Archives
April 2011
Every year, the world of soundware -- sample libraries and virtual instruments that let us simulate or recreate instruments we don't have in our studios -- gets richer and more diverse. It's a rapidly growing field, and the products just keep getting deeper in features, better in sound quality, and more affordable. In this issue of RECORDING, we bring you a glimpse into the world of soundware in 2011.
The centerpiece of this issue is its reviews... and there are a lot of them to choose from! Over a dozen soundware products are slated for inclusion in this issue, from famous names like Synthogy, Applied Acoustics Systems, MOTU, FXpansion, WaveMachine Labs/Drumagog, and Big Fish Audio/Vir2 Instruments, and important up-and-comers like Audio Damage, XILS-lab, Slate Digital... and Zildjian, which startled the audio world with its new gen16 digital cymbal library. All this and more will be laid out in detailed and authoritative reviews that leave nothing to chance. We also bring you a hard look at SONAR X1, the new incarnation of Cakewalk's genre-defining DAW software.
If software isn't your thing, fear not -- we also include a review of Blue's new Spark microphone and an in-depth test of the JDK Audio rack processors from industry legend API. We interview Chris Cox on his work remixing Michael Jackson, delve into the problems and solutions of latency, and our music-business series "It's Your Music -- Know Your Rights" begins its look at the complex and evolving role of the Producer in modern music.
From drum replacement and virtual synthesis to old-school analog gear and the people who make or break a studio session, the April RECORDING has it all. You won't want to miss it!
Pick it up now on the newsstand... and so you get your next issue early (and save on cost), why not hit the big red Subscribe Now button on this page and have RECORDING delivered to your door each month?
Blue Spark Microphone
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Reviewed by
Paul Vnuk Jr.
Blue Spark Microphone |
Reviewed by
Paul Vnuk Jr.
Blue's most affordable studio mic design may also be its most versatile.
From Dragonflies to Kiwis and Cacti, Bluebirds, Bottles and Mice, Blue microphones are unique, imaginative and stylish, with quality and sonics......Expand
Blue's most affordable studio mic design may also be its most versatile.
From Dragonflies to Kiwis and Cacti, Bluebirds, Bottles and Mice, Blue microphones are unique, imaginative and stylish, with quality and sonics to match. But it has been a few years since we last saw a new offering from Blue that's strictly for the recording studio. Recent releases took the company into areas of live handheld and instrument mics (the enCORE 100, 200, 300, and the brand-new 100i), USB desktop applications with built-in zero-latency headphone monitoring and user-configurable mono and stereo recording patterns (the Yeti and its new USB/XLR sibling the Yeti Pro), and even Hollywood guest appearances from the new Star Trek movie to recent appearances on American Idol.
Lucky for us studio guys, the wait is over. Blue's first new mic for 2011 is the Spark; there will be other releases coming later this year (see our NAMM report in March 2011 for more details), but for now, we're going to take a look at this entry-level studio condenser mic and how it performs in studio applications. Yes, you read that right-an entry-level studio condenser microphone... from Blue...
Read more in the April 2011 issue of RECORDING!
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MOTU BPM
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Reviewed by
Darwin Grosse
MOTU BPM |
Reviewed by
Darwin Grosse
This flexible plug-in starts with the familiar MPC experience and widely expands its horizons.
Over the last few years, some of the most interesting and useful synthesizer plug-ins have come from MOTU. Mach Five, Eth......Expand
This flexible plug-in starts with the familiar MPC experience and widely expands its horizons.
Over the last few years, some of the most interesting and useful synthesizer plug-ins have come from MOTU. Mach Five, Ethno and Symphonic Instrument have become must-have plug-ins, but a drum player/sequencer device was not part of the mix. This changed with the introduction of BPM, MOTU's entry into drum machine emulation.
A quick look at BPM's interface tells you exactly what this soft-synth provides: it is an "urban" drum machine that is focused primarily on hip-hop and dance sounds and sequences. The package includes a ton of sounds and patterns that back up this impression, with the instrument attempting to fill a lot of roles in modern music production...
Read more in the April 2011 issue of RECORDING!
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FXpansion Geist
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Reviewed by
Mike Metlay
FXpansion Geist |
Reviewed by
Mike Metlay
Building on the success of the Guru interactive beat software, new features make live rhythm creation a treat.
Geist is FXpansion's new program for loop and rhythm creation. Longtime readers will remember our March 2......Expand
Building on the success of the Guru interactive beat software, new features make live rhythm creation a treat.
Geist is FXpansion's new program for loop and rhythm creation. Longtime readers will remember our March 2006 review of its predecessor, GURU, and users of that program will quickly see enough similarities to wonder why Geist wasn't just called "GURU 2.0".
