Joel Braverman

Winter NAMM 2001 - an Odd-Essey

Mon, 01 Jan 2001 00:00:00 GMT

Every time I go to Los Angeles, I worry about my soul. It might just be a fear that I might actually start liking LA, and then I might want to live there. Or perhaps the danger is real...

More...

Samplitude 2496 v5.31

Wed, 01 Dec 1999 00:00:00 GMT

In May of last year ProRec brought you a comprehensive and exhaustive report on Samplitude 2496. Since then, several major improvements have been made to the software package. This report outlines some of the most recent changes to the program. If you're looking for a complete review of Samplitude 2496 in general, please read Jim Roseberry's review.

The most notable improvement to Samplitude 2496 is the new 5.1 surround mixing engine with Dolby Digital encoding and vectorized automatic mixing. The second is MIDI - you can now play and record MIDI from within Samplitude, partially eliminating the need to run a separate sequencer synced up with Samplitude during mixdowns.

Other major improvements include the ability to import and export 24 bit files from other systems. This was extremely useful to me when I needed to de-noise a 24 bit file from a ProTools/Logic audio system. It wasn't exactly easy to import the file, as things are stored somewhat differently on the Mac, but Samplitude provides enough options that I eventually figured it out.

One thing that has not been improved is the manual. Version 5.31 still sports the old manual and does not mention the new features. I was left up to my own devices to figure them out. I wish they would keep the manual up to date with the software.

I did call Samplitude support for one problem I was having. In the past I have primarily used 2496 as a mixdown and mastering deck. When I tried to use it for multitracking, I had strange latencies when monitoring the mix while recording, random amounts of delay between recorded tracks would occor.

Tech support set up a system fairly similar to mine to test: Sonorus, Adaptec, PII300. They were not able to reproduce the problem. After much intensive experimentation, I tried disabling the two options in the Sonorus Card control panel: "Play all active channels on first play command" and "Record all active channels on first record command" as these were options for slower systems that had trouble starting all track recording at once. Well, that fixed it right away. Testing showed my recordings were now in tight sync.

Samplitude 2496 Surround Mixer

I really really wanted to try out the 5.1 mix engine, but my monitoring is just two channels out of my mixing board. What could I do? I improvised! I ran the aux outs to another power amp and set up another pair of monitors behind me. What about the LFE and Center channel? Well, I'm sure you wouldn't want to mix a feature like this, but I hooked up my bass amp to one channel of another audio card (SB-Live) and a cheap multimedia speaker to the other channel. Samplitude in 5.1 mode let me assign each channel individually to any output, and I was up and running with 6 channels of sound. In addition, a stereo DirectX plugin can be inserted on the front pair, or the rear surrounds the LFE and the center channel each get their own insert.

Since there was no documentation, I was looking all over to see if there was an option for joystick control of each channel's panning. There wasn't as far as I could see. That seemed like a bummer until I plugged in my joystick (a Microsoft USB Joystic) and it worked right away!. Cool. When mixing in realtime though, it was a bit jumpy, the sound source currently selected would jump from place to place, although the automation recording was smooth.

The automation in 5.1 mode is recorded as a set of vectors with little handles for editing, just like the normal volume and pan vectors that samplitude has in regular mode.

I wish I could say I tried the MIDI, but I didn't. My way of working wth Samplitude at this point is still primarily as a mixdown deck. I understand that in the next major relase SEK'D will bring in a much more comprehensive set of MIDI features. There is also now a built in reverb in the mixer section and I have not used it yet.

The user interface of Samplitude is one of the main things that people have complained about over the years, and it has not changed very much. However, after using Samplitude since 1997, I have decided that I like the user interface for the most part. Almost every function is one keystroke away. A few require a control-key, and some make you click a button to activate. I wish there was a way to zoom in to a selected range with one keystroke. That would dramatically improve the speed of editing.

Surround Automation Module

One nice feature that has existed for quite a while, that I never used is the auto crossfade. Recently I was restoring a recording from cassette tape, and this feature helped me to get rid of miniscule distortions in the recording. I will say however, that I have seen the auto-crossfade in the new version of Logic 4.0 and Samplitude's isn't quite that tranparent - I had to zoom in and tweak quite a bit to get the results I wanted.

Overall, this is an impressive upgrade - 5.1 mixing, Dolby Digital output, MIDI support, support for 24 bit and 32 bit integer and floating point files (but you have to download and install the latest version of Quicktime for Windows from Apple to use it - a serious download at about 8 MB).

Winter NAMM 1999

Mon, 01 Mar 1999 00:00:00 GMT

The forces of life were against my trip to the Namm show this time. Everything conspired against me, but I did make it down for one day, and I took a bunch of pictures with a borrowed Sony DV Camcorder. (Techie corner - they were digitally transferred to an AVID and the stills were extracted from there). I've provided a little information on the stuff I saw that I liked, and some links to the respective companies if the products sound interesting to you.

Down in the Basement

If anyone was hoping for as spectacular a NAMM show as last year, they were somewhat disappointed.

There were some interesting new things, but for the most part it was the same old stuff with a few little changes. The only place that truly had some major innovations was to be found in a corner of a basement of the convention center. Down there, clustered within a few booths of each other, were the softsynth manufacturers. Native Instruments, Bitheadz, and Sounds Logical were all promoting some hot new software sound generators, samplers and audio processing software.

Waves also had their high tech booth nearby. If you use a PC, the dongle is here to stay, sorry. Apparently the Radium group has really taken a chunk of profits on the only product they make that is dongle free. Other companies told me they have decided that it's no use trying to fight piracy and just accept the loss as part of life.

