It is generally accepted that having more screen ‘real estate’ improves productivity, no matter what you use your computer for. In the world of audio production, having an extra monitor (or two) is pretty much essential. Most musicians tend to use several programs at once (either via rewire or as plugins) and relying on a single screen means that you spend a lot of time tabbing between various programs, or windows within the same program. If you haven’t tried adding another monitor to your existing setup, then you should read on – it’s one of those things that, once you’ve experienced it, you’ll wonder how you ever survived without…
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Music Technology Posts from March, 2008
Two Monitors: The Value of Having Multiple Screens
Thursday, March 27th, 2008Who Discovers Musicians In The Digital Era?
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008Considering all the hype around self-releasing albums these days, you might be forgiven for thinking that the whole concept of A&R has simply evaporated. In fact, talent spotters are (even more) essential in these days of mass distribution. This is one aspect of the music industry that is certain to persist through whatever economic model changes occur over the coming years; now that everyone can theoretically reach a worldwide audience instantly, it’s vital to have people who know where to put the investment that delivers a healthy return…
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EMI Feared Extra-Terrestrial Piracy Of Beatles
Friday, March 21st, 2008Today’s post brings together two normally unconnected interests of mine; space exploration and music. This year is the 31st anniversary of the Voyager golden record launch – a disc containing various representations of humankind which was sent off into the cosmos (more as a symbol of hope and adventure than a serious attempt to make contact with alien civilisations). A compilation of music was placed on this disc, and the difficult task of reducing the entire musical output of humanity to one ‘greatest hits’ LP was curated by Carl Sagan…
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Melodyne Introduces Direct Note Access
Thursday, March 20th, 2008Just a quick technology update today; I recently posted about the merits and abuse of vocal autotuning. Although the Antares Autotune is perhaps the most (in)famous of these pitch-shifting tools, another firm favourite amongst audio producers is Melodyne. The creators of Melodyne have now added a new trick to their arsenal, dubbed ‘direct note access’. This feature claims to allow editing of individual notes within a chord – something that is entirely trivial for MIDI, but virtually impossible for audio (until now). The company claims that the pitchshifting, timing and note length modification abilities previously available to Melodyne can now be selectively applied to particular notes within a polyphonic audio recording. Check out their demo to see if you believe them…
Vista Audio Latency Issues
Monday, March 17th, 2008If you’re planning to run audio applications on your PC, you’ll want to keep your latency as low as possible. This is something that may require quite a bit of system tweaking, as neither Windows XP nor Vista is designed as a real-time operating system. These are primarily consumer or business platforms (depending on the flavour you buy) and are not engineered with musicians in mind. However, there are some things you can do to significantly improve Windows performance for audio…
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Why You Shouldn’t Mix Too Hot
Thursday, March 13th, 2008Loud is the new black, so it seems that everyone is recording music as hot as possible – not just beefing it up at the mastering stage, but firing everything close to zero at all stages in the recording chain. Maybe it’s a hangover from the analog days where we had to keep everything as high above the hiss as possible, but nowadays there’s a lot more headroom that people don’t seem to be fully aware of…
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Haptic Robot Drummer Teaches Force
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008A researcher at MIT has developed a mechanical device which can help drummers learn new techniques more quickly. The device is called HAGUS (Haptic Guidance System) and is particularly effective at teaching novices how much force to use when striking the skins…
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Searching For 957 True Fans
Friday, March 7th, 2008Kevin Kelly of Wired recently wrote an article suggesting that artists should cultivate a thousand ‘true fans’ in order to make a living from their work. Although it’s an interesting piece, the amount of feedback it generated is certainly more due to the author than the content…
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Nearfield Monitors Take Centre Stage
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008For many home studios, the audio monitors are the last component that gets installed, but they are actually a vital tool in creating a transferable mix. Although you may be able to get away with using lesser-quality speakers if you really know what you’re doing (and know how to compensate for their frequency emphasis), having a decent set of flat-response nearfield monitors is a must…
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Jazz Jam Shuts Down Prefrontal Cortex
Monday, March 3rd, 2008A recent study by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) has discovered that some remarkable transformations take place in the brains of jazz musicians when they begin to improvise…
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