Rob Meulman from Groningen in the Netherlands created the song Once had a girl using OMB.

Once had a girl is inspired by one of the many beautiful styles that you can play with OMB. In this case the style FingerPicking S.727. The song is about a love that has no happy ending but stays alive.

Hardware:
I use a Windows PC (Athlon 64 X2 processor with 3 GIG RAM memory and Creative Audigy soundcard) and a USB midi-keyboardcontroller. For the vocal part I used a Sennheiser Evolution 835 microphone and a small Behringer(EuroRack UB 802) mixer panel.  

Software:
OneManBand 10 with Magic SF V2.0 Soundfont.
Wusikstation 5 VSTI
JB-Ferox VST
z3ta+VST
Cubase SE
Audacity version 1.2.6  

With OneManBand I tried several GM SoundFonts but Magic Sf vers.2 turned out to be the best. This one was (is?) a free download and gives OMB overall the best (well balanced, warm) sound. Especially the guitars. I.m.o commercial GM SF2's can't even compete with this.

At first I played the song (intro, mains, fills, chords) with OMB in realtime while recording it in Audacity ("what you hear" option of Audacity soundcard) and saved it as a wave file. This is what I always do when playing OMB so that I always have a digital copy of what I played. There is no quality loss in this, the sound rather gets warmer. After that I recorded the same again but now with an extra instrument: Wusikstation loaded on one channel as aVSTi in OMB with Les Paul guitar preset.  A few other channels I switched off. Wusikstation can be heared as a stringlike background sound in the instrumental-break and fade-out. Later I used Wusikstation with a same kind of guitar preset to play the guitar solo.

Because the song was a little limited compositionwise (there is no real bridge in it) I did a little cut and paste with Cubase to get an interesting sequence. When the basic arrangement was finished I made a stereo mix of that (16 bitw wave). To this I added VST effect JB-Ferox (free tape simulator) to get rid of that typical mechanical "midi" sound. And then I recorded the vocal part. But some way it it didn't sound quite good in the arrangement. None of my (mostly free) reverb and delay VST's could fix it. Finally I used my z3ta+fx for the vocals (as a delay effect). That worked out fine, but only if the vocal channel was not to loud.

Another arrangements from Rob using OMB: Over My Head.

Visit Robs website
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