Adventures in Technology

What am I doing when not being perpetually exposed to the seamy underside of NCAA athletics? Trying to get my Korg A3 to work, of course! Man, I tell you, it has been an odyssey.

It arrived yesterday. After popping all of the bubble wrap, I plugged the sucker in and watched it not work. It seemed that it was not the most intuitive thing on the planet, so I downloaded the manual and started through it.

I soon lost interest, however, but that's only guitar effect user manuals are only surpassed in poorness of writing by journals devoted to teaching writing. I will go back to the user's manual very soon because I need to know the ins and outs of how the stinker works, and this is a nifty enough piece of equipment to really sit down and get to know it.

But that did not stop me from hitting the Interwebs. You need to download some sort of virtual "midi card" to get the most out of the unit. Basically, I think that it is a string of commands to set up the effect chain, so that when I get it to work I'll basically be bumming other people's effects. I stand on the necks of giants.

The Internet told me that I needed a MIDI-to-USB cable, so I ambled over to Radio Shack and was promptly sent away, as cordless as the day after I was born. (Umbilical humor!) This of course, meant that I got to have to go to Guitar Center to get the cable. Got the cord. Installed the software. Connected the cord to the Korg. Got the virtual card. Nothing.

Hm. This was turning into a Bing McGhandi Patented Long and Unnecessarily Drawn Out Affair (TM). I was perfectly unable to provoke my computer into recognizing a new connection to my computer, even though the drivers indicated that things were working. What gives? It turns out that you need a client program that lets you upload and download MIDI commands. Damn it.

I downloaded the most popular shareware midi file transfer program. And I got it to try, but it kept saying that the cord was already in use. I returned to the Internet, where everyone agreed that, yes, it was unlikely to work. The best guess that I saw was that the transfer to this piece of late 1980s hardware using my blazing-ass PC was too fast, but who really knows?

Anyway, I downloaded at least 4 more programs, all of which were useless and a half. Finally, I got one to lie to me and say that the card had transferred, which was a big damned fib. So, I caved in and bought a preloaded RAM card for 80 bucks. Two nights fiddling and still getting nowhere is enough for me. I'm willing to cut my losses, live to fight another day using yet more additional cliches.

Oh well.

HJ