Other companies also consigned to the same basement hall were DAL showing their 24 bit card-D, Minnetonka software, and Frontier Designs with their new 24 bit Tango and light pipe cards.

Chapped Stick

Down in the lobby, a smarmy looking buffed dude played pretty melodies on a chapman stick, the ultimate tool for musical masturbation (it even look like that's what he's doing!), while a crowed looked on. I've taken the liberty of providing a snapshot of his musical exhibitionism.

Not to say that while wandering about during my short stay, I didn't see anything cool. The gold plated U87 was cool. The Fred Flintstone drum kit - made with skin drums - was quite cool. And speaking of drums, the high-tech kettle drums for orchestra were cool too. Why? There was no kettle! Check 'em out:

If Bill Gates was 2 feet taller...

...he would be Greg Hendershot of Cakewalk Corp. I finally met the founder of Cake Tone. He's a nice guy. He still does a little programming for them too. The newest thang from them is a room simulator plugin for creating virtual rooms. Sounds cool.

When you Get to Heaven they give you a Bass

Warrior Instruments was showing its latest line of hand made Bass guitars. JD, the owner explained to me that his life was transformed by a spiritual experience, which took him from drug addiction to Christianity and that the instruments Warrior makes are an expression of their deep religious feelings. The guitars are certainly beautiful, made from rare African and other hard woods, like Purple Heart and Zebra wood.

Steinberg and ResRocket conspire to rule the world

They have a new product that enables on-line musical collaboration via the internet. It's based on MP3 and Midi, and produces the illusion that you are working together in real time. Its the next big thing, so they tell me, and I believe them.

The Pod People

The Line 6 POD sounds damn cool for a fucking computer chip. Just don't go to sleep with one in your basement...

The Emu Party

I got an invite to the E-mu after party, at Serafine studio's, an unparalleled example of Los Angeles architectural history. I walked up and down flights of stairs, around corners down halls, up to the roof, around the roof, and finally found the party. On the way I passed all these little rooms full of people tweaking E-mu's latest gadgets. I had some interesting conversations, flirted with a few of Serafine's fine female ex-employees, ("I used to work here, I'm an actress now") found out the truth (the girl has a day job), ate some great food, catered by On Location Catering, drank some beer and stared at the utterly peculiar cloud formations in the LA sky, while discussing Art Bell with On Location's Colleen Stewart.

Autoscore

Tue, 01 Dec 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Many people have expressed a desire for a transcription tool that would let them take the melodies they hear in their minds, and convert them to music notation, or to transcribe an instrumental solo in order to more easily learn it.

Autoscore is a program from "Wildcat Canyon Software" (WCS) that attempts to fill this need. Although it isn't perfect, Autoscore does seem to do the job to some degree, but there may be some MIDI cleanup left to do afterwards. A skilled singer who can sing on key most of the time will get much more use out of this product than the average person.

The product was sent to me in two flavors - Deluxe and Pro. Deluxe appears to allow step entry only. It comes with MidiSoft Studio for Windows, but will work with other sequencers, like Cakewalk.

The Pro version ships with Cakewalk Home Studio, which is pretty much the old standard Cakewalk 3.01 sequencer, sans a few nice features. It appears to install Home Studio by default. Fortunately, it does work with the newer versions of Cakewalk. I set it up to work with version 8.01.

The package came with two floppy disks, a manual, and an el-cheapo Labtec microphone. Being the equipment snob that I am, I tossed the microphone into a file cabinet drawer and attempted to set the system up to work with my Rode NT1 mic, via my digital mixer and Sonorus card. More on this later.

Autoscore works as a virtual midi driver - the program attempts to detect the pitch of a singing voice, or of an instrument. Each time you sing a note, Autoscore creates a midi event that can be recorded into your sequencer. in Autoscore Pro there is also a step entry mode - the program devotes more resources to pitch detection, and doesn't have to analyise timing as heavily in this mode. However, I find that unless I can hear background music to harmonize with with, I don't sing very close to pitch, so for me this mode isn't very useful. Autoscore also has a percussion mode for transcribing rhythms.

It will load into your system tray, or as the "Autoscore Control Window" which has the same functions. The file menu allows you to pick the sequencer that you use with Autoscore.

There are also some menus that allow you to configure autoscore to more correctly track your voice, such as setting the upper and lower limits of your range (accomplished with a combination of microphone and mouse)

There are several dialogs which help you configure the program to work with your system. One is the Test Microphone dialog.

This dialog, while not intended to, is the only thing that will allow you to actually use Autoscore in a performance, where you could hear the midi tracking your voice, like the old Fairlight Pitch Tracker, or the IVL Pitchrider. You essentially go through a list of volume and feedback tests, to make sure that the system can get a good read on your mic levels.

I am not a highly skilled singer. However, singing against backing tracks brought about 90% accuracy in pitch tracking as opposed to singing a melody a capella, which was way off. Singing a capella resulted in barely recogniseable melody.

Some of the features of Autoscore include Constrain to Key, and "Tru-Trak" mode - Constrain does just what it sounds like - forces the driver to only output within a given scale. Tru-Trak mode tries to track the pitch wiggles of your voice with pitch bend.

