After reading the marketing hype on Arboretum's web site for their plugin effects package, I was almost drooling at the idea of testing them out. Are they worth it? At $299, they are certainly less expensive than some competing effects packages. One of the nice things about Hyperprism is the logical set of tools that it provides - almost 30 different plugins - if your software will allow you to chain direct-x plug-in effects, you can take, for instance, the noise gate plugin and gate a reverb, a classic effect made famous by Phil Collins and others. I was able to get quite a few chained up on a mono track in Cakewalk. Of course, the Vocoder is what I was dying to hear, but due to some technical difficulties, I got much less use out of it than I did their HyperVerb(TM), which is Arboretum's Flagship product. All of the Hyperprism effects sport a similar user interface - a set of sliders and buttons at the top, ouput level controls on the left, and a real-time controller, the X and Y axis of which can be...

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Walter Murch is known as the film editor and sound mixer for some of the best movies of our times - the Godfather, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient are just a few. Recently a popular Pro Audio magazine interviewed Mr. Murch in a special audio-for-video section. However, the topics discussed did not really go into technique and technology, but focused more on aesthetics. I wanted to find out more about what technology he uses when mixing for picture. Walter Murch

Walter told me that he is the only person who actually does the editing AND the sound mixing on feature films, an approach he developed at Zoetrope which he helped found with Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. I dropped in on Walter at his farmhouse in Marin County, California where I asked him too many questions over a cup of tea. He had just returned from Cannes a couple of days before with his re-edit of Orson Welles "Touch of Evil"....

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I was tired of turning up the inputs on my mixer to record my hiss, um, I mean my Bass guitar and decided it was time to get a direct box. I didn't know what to get, so I asked the folks who made my bass - Warrior Instruments (http://www.warrior-w1.com) what to get - they recommended the Bass Driver DI. I on the other hand didn't want to spend the $250 dollars to buy a little box. I went out and bought a Rolls Adb 2 for $40, which actually sounds great on my acoustic guitar with a Dean Markly Pro-Mag soundhole pickup, but not really what I wanted for bass guitar. After annoying my favorite salesguy at Banana's At Large, testing various doo-dads and processors, I decided to blow the bucks and get the Bass Driver. (My advice to the cheap and those on tight budgets - give it up, spend the money, do it right, you won't be sorry, and you can always sell it if it's worth anything in the first place)

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I've been using the Behringer Composer for a few weeks and so far I'm very happy with it. The cost is low ($250) yet the unit is very transparent, with fast gate response. The Composer is a dual-channel compressor / expander, noise gate, and peak limiter. It has the basic control you would expect on a compressor (threshold, attack, decay, ratio, etc) as well as an Automatic setting. It also includes less-than typical 8-segment LED meters to indicate gain reduction and signal level. The Composer features -10 / +4 inputs to match to any of your pro audio gear. It also includes a sidechain, which will allow you to compress only certain bands. This is a great feature on such an inexpensive compressor. Behringer Composer

I'm running my synths through three mixers - a Yamaha DMP11 digital mixer, a Mackie 1202, and a Korg 168rc, each of which add their own brand of hiss to the mix. The 168 is the end of the chain...

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