Stomvi Trumpets are now the choice of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and you can buy them through Quicksound.
Stomvi trumpets now in stock
June 16th, 2009
PRS fights back
March 26th, 2009You’ve probably heard about the spat between YouTube/Google and the Performing Rights Society (PRS). The PRS have launched a new site - fairplayforcreators.com - which aims to highlight the issues of online earnings. Pete Waterman is quoted as receiving a massive £11 for over 100 million views of ‘Never going to give you up’, while poor old Mark Kelly from Marillion only made 0.6p from 10 million views of his band’s videos. In the meantime, Google continues to make revenue from advertising on the very same pages as these videos. Gone are the days when videos were promotional tools to encourage album or single sales - those sales are through the floor. In the newly-emerging music business these digital channels will all take-on new significance as potential income streams for artists. If music video has value to Google in driving ad revenue then it is a resource that should be rewarded fairly. Without seeing the figures it is difficult to determine what that rate should be, but given some of the headline figures we’re hearing you can’t help but feel that at present music makers are getting a raw deal. If you’re involved in creating music, make sure your voice is heard.
Music: it’s not as good as it used to be
March 24th, 2009Have you ever wondered why music seems to matter less and less in your life these days? Do you remember the albums you listened to as a kid, and how you knew every lyric and how you’d anticipate one song starting after the last? How you’d hide under the duvet with a crappy radio to get a fix on the latest chart hits? That feeling of emmersion as your favourite song kicked-in on your Dansette record player? Ok, I’m showing my age here, but my latest theory for my own waning interest in music isn’t to do with the rise of MP3, the demise of vinyl or the relatively new distraction of the internet. No, I reckon a lot of it is down to this: it all sounds crap. Read the rest of this entry »
10 reasons why your band sucks
March 9th, 2009
Experience is what you get just after you need it. Many bands make the same mistakes in their early (and often not-so-early) days, but as a wizened old pro I can help. Get a leg-up on the opposition as I reveal the top 10 reasons why your band sucks:
- Your songs are dull. Have you written songs, or have you just come up with patterns of notes that sort of fit together? Does your song have structure, or does it meander around pointlessly like a Sunday league midfielder? Does it have a memorable melody or hook? Does it take 3 minutes before anything happens like my DVD recorder? Get it tight - trim the fat. Make every bar count. Read the rest of this entry »
epicVerb 1.0.1
February 24th, 2009Bootsy has updated the fabulous free reverb epicVerb to v1.0.1. It’s a maintenance release so no major new functionality, but the biggie is it should now run on older SSE1 CPUs, like the AMD Athlon. Other highlights include lower memory usage and improvements to the modulation algorithm. Download the update here.
Take the amp sim test
January 27th, 2009
Electronic Musician have a very interesting article up comparing real guitar amps versus their software pretenders. Basically, they got a few classic amps in a studio and knocked up their equivalent patches in a few different software amp sims, before presenting the lot in a blind test to a few ‘name’ producers. The results are interesting, the take-home message of which is it is pretty much impossible to reliably distinguish an amp sim from the real thing. In addition, even if you spot it the amp sim may give you a ‘better’ or more useable sound, not to mention all the benefits of total recall and all that jazz. If you’re not convinced, check out the listening test and see if you can spot the real amp. The experiment is described here, and you can check out some discussion about the results in a video.
The audio gear industry is chock-full of opinion and ‘wisdom’ rarely based on hard evidence. This kind of testing really appeals to the scientist in me, as did the Focusrite Liquid Mix Challenge. At the end of the day if it sounds good it is good, whether it’s vintage valves or the latest DSP, and you should always be open to having your preconceptions challenged.
Cubase 5 revealed
January 15th, 2009
Cubase 5
Yup, it’s time to decide how brave you’re feeling and to maybe climb onto that upgrade ladder once again. Cubase 5 is coming with a load of new features designed to separate you from your beer money. In a nutshell, here are some of the highlights:
- Loopmash - a plug-in multi-track loop mixer / combiner thingie.
