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visually impaired musician wants his first daw (long)


spottyaudio

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hello to all, i usually hang out in the live sound forum, but have decided i really want to get back into producing again.

i started out life totally blind, and 27 years later nothings changed. i dont mind, its kind of fun for venues to say they have the best soundman ever..and point at the guy with the cane lol.

i used to own a yamaha motif es6 and a roland fantom x6, both of wich functioned beautifully with button sequences and knob turning. i really got good at multitrack recording, just took a fair bit of memorization but was totally worth it.

i am about to buy the new yamaha motif xs6 in a month or so, but want also to use my fancy new pc to do some recording and support plugins and..just be more flexible than what is offered within the keyboard itself.

the yamaha motif xs6 has the ability to control a daw, anderton's pro review taught me that, but would that really net me any significent advantages? i guess i just dont have enough experience with daw software to know whether it will or not.

i'd considered one of the alesis 24 track hard drive recorders but i feel like nudging a track, or reversing phase, simple things daw users would probably take for granted would be difficult or require special cables..for phase reversal i mean, to acomplish on the hardware side of things.

so heres the questians:

1. are there any daw platforms that are user friendly to someone who..dare i say it? doesnt use a mouse, hell the monitor for this pc is only on when someone else is in the room and wants to read something.

2. i have an allen heath gl2000 24 which i could use for hands on mixdown of the computer recorded tracks, which i'd rather do because i'm very comfortable with this approach, and have outboard goodies that'd work well for this, but is this defeating the purpose of the daw?

3. has anyone had experience working through daw software or studio recording with a blind person? any points or tips that were really helpful.

i used to work on a roland vs2480 digital recorder and that was ok but way harder to learn and keep learning than the keyboard interfaces, and i kind of dont want to go this route again.

thanks for reading such a long and detailed post guys, i really do appreciate it.

mike

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I don't know the answer to your question, but I did find this thread on the Reaper forum, which might be useful: http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=55010

Also, this is a module with 128 programmable keys. Might this be useful to you for using computers, including DAWs, in general? http://www.tipro.si/index_products_mid_midkm128a.html

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thanks for the two links, with the 30 day trial, i might throw reeper under the microscope for a bit and see what i can do with it.

now if only fl studio was accessable, i love loops and such and..dont laugh..my first "daw" would have been mtv music generator on the playstation 1 ..all button presses again, and fun! though insanely limited..lol.

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Apparently Audacity has a huge following among those with visual impairments.

This is a guide for users of the Jaws screen reader regarding Audacity:
http://vip.chowo.co.uk/wp-content/up...2.0-Guide.html

This is a from the Audacity website, and has to do with Accessibility, including a discussion in screen readers and other things that you might find interesting or even useful:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/accessibility.html

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i've been using audacity for simple tasks like archiving minidiscs to hard drive for awhile now, but never really took it seriously as a daw platform. i'll read the guide as i am using jaws for my screen reading.

i installed reaper just to try it, and can literally get nowhere, just drops me in the track viewand the shortcuts i know that are almost universal get me absolutely nowhere, not even to the help/keyboard shortcuts menu, so i'mgoing to keep playing with both and see what i can do.

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i dont really have the budget to keep buying tape, but i was really considering using one of the rackmount 24 track hard disc recorders interfaced with my allen heath mixer i already have for live work. only problem is that i now dont have the software synthesizers, track nudging/snapping to grid and such that i'd have in a daw. its not a bad option, but it is like going back to workign within the keyboard, only without midi event editing for filters and quantization like i'd have working within the soon to be purchased yamaha motif.

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Now we're really getting into an area I don't know about, but I was going to suggest some HD recorders if the interface is better for you. Doesn't TASCAM or some of these other ones have VST plugins, or am I imagining things?

I'll be interested to hear what you think of Audacity as a real DAW when you've read Jaws. Sorry Reaper wasn't working out. I'm hoping someone will jump in here with some Reaper experience and say that it would be able to work since it's a good DAW.

And I hear you about the budget for tape and lack of editing. The lack of editing probably wouldn't bother me so much because I tend to record mostly with microphones, but still, it'd be nice to chop or move things around like one does on a DAW.

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Hey Mike--- I was a guide trained by The Lighthouse in San Francisco, and have worked, pro bono, as a guide and book-reader for many years now.

I wish I were there at your side. It would be cool for you to record on the DAW of your choice, with a sighted assistant at your side, preferably one trained in that software. There is no reason why you shouldn't be able to leverage the most sophisticated of recording softwares, if that were your goal. If I were there, you'd just say what you wanted--- and I'd make it happen.

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i've actually done that before with protools, mixing down a friends tracks with him..he's an excelent song writer but no engineer. i work a lot in live sound and have trained myself to pick out frequencies pretty acurately..so it was nice to say "put a parametric eq on the drum overheads at 5 khz, boost it ten db then sweep it slowly up..yep..there it is, now cut it to -6 or so" that kind of stuff worked out great.

its not practical to have to rely on a sighted person to acomplish the recording process but it sure was nice.

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Us sighted people can be helpful now and again! biggrin.gif

I hope you come up with something that works out well for you. Seems like there might be a few possibilities here.

BTW, as a sp. ed. teacher, I've had several visually impaired students, although obviously what I teach them involved navigation primarily (orientation and mobility).

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