Initally I was not too happy with Autoscore's accuracy as a pitch tracker. But recently I picked up a "Soundblaster Live" card, strictly for use as a cheap sampler. It has 1/8" audio inputs and outputs, so thought I would give Autoscore another try, this time using the original mic cheezeball microphone that came with it. Guess what? The pitch tracking was way more accurate using the toy microphone! "It's not that it's [the mic] calibrated for the program...it really just picks up your pitch and very little ambient noise"

Autoscore is useful for picking out melodies of songs. If are trying to learn, say, the bass line, you just have to be able to hum the bass line (actually the program dosn't like humming - it's better if you go "doo doo dee dee") while listening to the song. As far as I can tell, unless you are an extraordinary a capella singer, you won't get good results trying to use this program in a Raw sense to record your melodies.

The manual suggests that it might take a while to learn to use Autoscore. I wish there was a sort of Artificial Intelligence type of "learning" process, where in it wasn't just me learning to sing the way Autoscore needs me to in order to accurately track the notes. Autoscore should try to learn and compensate for user voice quirks, for instance the way that a voice starts off key and drifts into tune, or vice versa.

I went through a period where my Win 98 system was not working properly, so I went to NT - and had to run all my music hardware using beta drivers (Opcode, Sonorus). Autoscore doesn't have NT drivers. At some point, NT may be the OS of choice for audio processing - some day when all the manufacturers completely support it - which sure as hell ain't today. Will there be NT drivers for AutoScore in the future? I was told it was in the original plan but they won't be developed unless there is more demand from users.

Other improvements to the interface would be a "MIDI constrain" where you could pick the key that Autoscore would track into, from a MIDI keyboard. I received good response from WCS for my questions and suggestions.

Overall, I think Autoscore is a very useful program. However, I'm not sure how well it will work for those who wish to really just compose music by just humming the melody that is floating in their heads, unless they are good singers in the first place.
As a transcription tool, or to help learn parts or to double a vocal part in a song with a synth track, it is excellent.

For more info contact: http://www.wildcat.com

Gettin' Back To the Music

Tue, 01 Sep 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Cosmic Message...

Many years ago, I had a job working at IBM, a good two hours away from where I live. Because of the distance, I stayed near the job site during the week, and drove home on weekends, which meant I was not playing an instrument anywhere near as often as I was used to. I felt I was losing touch with it. One week, I stopped into a book store, and thumbed through some sort of mythic adventure book, possibly by which was all about getting back some kind of lost spiritual art. Then I went to the magazine rack, picked up some music rag, and flipped to the back page where there was a large ad for a recording console entitled "Get Back The Art"

It's still a meaningful message to me now.

Time Travel

A friend of mine loaned me a CD of Electric Light Orchestra's Time the other day. Wham. Some people talk about roots music being the blues, and jazz. Well, to me the roots music is the music that turned me on, blew my mind, and moved my emotions. It's what made me want to be a musician in the first place. Listening to this cutting edge electronic rock music again after 15 or more years, brought me back to those old feelings again. Its also amazing to hear what was done with 1981 technology, which does not in any way sound old fashioned. Most people think of Blues and Jazz as their root music because they were brought up on it, and it was what turned them on to music.

...Poppa Jes' don' understand...

Me, I'm a child of the modern age - the music that turned me on usually turns off most jazz, rock and blues aficionados - and especially my parents - even though my father is a scientist, he never could get into it - he listens to the Grateful Dead, Dylan, Marley, anything you can shake a spliff at.

The year in Review

I've been spending a good bit of the last few months testing new audio and MIDI software and hardware, both for beta and review purposes. But in the past few days, I've just been doing music - recording for myself and a few other people. It really feels good to sit down and record something, or even to just sit down and play the piano without turning on any electronics, though I feel a bit guilty if I don't record it, with the piles of equipment sitting over to the right of the piano.

Yes, its easy to get caught up in the excitement of technology, the possibilities that it opens up. But it also takes time to install, configure, troubleshoot, and then learn new products. Time that might be spent creating music. The new equipment opens up new vistas, but one must also take the time to explore those new areas before opening up new ones. Those of us who are musicians, need to remember from time to time that the technology is the means, and not the goal

I'm still using Cakewalk version 6.01, even though 7.01 has been out for a few months. But I know Cake 6.01 works with my equipment, almost never crashes, and I'm well versed in all its functions. If someone comes into my studio, I know I can record and mix at least 20 tracks of audio without any severe hiccups. I've added a few pieces of outboard gear - a new drum box from Alesis, and an ART (cosmic, man) stereo tube mic pre, but they require minimal configuration to work with my system.

Get Back the Art

After a year of furious upgrades, testing and experimenting, I'm glad to finally getting back down to the whole purpose of this equipment in the first place - recording music. It's like listening to an old album from high school - a welcome return to home. I'll still be reviewing equipment, testing software and trying out new toys, but it's important to remember what it's all about - music.

Cool Tools For MIDI Processing

Sat, 01 Aug 1998 00:00:00 GMT

Since I was a teenager, I've been enamored of music by Kraftwerk, Jean-Michael Jarre, Ultravox, Vangelis, and others. Unfortunately, with the exception of the built in Arpeggiators on some keyboards, MIDI has never been quite up to the task of producing this kind of music, unless it is through-composed (in other words, you program and play every note and filter setting). That is why I'm thrilled with some of the new software products that emulate the old step sequencers and arpeggiators. Here are some of the coolest ones I've found:

Seq-303

Seq-303 from Techno-Toys is a really cool little piece of software. It is a sixteen step programmable sequencer with some really neat features. It is called Seq-303 presumably because it functions in a similar way to the old TB-303 and TR-606, and attempts to emulate the 303's style of portamento,or "glide". I downloaded it from http://www.technotoys.com a few months ago, and liked it so much that I registered it after a few days of use. For each of 16 notes, you can set pitch, velocity, any controller settings, RPN and NRPNs, and turn on and off portamento for a TB-303 like glide effect. It lets you create and switch between up to 16 different pattern sets.

