Recording - January 2013 - 61

loop (with or without crossfade), reverse, trim, etc.; everything is right in front of you and you can learn the entire interface in about ten minutes. There’s a built-in delay with tap tempo, 29 available scales/modes to set which notes play and which don’t (and you can customize your own), a large number of MIDI-controllable parameters, onscreen help, and much more. The program comes with dozens of presets, some designed to be instantly playable, others to help you learn how the user interface works (e.g. a program that tells you to swipe a note from left to right to hear the waveform move through a vocal passage where a narrator tells you how you’re controlling what’s being said). This gets you started and gives you some really pretty sounds to play, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll have a couple dozen of your own sounds in the library within an hour or two of starting the app. It’s that easy, and that inspiring. Wizdom Music has a number of cool apps on the market, starting with MorphWiz, the groundbreaking ancestor of SampleWiz that provides a wide variety of interesting ways to play back and control basic synthesis. We’ll bring you more reviews of Wizdom’s products in future issues, but for now, SampleWiz is a great place to start if you’re looking for quick and fun musical inspiration.

Nonlinear Educating macProVideo
Free (content access costs $25/month or $199/year); www.macprovideo.com

We’ve spoken about the folks at Nonlinear Educating before, and it’s definitely time to revisit their amazing site at a time of year when it might be appropriate to give the gift of enlightenment to a recording musician you know... or to yourself. The macProVideo app is a free interface to the company’s enormous library of tutorial videos on dozens of subjects. They’re adding more each day, and the current tally is something like over 22,000 videos and nearly 2,000 hours of tutorials on over a hundred subjects. Some of the content is browsable for free, so you can try the service out for yourself to get a feel for how it works. When you buy a membership, you get full access to everything, all the time, for however long you maintain your subscription. Membership allows you to stream everything in real time from the company’s server, and you’ll want a good Internet connection to access the library smoothly. There are no extra fees unless you decide you want to purchase and download a video series to have on your computer or iOS device for when you’re away from the Internet; those can be purchased on a per-item basis. The tutorials are clearly recorded, nicely paced, and provide a wealth of information, with screen-based walkthroughs abetted by student-friendly features (see the screenshot of a Toontrack Superior Drummer walkthrough with the cursor clearly highlighted to reflect what the narrator’s discussing). The latest version of the player has added some welcome features: there’s HD video playback available, automatic queueing of consecutive sections for continuous playback without having to menu-surf from chapter to chapter... about the only thing I really missed was a way to manually or automatically flag/unflag any given video as having been watched, in case I had to go away for a while and didn’t remember where I’d left off. As the name implies, a lot of these tutorials are Mac-centric, but there’s a lot of basic information in the tutorials for programs that exist on both platforms that will be usable to anyone with a Windows PC, and over the years the library has expanded to include some excellent non-computer tutorials as well. Check out the tutorials on Music Theory and the basics of the Music Business, for example. The sheer breadth and depth of this library is already amazing and gets more so every time you return to it. On Pro Tools alone you’ll find over 40 “courses” with multiple videos in each one, and there’s also material on many of the major DAWs as well as popular plug-ins and waveform editing programs. And audio isn’t all the library covers; you’ll find tutorials on graphics and productivity software, video, web design... there’s something for almost everyone. The app is enhanced with a set of user forums where topics particular to areas covered in the tutorials can be raised and discussed, with many questions quickly being answered by staffers at Nonlinear Educating. There’s also a facility for emailing directly to the staff if you’re having support issues with the library. The overall impression is of a facility that wants to give its customers the very best learning experience possible, and backs up the high quality of its content with a very usable and elegant design. If you’re the sort of recording musician who learns smoothly from seeing things demonstrated in videos, this library is worth its weight in gold. Go grab the free app, check out some of the offerings, and get educated!
RECORDING January 2013

http://www.macprovideo.com

Recording - January 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - January 2013