Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Surface Sessions Season 3 – 01 First impressions of the Surface Pro (2017) for music production”.
Hello, I’m Robin Benson and welcome to season three of surface sessions. It’S a whole new season, focusing on a whole new surface pro. It’S not the service Pro five, of course, that would just be bonkers. No! This is the surface pro the surface pro.
I guess we’re going to call it the 2017, because I don’t know how else to define it really, because there will be more surface pros, no doubt and it’s all going to get very confusing. So the surface pro 2017 here it is fighting my way through the Microsoft ordering system I have acquired one. Two weeks later, I got the keyboard as well the pen, no not due to the end of the month, but you know I have other pens. I can use that’s okay, we’ll look at that later on. If you’re new to the channel, then hi hello.
What I do is I take a device’s sublime as the Microsoft Surface pro and I try to get it to make music. I try to tease out of it, pull out of it: the creativity, the music production, the virtual synthesis audio, recording band, making hip-hop beat making pop record nests. That is, music production. I try to demonstrate how cool this is as both a performance tool and as a recording device, or at least we hope so because, as we know from season one and season, two things are not always as easy as they seem in season one.
We have a surface pro 3 and that just worked out of the box. Everything worked, it just did its thing. It’S only real downside was its tendency to throttle once it got up to a certain temperature and that then just destroyed everything in season 2.
With the surface pro 4, we had a little bit of difficulty. It would glitch it work lick, it would pop on even the simplest of projects, and it took you know a good nine months to a year before the surface pro 4 and the surface book were really up to scratch on making any kind of music at all. But they are now and that’s awesome and you’ll find the journey we went through with that or in the season to surface sessions.
And so here we are with season 3 and a brand new surface, and I’m going to do the same things I’m going to plug audio interfaces in I’m going to run a whole load of audio software music software virtual instrument, software. Whatever I can lay my hands on I’m going to stuff inside and demonstrate it and show it working or not working I’m going to climb over all the obstacles and just tweak it. So it becomes the awesome device.
I know it can be and then I’ll show you how to use it in life. Performance I’ll, show you how creative you can get with the pen and with touch and with things like that, maybe also the dial that might be fun. I don’t know yet.
So that’s what surface pro audio is about. That’S what these surface session videos are all about, demonstrating music software on the surface pro got it good. So this then it’s just a quick introduction. It’S my first impression of the surface pro which I have handled very little since I got it a couple of weeks ago. Well, first of all, there’s bugger all the difference. Really between this and the surface pro 4, I mean you would be absolutely hard-pressed to find any kind of difference. All the ports are the same. Everything is in the same place here and all here, the thickness. I’M sure there’s a difference but load.
If I can see it. The only difference I can perhaps ascertain is that the grille on the surface pro 4 is a bit more pronounced than it is on the new surface pro. So that’s kind of tidied away a little bit so there’s less of this grille showing other than that the screens are very, very similar.
The feel it’s very similar weight, all those sorts of things just you know, kind of the same. Really, if anything, the camera on the top here is perhaps less pronounced, so you don’t notice it quite so obviously to do on the surface pro 4 and perhaps there’s a millimeter off the screen. Bezel, I don’t know, I don’t know whether that’s true or not one difference is, of course, the keyboard. There’S a lot of talk about this Alcatel katana alka about this fluffiness of the keyboard. Apparently it’s made from some very high-quality, fake suede. Now, I’m not quite understanding.
All the fuss that’s been made about that, because all the other ones are also made from sort of high-quality fake suede. I mean the surface profile here is: got similar fluffiness to it, although not anywhere near as luxurious as the fluffiness on the new surface pro, and then people are whinging about how that’s going to pick up stains and mess, and all that kind of thing – and I I suppose that’s possible, but it’s not as if we haven’t been there before. I mean here’s the cover of my iPad, which is about five years old, and you know it’s furry and it’s fluffy and it’s a bit tatty, but tacky kind of like a like a favorite novel like a favorite paperback book. You know what I mean is my surface 3 cover, which is the one that hangs out in the kitchen that my kids play with all the time.