You can also tweak it on the fly - pressing the "r" key will randomize the settings for whichever tab you happen to be on - note, velocity, pan, etc. Each page can be configured for a different parameter. Now lets say you have a nice sounding sequence, and you want to add another part from another synth. You can load up another instance of Seq-303 and set it to a different port, channel and patch creating a separate pattern that will run in sync automatically with the first one. In fact you can run as many instances as your computer can handle. I maxed out around 8 on my PII 300. I maxed out my screen real estate before that, and had to set my video card to "panning" mode, to get them all tiled on the same screen.

The glide function is quite interesting, as Seq-303 allows you to turn it on and off for any note, and there is a slider to control the portamento speed. All your "performances" with Seq-303 can be saved as standard midi files, which you can open with Cakewalk or any program that will read an SMF.

Other good useful features of Seq-303 - the MUTE button, so you can mute one instance while the others keep playing, and the various on the fly changes you can make - pressing G will gang all the sliders together so you can move all of them at once, changing the overall pitch and pan, the ability to change the key of the pattern with MIDI input, and the ability to force a pattern to a particular key, major or minor by pressing the F key. The rhythm can be changed by clicking on different buttons - Eighth notes, Sixteenth Notes, Triplets, can all be selected. A sequence can also be played in random order, and "Brownian Motion" an algorithm based on the random motion of molecules. The length of a sequence can be shortened dynamically as well, all while staying in sync with other instances that are running.

While Seq-303 is a pretty complete piece of software, which will run on windows 95 or NT, I would like to see some additional features - like the ability to send a patch change before each note, something I manually do for a certain effect after files are recorded, and an option to integrate all instances with one interface - Seq-303 takes up a good bit of screen real estate. Another problem is that in order to start using a new instance, I need to stop the program and then start playing again, which is rather annoying. The Force To Key could also be a little more useful if it allowed you to select with a single keystroke, instead of a dialog box.

Arp-X8

Arp-X8 is another product from Techno-Toys. Its a multitimbral Arpeggiator that can work alone, in sync with Seq-303, or, like most MIDI software, to an external clock source. Arp-X8 is 8 arpeggiators in one- layed out similar to Seq-303, each tab has settings for a separate arpeggiator, where you can set different parameters for each arpeggiator, such as the keyrange that it responds to, velocity sensitivity, key order, and like in Seq-303, the type of motion - up, down, random, brownian, and some semi-random settings like Mostly Up, Mostly Down, Mostly Up And Down. You can also determine if a given arpeggiator will play only while you hold down the keys on your keyboard, or if it will keep playing till you press another set - "latched mode" as it is called. You can also set it to play while the sustain pedal is pressed.

Like Seq-303, you can pick the rhythm - quater, eighth, 16th 32nd etc, and dotted notes as well. There is also a small grid where you set the accent pattern. You can also set and store up to 12 different complete setups, which you can switch between dynamically.

Arp-X8 is a very nice arpeggiator - with many options not normally found on an arpeggiator. One option that would be nice is if they added the glide feature that is in Seq-303 to the Arp-X8 as well. In addition, the control for setting the key range for each arpeggiator is somewhat difficult to set with the mouse, especially on a high screen resolution. Like Seq-303, multiple synchronized instances of Arp-X8 can be launched.

Overall, the Techno-Toys represent an incredible resource for creating arpeggiated and step sequenced music, and the price is incredibly low - Seq-303 is 35 dollars, and Arp-X8 is 25 dollars. I purchased mine online and recieved my reg code a day and a half later. You can download and evaluate them from http://www.technotoys.com

Building Blocks for MIDI

Another interesting product for creating experimental music is Building Blocks For MIDI (BB for short) from AuReality. For those of you familiar with Opcodes Max product, this is similar - a tool for producing creating interactive music.

BB presents a blank slate on which you can add a variety of different "modules" - input devices like mouse, joystick and midi, clock and "waveform", (useful for varying continuous controllers) generators, mathmatical formula modules, and output modules. There are also sequencer and arpeggiator modules, and while individually they are perhaps not as powerful as the TechnoToys, they can be combined to form a powerful whole.

The whole concept of BB is that every module has an input and an output - and with only a couple of exceptions, you can connect any input to any output, letting velocity control pitch, which can change the clock frequency which can step the arpeggiator to the next step.

I downloaded the 30 day demo of AuReality from http://www.midiwold.com/AuReality and was impressed enough that I decided to register it a few days later. Like many other products, it is registered through Kagi online (out of Berkely, CA). So I gave them my credit card number, and waited for my reg code. Instead, I got a message saying "Sorry the Author is on vacation, will be back on the 17th of August."

Boy was I pissed. I have to wait almost a month before I can save anything I create in BB. One would hope that shareware authors would be capable of automating their registration process, so that software could be registered while they were sunning their buns on some tropical island somewhere.

None of this is to say that Building Blocks for MIDI is not an excellent program. It has tremendous potential, if you are interested in a product for creating dynamic interactive music projects - in fact, if you had a MIDI lightshow controller, this could be used for all kinds of interactive effects.

One place that appears to be lacking is synchronization - there doesn't appear (although I may have just missed it) to be a way to synch to an external clock source, which would be a problem if you were to try to use it with any other MIDI software product.

If you are interested in experimental music, interactive installations, or stoichastic music, or are looking for a Max-like product on the PC platform, then this is the product for you - if you can wait a while to truly begin using it.

