Tag Archives: software

Gear of the Year Poll – From SCOREcast Online

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Saw this great poll SCOREcast Online. They are asking everyone for their vote on the Best Software of the Year for Music Production.

While I think all five of the choices are solid, two of them really stand out in mind. Kontact 4 is a definite candidate just based on how people are actually using it. Something that popular has to be a consideration.

My vote however, went to Melodyne DNA. This is a revolutionary piece of software that is really going to change how music production happens. In the demo I saw at NAMM, they took a guitar chord that had a single string out of tune and brought it into tune. They were also able to change the key of a whole song by changing the a single instrument. The ability to manipulate polyphonic audio is going to be huge for the industry. So I had to vote for that.

You can take the poll here:

NAMM 2009: Native Instruments Maschine

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Anyone who works with groove boxes and drum samplers knows that one of the drawbacks of sequencing is the slow hardware programming. This year, Native Instruments has combined the flexibility of the computer-based workstation with the ease and tactile process of the groove box with Maschine.

Maschine combines an intuitive on-sceen sequencer, sampler and over 20 high quality effects with real-time control and flexible routing into an inspiring Groove Production Studio. The hardware component features 16 pads, 41 buttons, and 11 rotary encoders dedicated to playing, recording, sequencing, automation, and arrangement. The software interface is a graphical editing environment that is eerily similar to Apple’s built in groove plug-in for Logic Pro. Easy inegration via VST, Audio Units, or RTAS into any host DAW.

From a musical standpoint, Maschine boasts over 5 gigs of studio-quality sounds and 14,000 plus samples. The onboard loops and patterns are perfectly suited for electronic, urban, and indirtronic genres.

More info online at www.native-instruments.com/maschine

NAMM 2009: Celemony Melodyne Editor

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One of my favorite and most useful tools in the studio is Melodyne. It’s great for making normal singers sound phenomenal and poor singers sound normal. It’s pitch correction an quantization features make cleaning up any audio mess a relative breeze.

One of the features sorely missed, however, has been the ability to edit different pitches on the same audio track, ie vocal harmonies where both singers are on the same track, but not on the same page intonation-wise. I missed it until now.

Celemony unveiled their new DNA technology this week, which allows for the recognition, correction, and editing of individual melodic parts within a polyphonic setting. Never again will your choirs have to sing in tune.

Other applications include cleaning up instrumental recordings, fixing guitar tuning, creative harmonization, etc… Scheduled for release in the spring

Songsmith – Intuitive Music Creation Tool or Just Plain Creativity-Zapping

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Songsmith (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/songsmith/), a supposed creative tool for music novices and professional musicians alike, is the latest arrival onto the computer music scene. However, unlike samples, loops, and other instrument tools, Songsmith auto-generates a musical track to your singing. Sounds pretty cool, huh?

Now, anyone who can hold together a tune, or has a musical idea in their head, can quickly find the chords to their musical thought — all without a lick of musical theory knowledge or performance experience.

My first inclination was to gag. But maybe it’s just the videos that Microsoft put on their site to show off the product. After all, this is the holy grail of song-writing — it’s as close to writing what you hear as you can get without having to spend 10,000 hours of cultivating musical expertise. I can see a product like this leading to musical innovation in a time when creativity has seemed to stagnate.

I can also see our creativity stagnating further as a result of complete stupification… Just rely on the computer to do the creative work for you. Soon we’ll have thousands of “new” songs where the emotion and creativity has been thrown out the window and replaced with computer generated algorithms. So much for personality and originality.

So how do you feel about it? An incredible music composition tool in the beginning stages? Or the complete and utter demise of the craft and creativity involved in creating new music?