Studios for the masses

...continued from front page

Laser printing gave us the ability to perform economical short-run document production in the office or home. The inkjet printer allowed us to print in colour at home. The joystick and the video accelerator card enabled our PC based graphical games. The advent of high definition photoelectric sensors made the digital camera market blossom.

Now the ROM storage market has taken off, so much so that some schools no longer have laptop PC programs, but instead are starting to use USB drives as their low-cost/low-risk computing solution. And the Pentium III chip and its successors provide sufficient power to perform high definition recording and editing of sounds on hard disk - which is of great interest to many musicians.

There have been many milestones along the journey of computer-based music. Recall the Moog albums of Wendy Carlos from the 1960's - and Gershon Kingsley's (Hot Butter) "Popcorn" single from 1970. Recall the Kraftwerk "Autobahn" going Top-10 in Australia in 1974. The Yamaha C5-XM PC (circa 1985) boasted an annotation package that ran from a floppy drive. The Apple IIe offered a whopping 6-second sampler program as early as1982. Until about 1994, the early commercial PC-based notation packages (like Cubase) were rarely used, as they suffered from buggy Postscript printer drivers that would overcrowd the printer RAM and trash entire printouts of arrangements. On the Atari 400 and 800 computers (1982-3), you had to learn machine language just to make musical blips on the PC speaker, whereas the Commodore Vic 20 (1981) produced sounds via instructions within its ROM-based Basic language. We have had MIDI with us for more than twenty years, testament to its brilliantly successful and simple-to-use file format and communications protocol. In the last two decades, we have seen computer-based music tools take hold in a pervasive way. Sampling, sequencing, orchestration, score production, synthesis and recording have all become possible on a domestic PC device that now costs less than $1000.

The advent of the sound card was the catalyst for a league of home PC recording enthusiasts, many of them musicians. Many budget PCs now come with a standard SP/DIF (digital) interface on the sound card. Just two years ago you would pay over $600 for the same feature on a professional audio interface card.

But once you have a sound card, how do you then record to your hard disk? We've all heard of expensive software systems to record to hard disk, as used by the big studios. We've heard of ProTools and Logic and many extremely good upper-end software applications that offer both sequencing and recording.

But the average home studio user is on a budget, and so we continue in this issue of The Dues to look at how to record on your home PC with an extremely low (or non-existent) budget.

My selections for personal recording software in this category include the following:-

Kristal (free for personal use ) - http://www.kreatives.org/kristal/index.php

I'd encourage you to register this software with the author - who is doing you a huge favour by making this available at low cost.

n-track (free to try out with limited functionality, US$69 to register for the full version with 24-bit recording capability) - http://www.fasoft.com

This program is brilliant for all manner of use. It records multiple tracks, provides flexible EQ and runs VST plug-ins (this enable you to add effects such as reverb, delay and compression digitally).

A tiny glimpse of n-tracks

Audacity (free) - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Limited to two tracks, but useful if you want to record from any stereo source to computer. Also useful to convert mp3 to wav and other formats for further editing or mastering.

For scoring and sequencing, our pick is:-

Noteworthy Composer - http://www.noteworthysoftware.com

This is both a midi sequencer and a scoring package - free to try for 30 days, and only US$39 to licence. It works in professional settings, and would definitely befit the amateur arranger. It can save files in MIDI format or its own proprietary NWC format, which includes all the annotation features like lyrics and phrasing marks and the other stuff that midi format omits. The sequencer can drive a sound card in general MIDI format, or an external synthesizer in MIDI and other formats. Its weaknesses include drum notation, some accent marks and guitar chords. Still, not bad at this price!

Definitely noteworthy! This one scores!

Hope you enjoy exploring these packages - next time we'll look at inexpensive microphone and mic pre-amp options, as well as some inexpensive VST effects and VST instruments, as a cheap recording studio becomes a distinct possibility on your Pentium class PC.

Home

Plush purple upholstery

...continued from front page

To be fair there is a sixteen word comment on the acoustics of the Hamer Hall but isn't this supposed to be a review of a concert? There is not even any mention of the effect these supposedly poor acoustics had on the performance and in any case that leaves us with 197 words unaccounted for if my arithmetic is correct.

Sadly much of the review is padded in the time honoured "purple prose" tradition. Not only was the violin concerto decorated but it tautologically possessed "a host of embellishments and ornamental flourishes". Not only was the last movement of Symphony No. 4 loud but it was "red-blooded drama" and "an act of passion". Not only did Emma Matthews sing well but her "beguiling voice is luminous". (I must admit to be still trying to understand exactly what that means, if anything).

Is it too much to ask for a review that gives the reader some sense of what actually occurred? 213 words is not a lot to describe an entire concert but surely this should encourage the reviewer towards a concise approach. Are we ever going to see a classical reviewer who does not feel it necessary to use a host of what a friend of mine once described as "seven dollar words"? Why is it that the expressions most used in this style convey nothing? I don't know the answers to any of these questions but if someone keeps asking them maybe things will improve. Oh, and by the way Xenia, congratulations for getting three pieces of information in; that's more than a lot of your colleagues do.

Home