Hyperprism Direct-X Effects

Wed, 01 Jul 1998 00:00:00 GMT

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 assigned to any of the sliders. You can actually set the range that the sliders operate on by typing numbers into the boxes to the left and rigtht of the sliders.

A representative set of presets is available for most of the effects, and you can create your own presets as well. The HyperVerb(TM) is definitely the best sounding effect of the bunch. It sounds pristine and beautiful, with no "repeating" or beating artifacts that some other reverbs have. The other reverbs in the pack didn't quite grab my ears as much as this one did, but they were still useful.
images/Wc2bc29768d54d.gif" width="450" height="448" alt="">
The main problems that I had with Hyperprism-DX were the GPF's that I would get from some of the effects, in different programs. I'm still running cakewalk 6.01, and the first effect I tried out (couldn't resist) was the Sonic Decimator, which is a bit-rate/depth reduction device, to add grit, aliasing and distortion to your pristine sounding recordings. Useful for Grunge, techno, rap, anything where you DON'T want it to sound pretty.

It was indeed decimating. As soon as I opened up the Sonic Decimator, it GPF'ed, taking Cakewalk, and any other audio software I tried to open up afterwards with it. Only after rebooting, was I able to open the Decimator in Samplitude 2496 and Cakewalk and experiment with it. This is one effect that I suggest you turn down the volume when you play with it, to avoid ruining your speakers and your ears. It can produce some seriously nasty sounds.

I had the most trouble with the Vocoder plugin - Samplitude has a real-time mode that allows you to pump live inputs through the effects. I was not able to do this with the Vocoder - it would crash everytime I opened it. I was able to test it in non-realtime fashion, applying the effect to a stereo waveform. It also crashed several times in Cakewalk, but it is intended to be used on a stereo file, and Cake 6.01 architecture doesn't appear to support this correctly.

I put a call in to Arboretum as I was rather disappointed, and was informed that "it works fine in Sound Forge". I loaded up the Sound Forge demo that was included on the Hyperprism CD, and yes, it does work fine in Sound Forge. I forwarded some of the debug info from the GPF's to Todd at Arboretum, and was rewarded with a positive response - they had found some bugs, and were now hard at work cranking out fixes for them which they expected to complete in a day or two. Unfortunately, they were not ready at the time of this writing.

Most of the other plugins worked fine. Some are:

Frequency Shifter

Great for making things sound weird - its similar to a ring modulator, but it does stranger things to the spectrum of the sound - making my acoustic guitar sound kind of like a banjo, or a harpsichord or a dying alien with a plastic tube in its mouth. Controls include mod frequency, LFO speed and depth, and feedback.

Ring Modulator

Produces metallic effects by modulating your source with a carrier. Use in a chain with the Frequency shifter for really weird sounds.

Pitch Changer

Not a Digitech quality pitch shifter, but you can get some interesting and usefuleffects.

Quasi-Stereo

A stereo widener - lets you play around with the stereo image.

Multi-Delay

An interesting multi-tap delay - the first two echoes are user defined, and the third is "the sum of delays 1 and 2" according to the help file.

With over 30 effects, including a compressor, Hyperprism is an almost-complete effects processing system. The HyperVerb(TM) is a really killer reverb sound, that performs as advertised, living up to the juicy PR on Arboretum's web site.

By using the various effects in combination, (like putting a compressor after the Sonic Decimator) it could be considered a replacement for an outboard effects box, and is capable of much longer effects chains than you would find on your average off the shelf reverb box - on a pentium II 300 I was able to process 8 different effects in a chain (on a mono track) simultaneously. On another test, I got 6 Hyperverbs to play on 6 tracks with two more tracks running un-effected.

Hyperprism needs a little work to perform stably with other popular software besides Sound Forge, although, after the initial crashes, it worked most of the time with Cakewalk. I swear, I didn't change a thing on my system. With Samplitude 2496, it was a little more crash prone, but I found out that there are some problems with Samplitudes's DirectX implementation that will probably be corrected in a maintainance release.

Overall, Hyperprism is a very good deal for the dough, and with a little more work from the developers, could turn out to be an excellent investment in some basic tools - and a few fancy ones - to help add color to your sound.

Walter Murch

Mon, 01 Jun 1998 00:00:00 GMT

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".

At work mixing Apocalypse Now

I noticed a picture in a recent interview of you in a small studio - is that your personal studio?

That was up in the barn and I was editing what you might call a Directors Cut of "Touch of Evil", which Orson Wells directed forty years ago and any project that I take on, particularly short term projects I can just do them up in the barn, renting whatever happens to be the available and appropriate technology for that particular film. So what I had there was an Avid, which is a film editing machine, which has up to 24 tracks of sound that run along with it, but you can only actively work on 8 at one time. If you get a track the way you want it, you can make it one of the 'Sleeper' tracks, sort of 'demote' it to playback only, and then move another track up into the active area, so you can play back 24, but you can only actively work on 8 tracks. Everything just ran through a Mackie Mixer which was also feeding audio from CD's and cassettes and DAT machines, and a DA88 which is an 8-track recorder which uses High 8 video tape.

How do you feel about working with a computer based system versus something like an analog tape machine?

WM: Well, for me it's fine. There are some people who claim to be able to tell the difference between professional digital equipment and analog equipment. I can't. The advantages operationally of using digital are so great, I focus on that and not on what I guess might be the "digital" sound of it. "Touch of Evil" was a film that was done in 1958, so there wasn't a wide range soundtrack to begin with.

