Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Best Computer Music Bits From NAMM 2015”.
Hello, my name is Robin Vincent and welcome to multi muses technology here in a slightly frozen Norfolk. The dust has settled on another name show, and I thought it’d be good to to pull out some of the more interesting computer music II – things that I think are cool or worth talking about for the last couple of years. It seems to have been all about the iPad all about little apps and bits and rubbish, whereas this year, there’s been quite a few bits that are actually interesting, useful and take us forward in computer music and look like a heck of a lot of fun to Play with now, I should make you aware that I didn’t go to now. I haven’t touched or played any of these things I’m talking about, and so this is purely just my opinion, based on completely false assumptions and just stuff off the top of my head.
But that’s why I do best. Let’S, let’s have a look. Let’S have a look, let’s have a look, let’s have a look.
Let’S have a look. It’S been the season for major door updates for anon from reason, 8 and Cubase 8 released before Christmas. Cakewalk released sonar x4 or sonar platinum, as it’s now called about a week before the show nicely stealing the thunder from avid Pro Tools 12, which was announced at NAMM. Both cakewalk an avid, have now adopted a subscription models where you can pay a monthly fee and then get free updates and support for the term of your subscription. Personally, I quite like splurging a bunch of cash on something and then trying to forget about it rather than having to budget for a constant outgoing bill, but it does mean that you don’t have to save up in the first place. I wonder how well they will cope with providing the sort of support the subscribers feel entitled to.
If you are paying for a support contract, then it’s not really acceptable to depend upon community forums and the goodwill of other users you’re going to want a phone number direct to the source. Both Pro Tools, 12 and sonar platinum, offer a dazzling array of music production facilities, keeping them both in the Premier League of digital, audio workstations and I’ll, be doing a full review of both sometime soon, we have been waiting so long for spectrasonics to get their thumb Out and do something new: it’s been years since the original omnisphere arrived and transformed atmosphere already my favorite VST instrument into something even more marvelous. Well, finally, we have a new version and it looks pretty amazing.
Actually, I should temper that a little because it looks actually a bit dated too much like the original, but the potential for sound creation appears to be enormous. You can import your own audio, not just samples on loose but whole pieces of music and use them as the basis of creating instruments and weird sort of sound scapes, they’ve grafted in wavetable and granular synthesis engines, new filters effects and all sorts of stuff. And it comes at about ten thousand sounds which might be rather overwhelming, but let’s hope they have a good search and filtering facility.
This is the software are most excited about. We’Ve had another fairly long, wait on Smiths and Martin getting version 1.5, an emulator out on the street. I played with a beta version of this back in November and it had a lot of good improvements and also some still slightly dodgy areas. So I’m hoping that the finished version is as awesome as I hope it will be. Are we doing a full review on this version soon, but suffice to say that if you have a touchscreen, then this is the software you need for creating multi-touch controller templates. For your software, well, what we really need is another piece of recording software.
Well, no, really we probably don’t, but let’s not stop tways from introducing their own multitrack. Recording software waves tracks live their angular is that it’s designed for live performance capture rather than studio production, and I guess no one has really done that before, and waves already has all their plugins embedded in a lot of life performance gear. So it does make some kind of sense: there’s bugger all information on the website or anything like that. So I’m not even sure why I’m talking about it get your act together. Waves moving on Wardour software released a new soft synth called nave, which has sort of natty 3d wave editing the likes of which we haven’t seen, probably since the 1980s it’s available for the iPad and also now in a VST format, with an enhanced interface. But of course, it leaps from the reason of all $ 19 on the iPad to a whopping 149 euros for the VHD format.
What’S that about to those of us in the know and care about comparing these things. Focusrite interfaces have suffered from kind of poor latency performance across their whole range, great bits of hardware, just kind of a a bit laggy. So it’s a great interest that they are marketing their new Klarich range. Can we think of any other ways of saying red as the lowest latency interfaces around? What’S the secret Thunderbolt becomes a standard on the Mac, of course, but they’re kind of thin on the ground on the PC. But this is changing and most decent, up-to-date motherboards now have a Thunderbolt header on board and offer us some kind of card upgrade for people who are interested in that kind of thing. These might be the first sensibly priced well specified Thunderbolt interfaces, I’ve seen, and so they could be really good, very standard sort of boxy design, though, but with the latency under one millisecond.
Who really cares? Well, I do, but that’s just me. I don’t know who this bloke is either, but a couple of years ago he produced a very interesting controller, called the kunio quinion corkwood. We know we’ve both kind of odd but really interesting. They seem to use a kind of a strange white spongy material.
This backlit with various LEDs and the effect is somehow kind of unbeautiful, but the creative possibilities are very interesting. Indeed. This year they’ve released the calyx, which, on paper at least, is my absolute dream: audio interface, I’m always on the lookout for the perfect audio interface. For what I do, but ticularly now, as I’m performing, live more often and would really be really helpful for me to have a bob, so I can plug other sources into and very easily mix without having to lean into the computer and mouse around.
