Recording - June 2010 - 40

By LORENZ RYCHNER

The names Superscope and Marantz have been linked off and on over the decades, and if your music making goes back far enough you may remember their specialized cassette recorders and later CD recorders aimed at the music education market. Features like half-speed playback for play-along practice and others made these devices ubiquitous in music students’ homes and in music schools. These days, under both the Superscope and the Marantz names, you can still buy such hardware devices that now incorporate today’s technology like SD cards, MP3 files, etc.—check out www.superscopetechnologies.com. Now Superscope has released a piece of music practice software called Elevation that makes these teaching and practice tools available on your computer. Audio recording is among the program’s tools—which, like all things recording, made us want to look at it, hence this Walking Tour. We’ll list Elevation’s main overall capabilities, then we’ll zero in on the program’s recording features. For a closer look and a hands-on experience of the entire program you can download a PDF manual and/or a demo version, for Mac or Windows, at www.superscopetechnologies.com. During the 10-day evaluation period you can’t export files or burn CDs, otherwise the program will show you all it can do. When the time comes to register, with your computer connected to the Internet, enter the serial number you get when you purchase Elevation, then those file-exporting and CD-burning functions are enabled, and you’re good to go. What it does At its core, Elevation wants to become your accompanist and practice mentor. To that end, you build an audio collection of play-along tracks—you import your music and Elevation organizes it into a Library. (Fig. 1) You can import audio files already on your computer, or from elsewhere, or you can “rip” tracks from a CD. Elevation accepts WMA,

WAV, AIFF, and MP3 formats. Playback will always be at 44.1 kHz—files of different sample rates will be converted during playback. You may also record your own singing or playing, solo or—and here is the program’s biggest instructional value—with an accompaniment from the Library: You name an existing audio file from the Library and you sing or play along with it. The recorded result is a new, mixed file that you can evaluate, discard, or save as a .WAV file—it gets added to the Library where the original accompaniment track still remains intact. The audio can be seen in either a timeline window (see Fig. 1) or as a waveform (Fig. 2). The program lets you link another file to an audio file in the Library; that could be a PDF with performance instructions, or maybe a notation file in .sib or mus. or .ntn format so you can read the score while the file plays. You can vastly reduce or even remove a vocal, or isolate the vocal while reducing everything else (Fig. 2). This works best with non-compressed files (WAV, AIF, CD audio tracks) and may not sound too good with MP3 files. A metronome can be set to a tempo and a time signature of your choice, and its loudness can be set from its own pop-up screen (Fig. 3). You can slow down or speed up an audio file, and—independently and simultaneously—change pitch up or down, coarsely by halfsteps or finely (Fig. 1, on the left). Separately, or while some or all of the above is happening, you can use the nine equalizer sliders to highlight or disguise a particular frequency range. They are set to these center frequencies: 40 Hz, 80 Hz, 160 Hz, 320 Hz, 640 Hz, 1.3 kHz, 2.6 kHz, 5.2 kHz, 10.4 kHz, 20.8 kHz. You can loop a section, roughly by ear or—more finely—in a zoomed waveform display, and the markers will be remembered when you exit the file. You can apply all the program’s processing to your loop. (Fig. 2) The loop, or any file from the library that you otherwise modified during playback (with the Key or Tempo knobs, EQ or Balance sliders etc) can be saved, with those processing settings, as a “Snapshot”—and that can become a new file that you can export (Fig. 4), so you can take a customized practice file with you that has the tempo and other characteristics you need; sing along with your MP3 player, at your favorite tempo and in your personal key, anywhere. There is more, and the manual will explain it. Overall, the program works as advertised, although I had two crashes that may indicate it’s

RECORDING JUNE 2010

http://www.superscopetechnologies.com http://www.superscopetechnologies.com

Recording - June 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - June 2010