Were you taking the existing sound track and mixing it with some sounds that were recorded now, or...?

Well no, we had separate dialog, and music and sound effects from the original magnetic masters, so we loaded those via DA88s into the Avid, onto the Avid's hard disk, and I was editing them, supressing the music in some cases, lifting the level of the effects in some cases. All of this was following Orson Welles notes. Where we had to make changes, we simply stole (sound) from various places within the film. The goal was to make something that still sounded like it was all done in 1958 with a minimum of disruption of that particular kind of sound.

Did at any point in the process you use any kind of noise removal software, like (Sonic Solutions) No-Noise?

I have a device here which we also used down in Los Angeles when we did the final mixdown, which is a single ended noise reduction and hiss reduction device. The Behringer DHR 2000 - its a relatively inexpensive device - around $300, but its a very effective suppressor of noise, from wherever the noise comes from - it doesn't matter if its tape hiss, or hiss from pre-amps or hiss from a tea kettle in the background of a scene, it will do its best to get rid of it. I've used it on all the films I've done since...1990. (!)

(At this point Walter's wife Aggie who does radio programming for station KPFA in Berkeley came in, and he went off to help her remove some low end from an interview on her personal Pro-Tools system. "We're a Mac kind of family" said his daughter Beatrice. When he returned he had an oddly shaped black box which he plunked down in front of me)

(incredulous)....its a Radio Shack...decible meter...

Yeah, you can buy them for about $30 and when I am lining up films in the theaters, I take that in and use it to make sure that all the speakers are lined up correctly, that the level is being played back at the same level as when we mixed it. Some times the theaters play the sound too loud or too soft.

So you do that when you are having a preview for a theater full of...critics?

(laughs) Or a preview for an audience. Any time you are going into a situation with a film that is not yet finished, there are a lot of variables, so you try to eliminate as many of them as you can. Once the film is done though, there is really nothing you can do - you put the sound tracks together as best you can, and then its just up to the theaters to do the right job.

I've heard that many theaters have equipment that is in poor states of repair.

I think that was something that George Lucas tried to rectify and is rectifying with the whole THX program. When Dolby went into theaters, what they sold the theater was the processing equipment that took the soundtrack track off the film, sent the signal to an amplifier, a Dolby amplifier that then made a line-out signal to the power amps in the theater. The problem was that the power amps and the speakers and the wiring was up to the theater. Dolby's responsibility merely was to get the sound read off the projector via a special optical reader, into their processor, and from there produce a line out and they could 'tune' it to the theater, but the power amps might be widely deficient to the size of the room, or in extreme cases, sometimes the cones of the right hand speaker might be blown... and so there would be all kinds of problems and Dolby would just simply leave a memo saying "it would be good if you fix this", but economics being what they are, many times the owners would just say "bye, thank you" and just kept on as usual.

That's happenning less and less because theater owners are realizing more and more the importance of sound to help sell tickets. But they were bothered by a lack of standards, so what George did was to take responsibility for the power amplifiers and the lines for the speakers, and even manufactured special crossovers that help get the best out of certain speakers. George simply did something that should have been done all along but he did it in a way that standardized everything and gave people an idea of how high the bar was set, in order to be able to jump over it.

One movie you did that I saw a while ago was First Knight...Do you recall what equipment you used on that film?

That was released in SDDS which is the Sony system to get sound in the theater. There are really three delivery systems operating simultaneously now - there's Dolby, which has the most units out there in the world, and then there's DTS which I think is second, (Universal's Disk Based System). The sound track is separate from the film and it's running on a special CD which is in sync with the image. And then there is the Sony system, SDDS, which is digital sound on the film - its different from the other systems in that it gives you 5 channels of sound coming from behind the screen, All the systems are similar to each other - they all give a low frequency channel, they all have stereo surrounds, what the Sony system has in addition is two extra speakers behind the screen.

That film was pretty conventionally prepared in terms of the sound for the period - which we did in 1995, so with a few exceptions, it was done on magnetic tracks. It was prepared the way sound has been done in Hollywood for the last 30 or 40 years.

When It comes to lining up sounds on tape, I would imagine it would be much harder to do than on a computer based system where you could just 'nudge' it a few frames forward of backwards.

Well if you are used to cutting on film, it becomes second nature. But yeah, if you want to shift the sync of something in film, you have to shift it physically in its relation to the image, which means cutting out frames, before or after, or if you want to change the relationship of the sound within the soundtrack itself, you have to cut into the sound, physically - you are doing physically what you do electronically or virtually when you are working on a workstation.

a lot of splicing and dicing...

Yeah, you are physically cutting and then taping it back together, you are making something - a physical object which is a reel of film which will run in sync with the image. Whereas you do that only in a virtual sense when you are working on a workstation of some kind.

What dB level do you typically monitor at when you are mixing?

The standard now is 85 decibels per channel at 0 dB vu. Once you've set that level the question is what systems will give you the maximum headroom above that before you reach distortion. In conventional old mono films, up until say the mid 1970's, the maximum decibels you could get were 88, so you could get just 3 decibels over 0db vu without distorting.

Some of the new hardware is supposed to get you virtually unlimited headroom...

The limit you will meet eventually will be own ear capable of hearing this without damaging you ear.