So essentially, our map is something which has a decent selection of ins and outs, hand on controls of inputs a bit like a mixer, so that I can easily route my growing selection of external noises and have all that instantly squirted into and out of the computer. Obviously, you can do this with a mixer to a degree or you can do it with a regular or doing a face and a software mixer, but I don’t want another box crushing on my desktop. I want one unit: that’s not crazy, big doing the whole lot without having to mouse around the K mix could be it again. It’S covered in their strange luminous material and I’m yet to see it in the flesh, but I couldn’t quite decide whether my reaction to it is cool or yuck.
So in a nutshell, the K mix is an 8 in 10 out audio interface, with a couple of preamps midi, i/o, a programmable mixer with DSP on each channel and a complete control surface for your software. That’S pretty much exactly why I’m after and hopefully I can get my hands on one when they arrive in the spring and do a full review. I’Ve ignored Roland for a few years now, but lately they’ve become sort of interesting again. I, like all the groovy area of stuff and I’ll talk about their new mixer in a minute, but first we have the super. You a USB audio in offense. This fits into a sort of a growing separate genre of ultra high performance interfaces like the motor track.
16 focus right, Forte, rme babyface, that kind of thing where you have a small box with a big knob on it that reports to be a super super quality. So likewise, the super UA is well built. High quality throughout nice, flashing lights, up to 192 kilohertz and you can add a cool little mic, preamp box to the video – tells you very little. But I guess all you interfaces are not really very exciting, but I can tell you that it has two ins and outs and uses a technology called s1 lki or silky which produces ultra smooth unclouded, sound whatever that mean the area MX one caught my eye because, As I mentioned, I’ve been looking for kind of a hybrid audio interface, mixer thingy, for live performance and for the studio, and I thought this might be it, but sadly not quite it’s designed for the area range of call, roll and analog style, synth and drum machines. But it can be used with anything I mean it’s an 18 channel mixer. It has this really interesting step: sequence effects, engine transport controls as a control surface, and it’s an audio interface.
You’Ve got loads of effects inside that you can play with. It looks totally sci-fi disco and it’s probably a load of fun to play with. If I had other bits of area gear, then it would be kind of a no-brainer.
I guess, as it has some special features and USB connections, especially for them, but I don’t, and that leaves me with kind of a cool or during a face: mixer effects and control surface. But and here’s where it’s lacking for me there’s no mic preamps or guitar input. Just you know a pair of combi mic preamps would have made it a killer product and without that I think it kind of it just misses the mark massively.
I still really love to try one arteria teased us with news of a new generation of audio interface. That’S going to revolutionize everything a few weeks before the show, and here it is the Arturia audio fuse it’s another. One of those high-performance blocks with a big knob in the center. It has a very interesting design and I love the cool lid thing that’s going on and it has more knobs than most of the similar interfaces. But it’s a bit of a stretch to find anything. That’S really radical about it.
I Turia built it because they were frustrated with having to cycle through menus to access the things they needed. I guess they’re kind of talking about their compatriots like the babyface and the track 16, and so they wanted to give every control its own control, which is awesome but also kind of what you find on most regular audio interfaces. Perhaps I sound a little cynical, but when someone suggests something is next-generation, then I’m expecting something unexpectedly awesome, rather than a nicely designed cool, high-quality audio interface, which is exactly what it is. There’S no doubt that this is a great looking in great featured box and I’m really excited about getting my hands on one and trying it out. But I just find the hype to be a bit of a turn-off. Sound quality does seem to be a theme at the moment, which is odd to me, because sound quality of the converters, preamps etcetera, has never really been that much of an issue.
For me, it’s a connectivity, it’s the ease of use and this little box is looking a little crowded. I still do really like the lid thing. I love my Launchpad. I use it all the time when I play live. I’Ve always felt it slightly restrictive and what you can see and what you can do with it. So I’m pretty excited at the prospect of a new version with more buttons and more features and more lovely lights.
I’Ve been tempted by the push controller many times but thought perhaps it’s just a bit too big and it’s not going to fit in my laptop bag and and I’m not quite getting what it will do more than my launch pad already. But this is looking just about right, and this is definitely on this year’s gear wishlist. It’S the RGB lip pads and Mladic modes, a lot more controls down the other side, making it easier to record quit scrape routes and seems cool, mixing facilities automated fades, depending on how hard you hit the pad lots of really cool here in a minute.
I think. That’S it there’s plenty more stuff. There was a whole load of things from behringer, there’s all your interfaces and control services.
There was a new audio interface from moe to updates to a bit wig things like that, and that’s of course not forget that completely not computing music related Korg, ARP Odyssey, but on the whole, these are the ones that interested me, but by all means flood me With ideas about what I missed, tell me what you thought was interesting and yeah. Let’S talk about it. Coming subscribe, talk to me, Twitter, all that sort of thing and in the meantime, don’t forget that at multimedia technology we build awesome computers for music production for every level for every pocket. Every budget, every experience from professional to beginner, whatever just come and talk to us and we’ll sort you out and coming soon we have reviews of Cubase Pro 8 every rating 1.5 and on our surface sessions, we’ll be looking at our chaos, grand Vijay and stage light And very soon, as soon as I can very soon sooner than that, we hope see you soon.
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