Recording - September 2012 - 20

FabFilter has ported its Micro filter and Pro-Q equalizer, providing that unique FabFilter treatment for a very affordable price. Finally, when you thought you had all the insert effects you could use in a DAW, Overloud has ported to Auria its THM collection of virtual guitar modeling effects containing 10 amplifier emulations, 8 cabinets, 8 microphones, and 7 pedals. Enough of the generalities, time to mess with some songs... Using Auria to greatly alter a mix The first little ditty in the supplied demos was called “I Only Wanted”. Recorded on 32 tracks at 44.1 kHz, it ran a little over 3 minutes. The 700 MB file loaded from RAM in a few seconds, and then the fun commenced: listening, playing, and seeing if I could make it distort (in an unfriendly way). I put myself in the position of a producer working

with a band’s tracks to create a song with a particular mood or vision in mind—the same set of tracks can come out sounding very different depending on who does what with them. Since the whole purpose of this exercise was to put Auria through her paces, what better way than to actually use the program to alter the tracks that were present and create my own version of the song? On first listen I felt that the song’s mood was a bit “down”, so I thought I’d use several of the included plug-ins to sculpt it a bit to make it more energetic and more cohesive. The PSP channel strips came very handy when placed on the more natural instruments such as guitars, keys, and vocals, as well as loops in the mixing buses. When I sat the FabFilter Pro-Q on the vocals my eyes practically glazed over, the smoothness of the effect sounded unreal. One more thing was lacking that I noticed—even with the Pro-Q, the lead vocalist needed something to give him emphasis and it shouldn’t come from a frequency-varying effect. I found the PSP StereoDelay a godsend. This may be the most sounding natural delay effect I’ve ever heard, and the way it smoothly integrated with Auria was amazing. Playing with editing features A second demo I looked at was “The Rubens (untitled)”. This is a much more uplifting track that I felt needed no ‘mangling’; it was the perfect track to play while working with Auria’s sound editing capabilities because all the sonic elements were predictable. If you have ever experienced a track editor in a modern DAW you would be familiar with how Auria’s works. However, on an iOS device with a multitouch graphical work surface, your interaction with Auria is directly through your fingers. Not having to grab a mouse or a trackball, all editing is much more fluid and intuitive. Many modern DAWs have made supposedly-simple edit operations such as ‘cut and place’ or ‘cut and delete’ amazingly frustrating; not so in Auria. The intuitive slide, pinch and mark operations familiar to all iOS users have totally revolutionized these editing processes. You have to touch it to believe it. As with working on the mixer, I initially had some trouble with edit regions slipsliding around. I soon found that a single slap opens the edit region and locks the region for easy editing. File management and more Of course, in a limited memory device such as an iPad, memory and file management is a must. I have an iPad retina

RECORDING September 2012

Recording - September 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - September 2012