The old mono peaked out at 88 dB maximum. When Dolby A came in the peak was raised to 91. When Dolby SR came in the peak was raised to 97 - with digital systems it could easily be 110 -115 dB, which was also true of 70mm releases. For instance, when we did Apocalypse Now, we were mastering to magnetic masters, and magnetic soundtracks can take up to 110 -112 dB without distortion. When they do distort its a progressive distortion, whereas when you distort digitally it's instant, and you really hear it, it's very similar to optical, where there is an actually almost physical wall that you hit where you cannot get any louder without distorting. I prefer not to go much over 100 dB So if average dialogue is reading 78, that gives you 22 dB of headroom, which is plenty.

When you are finished with a film, is that the last step, or is there a mastering step after that? Are you the last person to touch that film?

There is one more step: transfer to the digital optical format. That's supposed to be a completely neutral transfer from one medium to another without any tweaking or interpretation. What create for a Dolby digital master is a magneto-optical disk That's sent to a place in LA where they make an optical negative - changing the M.O. to beams of light they expose that on photographic film, and then that becomes the negative master of the soundtrack which is sent to the lab and then printed on the film. But its very rare that you would do anything at the transfer stage that you haven't already done - it has to be a hands off, do-it-by-the-numbers transfer.

So, this is different from mastering a record where there is still a lot of final interpretation. In film that stage is where we take all the theoretically balanced final tracks and make the last combination down to say, 6 tracks, which is called a printmaster. Two tracks in the case of Dolby SR, that's like an encoded 4-track. Sort of like FM stereo. The basis of the Dolby system since 1976 has been that they use a phase correlation system to take the three front channels and compress them down into left and right. If anything is in phase on those two tracks, its extracted and sent to the center speaker and that in-phase information is suppressed in the left and right channels by 6 dB. So there is a shoulder. The same signal is coming out of all the speakers, but noticeably louder in the center than on the sides. Then there's an out-of phase signal which is the surround information, very much like an FM signal. That's all technology as of 1994. Still exists as a backup, but when you go digital, every track is discreet, whereas with Dolby SR, no track is exclusively itself - its sort of like a soft stereo with mono mixed in.

Is that the similar to 5.1 mixing?

No, see the tracks in 5.1 are discreet - there in no matrixing. 5.1 is 3 speakers behind the screen, stereo left and right in the back, another speaker that's just low frequency, placed anywhere in the theater since low frequencies are non-directional.

Do you put one of those systems together here, or at a big studio.

Recently I've been working over at Berkeley over at Fantasy Records. Every studio that they have has a 5.1 setup.

What just happened in the last three years is that Tom Hohman, who created the THX system for theaters, has gone off on his own and created something called micro theaters - 5.1 systems you can put in your home or your studio - they are very carefully balanced and weighed speakers, such that you put yourself in the right place what you will hear will be identical to what you hear in a big theater.

The English Patient. What process did you follow for mixing that?

I produced a 'guide' track on the Avid, and then that was taken and transferred at a higher quality, onto a Sonic Solutions system at Fantasy Records, and then coming out of the Sonic solutions, after it had been cut, we would make transfers either onto 6 track film, or DA88's

What we just did on "Touch of Evil" because I was working on the finished soundtrack right from the beginning was to take my Avid sessions and re-create it, opening it up through an OMF (Open Media Framework) file and convert it into ProTools, which is another sound editing situation (Digidesign and Protools are both owned by Avid). That was a real timesaver, in the sense that all of my decisions cutting and fading in and fades out and level setting were maintained when the sound track was opened up in the ProTools environment.

So all they had to do was to tweak what I had done and refine it, because the tools that they have in ProTools are much more precise than what I have on the Avid.

On The English Patient all they really had to rebuild everything that I had done from scratch which was a time consuming process.

What audio systems are most common in the movie industry?

The three systems that are most commonly used in the industry are ProTools, Sonic Solutions, and WaveFrame. It really has to do with which system you are comfortable with. ProTools is a good system, my wife is using it upstairs for the radio programs that she does.

In a recent interview you expressed the desire to be able to capture the acoustic properties of an environment. That ability is available now with acoustic modeling software. Do you think that will change the way you work?

What I used to do was to actually go to the space that I wanted to capture, have two tape recorders and play the sound from one tape recorder into that space, and record the result on another tape recorder, and in the mix, have both tracks running simultaneously. That was just because I was dissatisfied with the echo chambers at the time which simply gave you a certain kind of twangy sound. But I wanted "gymnasium", and "auditorium" and "bathroom" and other sounds. Back in the 70's the only way was actually to go to the space and record it there.

You're a Mac user - do you think you would ever use a PC based system?

No. (laughs)

What are the deficiencies that you see in the technology at the moment.

We're in a transition phase, which means a lot of redundancy 100 years ago if you had a chandelier, it was likely to be BOTH electric and gas - electric was unreliable, and gas was dangerous. Film itself, the Celluloid part of film, is threatened and on the way out. But we have to live with one foot in the Digital world and one foot in the conventional Analog world and find a way to blend those two things, at least for the moment..

Do you think that Digital Video will replace Film?

I think it will. It won't be in the form we know it now, but I just think the economy of the whole process... I mean Godzilla made 7000 prints at... I don't know what they cost these days, but at least $5000 - That's 35 million dollars. If they were able to beam the film from a central station by satellite into the theaters, they would probably save many many millions of dollars. Kodak now has a digital projector that is reportedly the equal of film. It uses up a tremendous amount of memory, and its an expensive item because it isn't built on an assembly line. It just takes something to start a process going. 6 years ago probably 30% of films were done on Avid and 70% done on film. Now it's probably 10% done on film and 90% done on Avid.

Once those figures reach a certain level it becomes almost impossible to edit on film because all the support is headed in the digital direction, so it would become more expensive to edit on film. I think eventually there will be digital projectors in movie theaters, then it will become cost inefficient to do film.