Why the new name? Perhaps because Geist really feels like a new program, at least to this reviewer. GURU was very powerful for its time; Geist adds many more features, but just as importantly, it takes some of the things GURU pioneered and makes them faster, easier, and more musical...
Read more in the April 2011 issue of RECORDING!
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JDK Audio R20 Microphone Preamp, R24 Equalizer, and R22 Compressor
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Reviewed by
Paul Vnuk Jr.
JDK Audio R20 Microphone Preamp, R24 Equalizer, and R22 Compressor |
Reviewed by
Paul Vnuk Jr.
Three new rack processors debut a cost-effective and sonically powerful new line from the folks at API.
JDK Audio is a brand new product line designed, engineered and built by API (Automated Processes, Inc.). API sta......Expand
Three new rack processors debut a cost-effective and sonically powerful new line from the folks at API.
JDK Audio is a brand new product line designed, engineered and built by API (Automated Processes, Inc.). API started the JDK offshoot as an outlet for designs and ideas that don't necessarily fit into the usual API paradigm. Currently the JDK line consists of the R20 Microphone Preamp, R24 Equalizer, and R22 Compressor rackmount processors under review today, and the V-14 Equalizer, a 500 Series module version of the R22.
Each unit looks strikingly like new-old-stock army surplus communications gear, housed in olive-green metal enclosures with military-style nameplates and black pullout rack handles. (This look probably comes from the line's quickly-discontinued original name: Arsenal.) Each unit shares similar black knobs, silver switches, and a front mounted power switch and corresponding red jewel LED. Additionally, both the mic pre and compressor use essentially the same housing and feature a pair of matching moving-coil VU meters.
One of the JDK line's biggest innovations is in its implementation of IC chips instead of transformers, and the compressor's gain reduction circuit. While chip-based audio gear is nothing new, JDK makes use of specially designed, function-specific chips, a technology invented by API and licensed for manufacture to THAT Corp. Each chip is designed to emulate the sound and function of transformers minus the heat, weight and, better still, the cost...
Read more in the April 2011 issue of RECORDING!
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Reviewed & Revisited: Cakewalk SONAR X1
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Reviewed by
Allen Goodman
Reviewed & Revisited: Cakewalk SONAR X1 |
Reviewed by
Allen Goodman
A complete visual and workflow redesign and improved CPU performance revolutionize the popular Windows DAW.
SONAR X1 is the latest version of Cakewalk's flagship Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software from Cakewalk......Expand
A complete visual and workflow redesign and improved CPU performance revolutionize the popular Windows DAW.
SONAR X1 is the latest version of Cakewalk's flagship Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software from Cakewalk. SONAR X1 comes in three levels: Producer, Studio, and Essential.
Designed for audio professionals and hobbyists alike, with integrated MIDI and digital audio sequencers, it is a professional-level tool that provides you with everything needed to make quality tracks from start to finish. For this review we will be diving into the full-featured SONAR X1 Producer...
Read more in the April 2011 issue of RECORDING!
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Slate Digital Trigger Platinum
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Reviewed by
Paul Vnuk Jr.
Slate Digital Trigger Platinum |
Reviewed by
Paul Vnuk Jr.
We introduce a new name in drum replacement software... and as we do, we teach you a bit about how the process works.
Steven Slate is the man behind the popular Steven Slate Drums line of virtual instruments. The sof......Expand
We introduce a new name in drum replacement software... and as we do, we teach you a bit about how the process works.
Steven Slate is the man behind the popular Steven Slate Drums line of virtual instruments. The software we're reviewing today, Trigger from Steven's Slate Digital brand, is a drum replacement utility that takes advantage of the SSD drum sounds. I reviewed Trigger Platinum, which has a large library of sounds for kick, snare, and tom replacement; a less expensive EX version with a smaller sound selection is also available.
What is drum replacement?
Virtual-drum instrument programs such Steven Slate Drums Platinum and EX, as well as competitors like FXpansion's BFD lineup and Toontrack's DFH, all rely on MIDI programming and pre-made grooves, or grooves played into the computer with a controller like a MIDI drum kit, to create realistic drum tracks for your music productions. That's not the same thing as drum replacement: Programs like Trigger and WaveMachine Labs' Drumagog "listen to" real drum tracks that have been recorded, replacing the drum hits on the audio track by triggering sampled drum hits in their place.