This is a couple of years old and it don’t look bad. I guess a it looks worn, but not an hour away and my surface pro 4 cover is it’s not it’s. Fine, it’s a and what I really like about this sort of material is that when you pop it down on a desk, it doesn’t go with. Like a clutter, it doesn’t chunk down a metal meeting, another hard object. It goes down with a very satisfying, it doesn’t slide and disappear off. It just goes down and it feels enormous Lee detective. In fact, the two weeks I had without the keyboard, because the UK managed to release the keyboard 2 weeks later, it felt very, very vulnerable, very vulnerable. I didn’t like having it out, that’s why I didn’t use it very much I’d sort of put it away.
So I was scared that I’d scratched the screen or something terrible happened. But once the keyboard thing is here, it’s a whole different thing and it feels very sturdy, very safe and quite happy to put it down either way up and feel completely confident that it’s going to stay awesome. So what specification did I go for on this occasion? Well, I have a history of going for the mid-level. What I see is the sweet spot choice of the product, and that tends to be the i-5 with eight gigs of ram and that’s exactly what I’ve gone for this time, but there’s an added bonus. That was this: i 5 model there’s no fat. Apparently the cooling system in here is efficient and good enough to remove the need of any active cooling.
That’S pretty remarkable to me and I wonder how much drop-off that’s going to give us down the line, but how a completely fanless surface Pro is brilliant, particularly for music making. That’S what you want! You don’t any noise! You want the fans coming on all the time. You want silent so that you can concentrate on your vocal performance or your instrument recording and your microphones and bits and pieces. So being fanless is awesome, will it live up to the height? Will it throttle? Will it give me all sorts of trouble? Will it catch fire? These are questions I hope to answer at the time the kickstand I now go all the way back a little bit further than the other one, so you vent a little bit further, which is interesting.
I suppose I was alright with the way the other one was, but you know a little bit more, perhaps it’s good. It gives it the same angle as a surface studio. Apparently, and that’s no bad thing. I also picked up the dial, which I showed you a moment ago, which, of course it’s doesn’t isn’t supposed to go on here.
I just think it just looks quite nice and I have to say it is a fantastic thing. Well, I mean it’s completely useless. What am I going to use it for turning Spotify up and down? I mean really. I guess I am, but it is just the feel of it, the quality of it, the weight of it.
The way it turns you can have it either going bit or completely smooth and for scrolling through websites and turning the brightness up and down which of the two activities I’ve done so far, it’s just beautiful now. I hope I dearly hope I can find some use for it that I can use it to put in automation. I could use it to turn knobs in music software.
How am I going to make that happen? I’Ve, no idea! If anybody out there knows how to make that happen, then let me know I would be very, very interested because that could be remarkable and we see a lot of these knob controllers and for doors and for MIDI control, and this could be that if someone can Write an app that makes that happen. That’D be great, so I’ll be looking at that as well, but for now that’s more or less it. We have the same connections as we have with the surface pro 4 there’s no new sort of USB 3.1 or Thunderbolt II. Try out or anything like that, which we kind of hoped might have been there, but then, if it was there, I wouldn’t have anything to plug in, because I don’t have any Thunderbolt 3 devices. So we’re just sticking with what we know and we were approaching it like the surface proof or plug everything in and just see what occurs. So that’s the plan. Now the next article is going to throw us into the deep end where I’ve installed on here a whole bunch of different bits of audio software, and I’m just going to run it and film it and see what happens see if I can get sound out see What the Audio Driver situation is like I haven’t installed any ezio audio drivers. I haven’t installed any overall or any USB audio interfaces purely running on what this has to offer in terms of its headphone out and its speaker out. I just want to see what works.
I haven’t tweaked it all. I’Ve done so far is turned the power settings off because it always annoys me when the flippin thing shuts itself down all the time, just because I’ve gone to make a coffee, no I’m always on kind of guys. So that’s the only tweaking I’ve done and I’m just going to plow straight in and see what happens. That’S what I do this is what this is all about, so stay with us sign up subscribe, get into Facebook, Twitter, YouTube! Anything you like surface pro audio calm and you can follow the written version of everything that I do and come and watch the videos and enjoy the journey.
If you’re interested in getting a surface pro for music, then I would recommend, for the moment you just hang on just wait and see what we discover and hopefully, in a month or two we’ll have a fair idea as to what this is capable of. So far. The little bit of testing that I’ve done is pretty positive, so I’m feeling at this point hopeful and very cuddly just smell, though really does smell. I can’t get over how smelly it is through yeah, Italian.
I guess so. That’S it. That’Ll do see you soon and in the meantime, go make some tunes.
You .