit button. I even went as far as reloading the file. Still not able to edit any settings for track 10. I was able to edit the other tracks. Hmm…

Fired up Logic Pro on the Mac and loaded the MIDI file. Sure enough, it played correctly. In the second screenshot, I show the controllers that I found in track 10. Besides having quite a few duplicated controllers, which really shouldn’t be an issue, the first three were of the most interest. Those are the ones that will select the bank and patch (sound) used on the track. Normally in a standard General MIDI file, track 10 will play the default GM drumkit. You can’t change the drumset used in GM as there is only one. If you are working with GM2 you can select from different drumkits. End of the story I deleted the duplicate controllers and set the drumkit to “0” to pick the Standard GM drumkit. All of those changes were made to track 10 only.

Next, we reloaded the file in OAX, and the drums now play! One thing that jumped out in the OAS version was how low in volume the bass line was. If you look at the original mix, you will see that just about every track is turned up to 127 (100%). Since this file was a bit of a problem, requiring me to make some unusual changes, I went ahead and picked a different drumkit along with turning down the levels on the other tracks so we could hear the bass line a little better.

The MIDI file as it looked initially in OAX:

Here are the controllers that I found in track 10 as viewed in Logic Pro X:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And finally here’s what things look like with patch (sound) and volume level changes to the file:

Wonder what else awaits us in the remaining files?