What was Zoetrope and how did it start?

George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola and myself were all film students who had gone to film school in the mid-sixties. When we got out we found out that Hollywood was in a very depressed state. I think 1967-1968 was the absolute bottom of people going to movie theaters ever, so there wasn't the kind of money that there is today, or was back in the 40's. In addition the studios were still owned and operated by the people who had owned and operated them in the 40s - Jack Warner, Adolph Zukor, Walt Disney. Anyway. But they were all reaching retirement age, or about to die, and the idea of completely re-inventing Hollywood or did not occur to them or appeal to them. So we found ourselves frustrated not being able to get interesting employment. As a result we moved up to San Francisco, thinking that if we just changed where we were it might loosen things up a bit. We decided to make all low budget films and make them on location, and try to do as much as possible to lower the cost, and also provide a stylistic unity to the process.

As far as sound goes, it was really possible at that time because of the recent invention of the transistor - audio equipment was beginning to be miniaturized and so the cost was lower and the quality was nearing the professional level, and we had an intuition that this would open up the whole process in a way that had been impossible in the 40's and 50's.

Ok, One last question: When you go out in the field and record sound, what are your favorite microphones to use?

You know, it's been so long since I've done it... I've now become a film editor and mixer. That middle part of going out a recording them I actually don't do. When I was doing it, I liked the Shoeps Microphones.

I started out with Sennheisers, throughout the 60's and early 70's. There was something about them that sounded very good when you heard them on immediate playback, but when you had gone through several generations of transfers, the sound became a little peaky in the sibilant regions. Shoeps at the time had a little bit of a softer sound, but it aged well through different generations. That isn't really a problem any more with digital.

With analog, if things were calibrated right, the noise reduction systems are very good. On Apocalypse Now we had a 24 track with DBX noise reduction. We daisy chained a sound across all 24 tracks - copied the sound from track 1 to track 2, track 2 to track 3 track 3 to track 4 etc, and there was really no noticeable generation loss, even by the 24th track.

Well that should blow some illusions about what you can and cannot do with analog tape.

The Rainpeople (1969)
THX-1138 (1971)
The Godfather (1972)
American Graffiti (1973)
The Godfather, Part II (1974)
The Conversation (1974)
Julia (1977)
The Black Stallion (1979)
Apocalyspe Now (1979)
The Right Stuff (1983)
Return to Oz (1985)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)
Ghost (1990)
The Godfather, Part III (1990)
The Godfather Trilogy (1991)
House of Cards (1992)
Romeo is Bleeding (1994)
Crumb (1994)
First Knight (1995)
The English Patient (1996)
Touch of Evil (reconstruction) (1998)

The Tech 21 SansAmp Bass Driver DI

Fri, 01 May 1998 00:00:00 GMT

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)

The bass driver admittedly doesn't sound anywhere near as good as plugging into my friends JoeMeek compressor, (give it up, spend the money...) but it does sound good. The Bass Driver DI sports 6 knobs - bass, treble, presense, drive, level and blend, and a stomp switch. Turning up the drive and adjusting the blend hard clockwise gets you a kind of heavy metal distortion bass sound. I don't personally have any use for that. But adding ever so slight an amount of distortion does add a kind of interesting edge to the bass sound.

The documents bill the Tech 21 as also being a "Tube Simulator". Well, I don't own any tube hardware to directly compare it to, but it does sound somewhat organic. Mostly I use it to fine tune the sound of my bass guitar a little bit, and it also has a little bit of compression circuitry that seems to keep the levels from getting out of hand.

There are three outputs - XLR, 1/4 inch and a "parallel" output that is just a passthrough. You can run the Bass Driver off the phantom power on your mixer, or off a 9 volt battery. It also has the usual ground-lifter, so if you ever want to get yourself fried to a crisp you can do that too. (Memory of a friend of mine saying "it sure is weird, but every time I touch the door frame and the guitar I feel like I get stung by 1000 bees!" pops into my head)

Overall, I would say say the Bass Driver is a useful tool for recording and it has a nice solid warm sound which is why I bought it in the first place. I'm looking forward to testing out the new Acoustic Guitar DI box in the near future, and I will report back on it as well (but I'm still happy with my Rolls ADB2).

By the By - Tech 21's web site is really cool - check out the "onmouseover" stuff in yellow at the bottom of their home page: http://www.tech21nyc.com (make sure you put in the nyc part - there's another company named tech 21)

Behringer Composer

Wed, 01 Apr 1998 00:00:00 GMT

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 - it has inserts for a compressor or effects processor on four of its inputs - so that's where the Behringer goes. I use it primarily to reduce the signals from my synths - to prevent clipping my inputs - as well as hiss reduction and dynamic control.

I wanted to get familiar with each section of the compressor before I started using it, so first I worked with the compressor, then the peak limiter, and then the gate (which is what I'm happiest with). The gates open fast enough that I don't notice their existance. In fact, I turned on the gates experimentally and forgot all about them. Then I noticed a day or so later - what happened to all the noise?!

I appreciate the Auto feature of the compressor - I don't have to mess with the attack and decay other than setting the threshold and ratio, and it deals with the signal levels from there - very nice. The peak limiter is useful for getting as hot a signal as possible without clipping the A/D converters on the mixer.

The one weird thing is: the two knobs labled "Output" - they seem to control the INPUT level to the compressor -not the post processing level! Turning these up too high results in nasty distortion.

Probably a translation problem from German and Chinese.