Back in the olden days of recording (circa the '80s and '90s), drum replacement was a much more complicated process than it is now. The techniques for drum replacement included hardware noise gates and sampling digital-delay units with a single triggerable drum sample stored in their memories, which then evolved into using clamp-on MIDI triggers or piezo pickups to trigger early drum samplers like the now-classic Wendel Jr. and the early Drumulator drum machines from E-Mu. Fast forward to today, and like many studio processes that were once difficult to agonizing, this procedure can now be handled by a single plug-in within your DAW...
Read more in the April 2011 issue of RECORDING!
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Reviewed & Revisited: Synthogy Ivory II
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Reviewed by
Gary Eskow
Reviewed & Revisited: Synthogy Ivory II |
Reviewed by
Gary Eskow
A huge leap forward in realism and playability for what many say was already the best sample-based piano yet.
Ah, the elusive grand piano. To those who sample, it's the great white whale of instruments. Will we ever ......Expand
A huge leap forward in realism and playability for what many say was already the best sample-based piano yet.
Ah, the elusive grand piano. To those who sample, it's the great white whale of instruments. Will we ever reach the point where a piano costing as much as a good-sized house is faithfully reproduced by a computer hooked up to a MIDI controller? Maybe not, but the quality of sampled pianos is rising steadily. Synthogy's Ivory II is getting tons of favorable press. Is it justified?...
Read more in the April 2011 issue of RECORDING!
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WaveMachine Labs Drumagog 5.0
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Reviewed by
Bob Emmet
WaveMachine Labs Drumagog 5.0 |
Reviewed by
Bob Emmet
The industry-standard drum replacement package adds new features and enhancements.
WaveMachine Labs' Drumagog addresses the need for drum replacement-the process of replacing the recorded sounds of a live kit while p......Expand
The industry-standard drum replacement package adds new features and enhancements.
WaveMachine Labs' Drumagog addresses the need for drum replacement-the process of replacing the recorded sounds of a live kit while preserving the drummer's nuances and feel.
The exploding popularity of online collaboration across multiple studio locations has created a huge demand for this process-by the time drum tracks arrive from a distant location, the project for which these tracks were played and recorded may have taken on a different "sound". The playing may be fine, but the drum tones may not fit. And since drums are often recorded at the beginning of a musical production, drum tones are some of the most difficult elements to change when the song's sonic vision morphs in a new direction.
With three projects on my desk with good-but-not-perfect drum sounds sent from afar, I was naturally curious as to how well Drumagog would work for me. I found the plug-in to not only do a great job at traditional drum replacement, but also to have some surprising creative extras. You can hear some examples of my experiments on our website, in the Resource Library (under Magazine Extras > Audio and Music)...
Read more in the April 2011 issue of RECORDING!
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RECORDING's Showcase Of Sounds
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Reviewed by
Gary Eskow and Mike Metlay
RECORDING's Showcase Of Sounds |
Reviewed by
Gary Eskow and Mike Metlay
Cinesamples VOXOS Epic Choirs; Zildjian Gen16 Digital Vault; ConcreteFX Kubik; XILS-lab XILS 3 and PolyKB II; Applied Acoustics Systems AAS Player and Sound Bank Series; new libraries from Puremagnetik; Audio Damage Phosphor.
Read m......Expand
Cinesamples VOXOS Epic Choirs; Zildjian Gen16 Digital Vault; ConcreteFX Kubik; XILS-lab XILS 3 and PolyKB II; Applied Acoustics Systems AAS Player and Sound Bank Series; new libraries from Puremagnetik; Audio Damage Phosphor.
Read more on all these cool products in the April 2011 issue of RECORDING!
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DAW Details
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Written by
Mike Rivers
DAW Details |
Written by
Mike Rivers
What is latency, really, and how do you work with it... or around it?
To paraphrase author-humorist Mark Twain's comment about the weather, everyone talks about latency, but nobody does anything about it. Since most of today......Expand
What is latency, really, and how do you work with it... or around it?
To paraphrase author-humorist Mark Twain's comment about the weather, everyone talks about latency, but nobody does anything about it. Since most of today's recording musicians are using some sort of computer-based multitrack DAW, "latency" is the frequent topic of tutorials and on-line discussions. Everyone knows that low latency is good, but what constitutes "low latency," when is it important, and when isn't it?...
Read more in the April 2011 issue of RECORDING!
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It's Your Music - Know Your Rights. Chapter 13: The Role of the Producer - Part 1
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Written by
Todd Gascon and Bruce Kaphan
It's Your Music - Know Your Rights. Chapter 13: The Role of the Producer - Part 1 |
Written by
Todd Gascon and Bruce Kaphan
We start our look at producers in modern music by explaining what to expect from an outside producer working on your project.
The meaning of the word producer, as in music producer, has undergone subtle transformations over ......Expand
We start our look at producers in modern music by explaining what to expect from an outside producer working on your project.
