EQ Magazine - May 2008 - (Page 24)

FAST TRACKS FOR DYNAMITE DEMOS By Craig Anderton S ometimes what matters the most about music is getting it done—starting with demos. Maybe it’s a demo for your band, to give the players an idea of what you anticipate for a full arrangement. Or, maybe you’re LOOP LIBRARIES For many musicians, the answer to demo nirvana is loop libraries. Whether multitracked drum loops that add a firm foundation to a rock tune, cool TB-303 bass lines for dance mixes, or pads to fill in an arrangement’s Yes, you can make great demos without taking forever to do it. pitching songs, or just want to get an idea down before it goes away—you can worry about the finished version later. Demos can help get you gigs if they show what you do, whether it’s as a live performance act or a sound designer for videos. And thanks to today’s tools, it’s possible for even a solo performer or composer to create a decent—and sometimes even great— demo using a combination of loops, editing, and realtime playing. We’ll assume that you don’t have a full band available, so while you can play whatever your main instrument may be, you’ll be relying on loops or samples for the remaining instruments. Let’s figure out how to do that in the best possible way. ARRANGER KEYBOARDS C’mon, stop laughing: These can do a pretty credible job of generating a background track. If you haven’t seen recent arranger keyboards (by Korg, Roland, Yamaha, etc.), you might be surprised. Some have sounds that rival dedicated samplers, and the “intelligence” needed to create more interesting arrangements has become refined over the years. You get a huge variety of styles, lots of instrument sounds, pre-programmed patterns to get you started, and the ability to play your own parts on top. Do the math: An arranger keyboard might be a better deal than sample libraries if you need to cover lots of different musical styles (e.g., audiofor-video work). And, using them is wicked fast—call up a style, tell it what you want, play your chords, and you’re on your way. cracks, there’s almost certainly a library with the sounds you want. Loops can also help provide inspiration when songwriting. Sometimes when you have a hot idea for a song, it’s too timeconsuming to build up the song piece by piece: It’s a lot easier to lay down a few loops while the vibe is strong, and replace them later as needed. Loop libraries fall into four main categories: • Construction kits. These have groups of samples, usually with one or two dozen loops per group, that form the individual components of a multitrack arrangement. You rearrange these samples, or do “mix and match” with samples from other construction kits, to create an original arrangement. • Collections. These group samples by instrument or genre; for example, a collection of drum grooves, or a collection of dance loops. • Construction/collections. In this case, there are lots of samples relating to a particular instrument (e.g., a collection of guitar sounds or loops, another of drum loops, another with synth lines, etc.), but these are intended to work together in a construction kit-like way. • Playback engine-based, plug-in libraries. Some would say this is a more limited concept than sampler-based libraries (see next), because it weds a sound library to a particular sound playback engine (like Kontakt Player 2, East-West Play, TASCAM GVI, etc.; see Figure 1). But unlike other libraries, which 24 EQ MAY 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - May 2008

EQ Magazine - May 2008 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Jamie Lidell, What the New Model of Record Deal Means to You, Part II, Andrew W.K. Tool Box Aerosmith Fast Tracks Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet DigiDesign Pro Tools LE 7.4 Cakewalk Sonar 7 Line 6 UX8 Studio Projects CS5 Art Tubefire 8 Jazzmutant Dexter MCDSP Emerald Pack Overloud Breverb KRK Exposé E8B Mackie MR5 Blue Sky Exo Monitor System Big Fish Audio Around the World in 80 Raves East West Fab Four Virtual Instrument Sony Matt Fink- Starvu Session Keys Room With A VU

EQ Magazine - May 2008

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