EQ Magazine - February 2008 - (Page 44) ROMPLER ROOMS Make Workstation Software Work Harder for You by Craig Anderton When hardware still ruled the earth, the Korg M1 workstation created quite a stir with its combination of sounds, multitimbrality opps, a MIDI sequencer, and effects. And when MIDI sequencing took off, workstations became essential elements of many a MIDI studio because they could play back multiple sounds from a single, economical piece of hardware. Today’s software workstations can not only do pretty much anything their hardware ancestors could do, but a lot more. Let’s discuss how to maximize the potential of these virtual instruments, from your initial songwriting inspiration to the final mix. Ready To Rock (or Jazz, or Techno, or . . .) reverb on a bus, and send signal to it from the instruments you want processed, rather than inserting reverb on all channels requiring reverb. The MIDI Advantage Software workstations are exceptionally useful for songwriting, because with one instrument, you can create eight, 16, or even more tracks. As a result, you can simply keep loading instruments into MIDI channels, create new MIDI tracks, and lay down overdub after overdub. However, as you add more instruments, CPU consumption increases—sometimes dramatically. Many workstations let you adjust polyphony for particular channels (Figure 1), so take advantage of this feature to minimize the number of voices that need to sound at once. With many bass lines, for example, you probably won’t need more than two voices. Sounds with long decays—such as pads—tend to eat polyphony, so restrict these, as well. Often, the voices that are cut off are at a low enough volume—or are masked by other notes—so that you won’t notice they’re missing. Another way to reduce CPU consumption is to use bus effects within the instrument (if present), rather than insert effects, whenever multiple sounds use the same effect. For example, insert A big advantage to using a MIDI-based software workstation is that MIDI data is so malleable. During the songwriting process, if you decide to change the key or tempo, it’s much easier to do with a bunch of MIDI tracks than with digital audio. (Having said that, many workstations can also stretch digital audio loops with respect to timing, and, possibly, pitch.) A corollary MIDI advantage is that when it’s time to mix, you can replace the sounds of individual tracks with individual instruments that may offer a better sound quality. For example, you can use the workstation to lay down a piano part, but then switch over to something such as Ivory or another dedicated piano program to get the best piano sound possible.The same thing goes for drums, as you can use a program like FXpansion’s BFD to replace the simpler drum sounds found in a workstation. Also note that hosts with MIDI plug-ins get along very well with workstations. When you’re laying down tracks in quick succession, rather than deal with quantizing or tweaking as you record, you can often use MIDI plug-ins to temporarily do quantization, scale velocities, and the like. After you’re finished laying down tracks, then you can get into the editing process and tweak the MIDI data. Content Management So, dedicate a big hard drive (250GB– 500GB) just to content and samples. If your computer ’s motherboard has some unused connections for hard drives, you can mount the drive internally, but, if not, an external FireWire or USB drive will do the job. However, you will likely have to instruct the program where to look for the content. Check any available preferences dialogs, as that’s usually where you specify a path to the content. With some workstations, you can create an alias/shortcut for the target samples in the original folder on your root drive. For example, if the workstation has a folder named “sounds, you may be able to ” create an alias for the drive containing your samples and put it in the “sounds” folder. Other workstations recommend against moving factory content to a different There’s a growing trend with workstations and multitimbral samplers to include ever-greater amounts of content. Generally, this defaults to being installed in the root drive where the program lives. If you use enough of these products, your main drive can run out of space pretty fast. Fig. 1: Several techniques mentioned in the text are applied here to Native Instruments’ Kontakt 2. Polyphony has been limited to save on CPU consumption (outlined in yellow; Electrik Guitar is limited to 16 voices, Drawbar Organ to 32, and Fretless bass to 4). The blue outline shows that reverb has been added as a bus effect to avoid putting a reverb in each channel. The red outlines show that each instrument has been sent to its own output channel. 44 EQ FEBRUARY 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com
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