The meaning of the word producer, as in music producer, has undergone subtle transformations over time, reflecting a number of developments in the music industry.
In the "old old" days a producer would represent the record label, schedule and attend the sessions, supervise the engineers (but never touch a knob if it was a union shop), make sure the bandleader or the copyists had brought the music to go on the musicians' stands, call the breaks, confer with the bandleader about re-takes, and report back to the label about the progress of the sessions.
Then in the "old" days, the '60s, producers became more hands-on. People like George Martin (The Beatles) would work more closely with the musicians and the engineers, suggest sounds, encourage various ways of performing parts, come up with creative experiments with recording techniques, be more involved on a person-to-person and on a musical level, live and breathe with a project until its completion.
Later, beginning in the '80s and blossoming in the '90s, came the recording equipment revolution that now makes it possible to record and produce music in a personal environment. That has again given new meaning to the term producer.
As a reader of RECORDING you are, by definition, a recording musician. As such, you could just as easily be in a situation where you work on a recording project under the direction of a producer, or you could be working as a producer yourself.
If you work under the direction of a producer, it might be in the capacity of the first or second engineer, or as a performer, or as a songwriter whose song is being recorded by others and who is asked to be in attendance in case some fixes are needed.
Those situations may require signing some papers so you and the producer have a good understanding of what's expected of each other. This is what this first of two articles is about.
In next month's column we'll look at the situation where you are the producer, possibly combined with other activities, like producer/songwriter/programmer/recordist/performer -- any or all of these tasks rolled into one.
Read more in the April 2011 issue of RECORDING!
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In The Studio
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Written by
Mike Metlay
In The Studio |
Written by
Mike Metlay
We get down and dirty with a closet full of mics, no preconceived notions, and the hottest new instrument the industry has seen in many a year.
You'd have to have been living under a rock for the past year not to hav......Expand
We get down and dirty with a closet full of mics, no preconceived notions, and the hottest new instrument the industry has seen in many a year.
You'd have to have been living under a rock for the past year not to have seen the revolution in modern living that Apple's iPad represents. It's more portable than any netbook, easier to use than any laptop, more powerful than any eBook reader, and more attention-grabbing than showing up at a party with an adult film star on your arm. There are nearly 2000 music-related apps for it already on the market, with more coming every day.
Let's face it, the iPad rocks the musical universe. It can be a multitrack audio recorder, a remote control surface for everything from digital consoles to computer-based synthesizers, a virtual fake book (complete with automated page-turning), a music education tool for everything from history and notation to pitch recognition, a metronome, a tuner, an emulation of a gazillion different traditional instruments from the ukulele and trombone to the Mellotron (yeah, you knew I had to get that one in there!), a whole variety of entirely new musical instruments never before heard or played, an audiovisual/interactive music/meditation generator, and a source of personal trivia and tour dates for a whole stable of pop stars from Hollywood to Bangkok. If there's anything the iPad can't do in the world of music, it's probably not worth doing.
But this is RECORDING, the magazine for the recording musician, and let's face it, we know you want to cut through the B.S. and get to the really critical stuff you need to know before a client walks through your door with an iPad under his arm and an itch to record next year's YouTube magnum opus. You need to know...
...what? Find out in the April 2011 issue of RECORDING! (Trust us, this article alone is worth the price of admission, if you want to be seen as anyone at all in the coming iPad revolution!)
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Chris Cox Remixes Michael Jackson
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Interviewed by
Lorenz Rychner
Chris Cox Remixes Michael Jackson |
Interviewed by
Lorenz Rychner
A lesson in long-distance collaboration under pressure: Jody den Broeder and Chris Cox remix the song "Monster" from Michael, making a 91 BPM vocal sound good at 128 BPM, and building a new Dance track around it. Chris Cox tells us how.
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A lesson in long-distance collaboration under pressure: Jody den Broeder and Chris Cox remix the song "Monster" from Michael, making a 91 BPM vocal sound good at 128 BPM, and building a new Dance track around it. Chris Cox tells us how.
Chris, the last two times we looked in on you, your remixes you described for us were compilations turned into megamixes, of songs by Hannah Montana and Christina Aguilera. This time it's Michael Jackson, and it is not a compilation?
Chris Cox: This one is a good oldfashioned single remix package. The song is called "Monster", and it's Michael Jackson, featuring 50 Cent. It's on the album Michael that just came out. 50 Cent does a guest rap in the middle of "Monster".
When was the original recorded?
CC: I don't know. There is such a huge back catalog -- every time he made an album he'd record so many more songs than made it onto the release, there must be a lot we haven't heard yet.
Read more in the April 2011 issue of RECORDING!
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