- Groove Agent One - a built in drum-machine / sample trigger.
- Beat Designer - a step-based rhythm programming tool.
- VariAudio - offline (in the wave editor) vocal tuning a la Autotune / Melodyne with time-stretching tools. Looks cool!
- PitchCorrect - a realtime pitch-correction plug-in.
- REVerence - a built-in convolution reverb plug-in complete with over 70 impulses. Nice.
- Better automation and midi controller data handling.
- VST Expression - tools to ease the pain of working with sample libraries with multiple articulations.
- 64 bit compatibility for Vista, lifting the 2GB limit!
- Total Export - track export selection options. Should be great for creating stems.
In all it looks like a fairly significant update, and it seems the tie-up with Yamaha has certainly yielded some fruit in the area of effects processing. Of course history tells us you’re a brave person to dive-in with a first release, but give it a few months (ok, maybe a few more than that) for the bugs to be ironed out and it may be an attractive upgrade. That attractiveness will probably depend on whether you already own plug-ins that do the job of many of the new features, or if you’re a ‘beats and loops’ kinda guy/gal (I’m not). You can check out a video of Cubase 5 in action from NAMM 2009 at AudioFanzine.
Update: Cubase 5 will cost £544.13 new, or £180.77 as an upgrade from Cubase 4 or, bafflingly, Cubase SX3. As a reasonably recent Cubase 4 owner that feels like a bit of a raw deal. Details in the Steinberg shop, or get it for cheaper at Dolphin.
Guitar Rig 3 updated to v3.2
January 14th, 2009
Native Instruments have announced the release of Guitar Rig 3.2 Update. Most of the update is around 64bit compatibility for Vista users, but there are a few minor feature updates too, including a MIDI input filter. I’m hoping the latter might allow me to correct the expression pedal input when using the wah wah (I’m using a Boss EV-5), as at the moment it’s backwards. I actually just got Guitar Rig 3 a couple of weeks ago. It still has, to my ears, noticeable digital artifacts on some distortion sounds, but there’s a lot of power under the hood for tweaking and the range of effects on-tap is fantastic. As ever, the presets don’t really do the software justice. For clean sounds I have no hesitation in using GR3 straight, but for more exposed dirtier sounds I’m currently experimenting with disabling the software speaker simulator stages and outputting the feed into the effects return of a Trace Elliot 2×10 combo, which is then mic’d up in the traditional manner. Initial results are encouraging - it’s one way of losing that subtle high-frequency fizz which is so often an amp-sim give-away, whilst still being able to take advantage of the great range of different amp flavours on offer. Oh yes, and you’ll definitely want to engage the ‘HiQ’ button whenever you use Guitar Rig 3 - the improvement in sound quality is noticeable.
Bye bye DRM
January 7th, 2009
In what must surely sound the death knell for Digital Rights Management as we know it, Apple have announced the ditching of DRM protection on music bought through their iTunes store. DRM is the mechanism that prevents you copying downloaded music onto the device of your choice, and is a huge disincentive for the more technically-astute to buying from places like iTunes. As a piracy prevention measure it never achieved anything but the inconveniencing of those that actually did choose to pay for their music. I doubt I’ll ever bother to download and install iTunes anyway, especially after using Amazon’s MP3 Store
Update: It appears that DRM-free MP3 files downloaded from iTunes can still be linked back to the purchaser by way of an email address embedded in the file. Is that a form of Digital Rights Management? It doesn’t seem to have been used as such in the past, but who knows how this trackable tag may be used or abused in the future. However, if you only use the music for personal and non-commercial use as per the licencing agreement you should have little to worry about.
epicVerb released
January 6th, 2009Following on from my last post, I’m happy to report the official release of epicVerb. The great news is that it is free!
The epicVerb interface
My preferred freeware (ok, nagware) reverb up until now has been the excellent Ambience, but judging from the demos I think epicVerb may have a stab at the top spot. Its tails sound smooth and natural, without metallic ringing or other obvious artifacts found on many simpler reverbs. I can’t wait to load it up in Cubase and see what it can do.