Recording - June 2012 - 4

PUBLISHER: Thomas Hawley ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER: Brent Heintz

EDITOR: Lorenz Rychner ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Mike Metlay EDITOR AT LARGE: Beto Hale MÚSICO PRO EDITOR: Fernando Curiel

EDITORIAL

CONTRIBUTORS Paul Vnuk Jr., Eric Ferguson, Gary Eskow, Darwin Grosse, Marty Peters

Sounds
In this issue we write up even more soundware than usual, and the variety of available sounds is remarkable. We can have them all these days—sampled, modelled, synthesized, natural or processed, pristine or mangled, all from within your computer. And if you use old-school tools like microphones, you can even record the real thing. What a concept! Picture yourself as an audio gal/guy about sixty years ago. You’ve just managed to wrap your head around the new-fangled devices like tape recorders and the LP. Cutting-edge stuff, or should I say cutting-lathe? Hi-fi is the new craze, and unless it’s Mahler, a full-length symphony quite likely fits onto one disc, maybe even just on one side! Recordings have never sounded better. The concert hall and the bandstand are coming to your living room, and in a few years your furniture will wobble to early rock n’ roll! Now picture yourself being parachuted from that world into the audio world of 2012. I’d give up a week of Colorado sunshine to see the look on your face. An orchestra on your hard drive? Several orchestras? Brass sections, string sections, drums, and on and on? No crackles, no worn grooves, no spinning vinyl (unless you choose to go that route...). Music notation software that obviates pencil, eraser, and ink? As you’d be looking through the soundware reviews in this issue of Recording, you would have trouble believing that you can get a sample library of a real piano, sounding much like the actual instrument, with the added ambient noise of city-street traffic floating in through an open window... Practising “Für Elise” or the Nora Jones piano book will sound real urban even if you live in the quietude of the boonies. If you can’t play the guitar but want to sound like you can, play a keyboard and use software like Nylon Guitar. You’ll fool a great many! No need to risk life and limb to go capture wind instruments from the lands of belly dance—Desert Winds brings them to your computer. Now here’s where it would get time-travel complicated: Coming from the early 1950s when so much groundbreaking equipment redefined the audio industry, you would not know what a Mellotron is (unless you’d heard of Harry Chamberlin’s garage experiments...). But now, in 2012, it is a nostalgic period instrument, reminding us of distant Strawberry Fields and of Nights in White Satin. You’re better off getting the GForce version than the unwieldy piece of furniture—if you could find one that works... If your music collection (oops, I almost wrote “LP collection”) contains a lot of classical recordings, you’re familiar with the term “period instruments”— the sort of thing that might have been state-of-the-art hundreds of years ago, recordings with often clunky pianos (forte-piano, from before the piano-forte), screechy winds (get that Krummhorn outta here!), with tuning and intonation problems... Only for the diehard aficionados! In this world of fast-changing technology, instruments don’t have to be hundreds of years old to be considered “period instruments”. When New York’s Museum of Modern Art stages an elaborate retrospective, as it did this month (April) of Kraftwerk, then the old has been institutionalized and legitimized as such—Kraftwerk had to bring its original sounds to the performances, making the retrospective into a true cultural ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s document. How long will it be before we can do away with singers and construct the lead vocals from a few files on our hard drives? (And would we want to?) Meanwhile— Happy Recording!

SOCIAL MEDIA Brent Heintz, Paul Vnuk Jr.
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

EXECUTIVE OFFICERS

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RECORDING JUNE 2012

Recording - June 2012

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