Recording - April 2011 - 2

PUBLISHER: Thomas Hawley ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER: Brent Heintz

EDITOR: Lorenz Rychner ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Mike Metlay MÚSICO PRO EDITOR: Fernando Curiel

EDITORIAL

New and old If I’d told you ten years ago that you’d soon be able to record a chord, then change the pitch of an individual note within that chord, you would have said, “My MIDI sequencer has been doing this since the early ’80s,” and you would have been right, but also wrong. Wrong because I wouldn’t have been talking about a chord made up of MIDI data (everybody knows that you can’t hear that), but about a chord that has been played and recorded, that now exists as audio. Well, digital audio, so it’s still only numbers, but nevertheless—the software program Melodyne can now grab a note within a recorded chord and shift its pitch. And it’s ho-hum already, not even news anymore... If our resident soundhound Mike Metlay had told you ten years ago that his beloved Mellotron would soon be available in software, playable while staying in tune (and sustaining notes for longer than eight seconds...), you might have said “Holy Transwaves” and Mike would have predicted that they, too, would soon be available in a much easier and more reliable form than on Ensoniq’s FIZMO keyboard where they came from. What I’m getting at here is this: The extremes of the new and the old-but-new-again that we cover in this issue of Recording are astounding. Grabbing a note within a recorded chord and shifting its pitch? Like standing in front of a choir and directing the altos to move from E to E flat to make that C chord into a C minor chord? And that’s not all that Melodyne can do. Chris Cox (see interview on page 12) used Melodyne extensively in his Dance remix of Michael Jackson’s “Monster” (from the recent CD Michael), not so much for shifting individual notes in a chord but for many other astounding chores; next month we’ll bring you more on Melodyne, and also on Auto-Tune. Equally astounding is the drum replacement wizardry—the sounds of recorded hits in existing drum tracks being swapped out for sounds of your choice, while maintaining the original drummer’s dynamics and groove. All done from within the DAW, no razorblades, no hardware racks full of gates, just software and soundware like the two we review this month: Slate Digital Trigger Platinum, and WaveMachine Labs’ Drumagog 5.0. Also in that realm of “how do they do that?” is the Epic Virtual Choirs product called VOXOS from Cinesamples, as is the new version of piano samples in Synthogy Ivory II—sounds coming out of your DAW on a level of realism that stretches credulity. Then again, the old comes alive again—you can now play, flawlessly and in tune, the sounds from long-forgotten instruments like the Buchla 200e, the EDP Wasp, the alphaSyntauri, the Yamaha CP-70 (without the chiropractor’s bills), and many more instruments that you may never have heard of or cared about! This is a testament to the longevity of any sounds that are unique in some way. Not only can we now play these instruments “virtually” but the sound designers invariably add features that make it even more fun that it used to be in the old days. Yes, Virginia, we did had fun before computers took over, and we’re still having fun... I hope we won’t soon take for granted the advances in software technology that make these developments possible. And let’s also hope that these products will lead to the making of much beautiful music, whatever your personal definition of that may be, and that these products may bring about much— Happy Recording.

CONTRIBUTORS Paul Vnuk Jr., Darwin Grosse, Allen Goodman, Bob Emmet, Gary Eskow, Mike Rivers, Todd Gascon, Bruce Kaphan, Marty Peters
ART DIRECTOR: Scott Simmonds PRODUCTION MANAGER: Colin Courtney WEB GOALIE: Colin Courtney

ART & PRODUCTION

EDITOR/PRODUCER:

PLAYBACK PLATINUM SERIES Lorenz Rychner CIRCULATION Tiffany Sepe

CIRCULATION MANAGER:

ADVERTISING SALES AND MARKETING DIRECTOR: Brent Heintz CLASSIFIEDS MANAGER: Stephanie King
ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE:

ADMINISTRATION Stephanie King

PRESIDENT: Thomas Hawley VICE PRESIDENT: Brent Heintz

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I’d like to add one more note to Lorenz’s editorial. Years ago (March 2004) I wrote an editorial called “A Human Face”, in which I touched on the fact that in music software, perhaps more than any other facet of the music recording gear industry (except the boutique-gear hand builders), there are real accessible people behind the products, people I know and respect, either as new acquaintances through their releases or as old friends. I wish I could introduce you all to each and every one of them, because there are some severely cool people in this business, who love and feel passion for their creations every bit as much as the makers of microphones, recorders, mixers, rack gear, or traditional musical instruments. And in each of the products I reviewed for this issue, that passion was evident in every note I played. So: to all of you guys creating this stuff, to Matt, Jim, Angus, SKoT, Fabrice, Joe and George, the stereo Mikes, Jon, Xavier, Eric, Micah, Chris, Adam, and all the rest... thank you for making our virtual music world a lot brighter.—MM
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RECORDING APRIL 2011

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Recording - April 2011

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