I’m a big fan of continuing education and I really like the products that iZotope (www.izotope.com) has been turning out. So do many of you, I would imagine, considering the market share gains that the company has been enjoying.

Izotope has a couple of videos on the ‘net that walk the user through examples that use the RX2 plug-in to rescue damaged audio. You can also download the actual before and after audio files that were worked on and a pdf that explains the procedures. You can even download a trial version of the product if you want to take it for a test ride prior to purchase.

I just spent about an hour replicating the processes that Matt, the tech support guru who cleans up background noise from a clip shot in a park, and the dreaded 60 cycle hum from a guitar track, performed.

Quick take: I was able to clean up the audio nicely, but I didn’t feel that at the end of the process I had gained a fundamental understanding of the concepts. Look, this particular blog is not for you Mix genius engineer-types… to you folks, this is elementary school stuff!

As high quality tools like the ones iZotope is turning out become less and less expensive they will become increasingly available to troglodytes like me. I’m going to keep working at this, and will let my fellow neophytes know how I’m doing- hopefully the teacher is grading on a curve!

Check out the video tutorials here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMrVgZeCXa8 (reducing unwanted background noise)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCkvnSXrHxY (rescuing noisy guitar)

Grab the files here:
 http://www.izotope.com/rx/tips

Let me know how you do!

When did the fascination for ethnic percussion overwhelm the film scoring landscape? Maybe it was the day Eric Persing made a pilgrimage to the land of mystery and came back with a set of samples that he turned into the hugely successful “Heart of Africa” library. Today, no film composer worth his salt is without a mighty set of pounding drums that can convey a sense of power and awe at the flick of a key switch.

Given the fact that multiple libraries of this nature were already available, I wondered why Mike Peaslee decide to devote the time and energy that went into SOUNDIRON’s new release, Apocalypse Percussion Ensemble. Mike told me that Tonehammer (of which he was a co-owner) developed techniques for recording big drums that he was constantly striving to improve. Mike felt he had at least one more major release of this type in him.

Apocalypse Percussion Ensemble, available as a download from the SOUNDIRON website (http://www.soundiron.com/instruments/percussion/apocalypse/) is currently discounted to a price of $179, is the result of these efforts. Eventually, APEwill return to its list price of $199. The full version of the Native Instruments Kontakt 4 player is required.

What a gorgeous sounding library, and extremely well laid out to boot! SOUNDIRON went crazy with multiple mic placement combinations, and to be real it’s going to take me (you too!) some time to compare and contrast them all.

APE weighs in at a hefty 14+ GB, and many of the presets draw tons of CPU cycles, so SOUNDIRON followed the well established practice of offering several different versions of each. The lite ones have a limited number of samples (four) per round robin. They load the quickest (obviously) and I’d recommend that you use them to explore APE. Computers with less than 64 bit operating systems will most likely choke on this material, particularly if you use the heavier presets.

Download the manual from the SOUNDIRON site. It’s fairly clear, but I pointed out to Mike that there are some omissions. For example, the company has a very interesting arpeggiator they niftily name the Uberpeggiator. I get it; it has lots of controls. You can for example, instruct the plug-in to hold the note you’ve just struck, and then add other notes (the same drum sound with different pitches, perhaps, or different instruments) into the arpeggiation cycle. I couldn’t figure out why some notes were going in and out until Mike and Chris (the SOUNDIRON partner who added this feature) explained that if you hit a note a second time you remove it from the cycle- the manual didn’t tell me that!

The bigger presets contain round robin cycles of 12 samples per note. You can also hit the Shuffle button, which introduces a random factor to the note repeats. I can’t believe I’d ever hear the repeat in a round robin cycle of a dozen, but if your golden ears can, knock yourself out with this function.

May I riff here? That is, Riff, as in West Side Story! When you’re tapped to execute a midi version of this classic Broadway score, check out the solo bongos! Damn, they’re good!

As you’d expect, there are controls that allow you to re-pitch and play with filters and eq. SOUNDIRON has also provided some very useful convolution reverbs. These aren’t the Carnegie Hall type, but rather warehouse and garage type environments, plus a bunch of zingy sounding spaces that let you take the drums into some weird and very attractive places.

Multi-drum presets are included and so are some empty templates that you can use as starting points for the creation of your own. APE also ships with a set of Ambience presets that derive from the drums themselves, adding a tonal unity to the package. Of course, you probably own Omnisphere, in which case these sounds may simply become a pleasant diversion.

If you already own a healthy complement of mondo drums you may want to pass on Apocalypse Percussion Ensemble. If you’re in the market for this kind of product, however, APE is a must consider item. The drums are beautifully recorded, the effects are excellent, the interface is first rate… and the price is quite reasonable.

Highest rating.

Long a player in the lower priced sampled products market, bigfishaudio established a separate division, Vir2, several years ago. Vir2 products cost a bit more, but they are still very attractively priced and have a luster and feature sets that distinguish them. Fractured Guitars (which can be purchased for $150 as a download by visiting the bigfish site: http://www.bigfishaudio.com/detail.html?512306) fits neatly into the Vir2 scheme.

All of the sounds, Instruments, and Multis included in Fractured Guitars derive from one or more acoustic guitars-I think; I couldn’t find any information regarding the source material on the bigfish site. This product operates within the Kontakt 5 player, which is included in the download.

The five categories of Instruments (Chromatic Kits, Tempo Synced, Pads & SFX, Melodic, Drum Kits) fall into two broad categories. The quick attack/release samples have a prepared piano quality that makes for effective rhythmic patterns, while the longer samples have an ethereal sensibility that film score composers will quickly glom onto.

To get the most out of this library you’ll want to distinguish those sounds that have a clear tonal center to them, even though they’re colored with sound design elements that create a dissonant edge. Take one of these sounds, and play an F#m7(no 5th) chord in your right hand and an Fm7(no 5th) chord in your left. The ear tries to hear through the shimmering and is pleasantly confused by the tonal ambiguity. Sounds cool, right?

The effects that ship with Fractured Guitars (reverbs, flangers, etc.) are quite serviceable, and the interfaces that let you control them are well laid out. You can, of course, re-pitch, pan and apply equalization to all of the material.

No sample library worthy of the name would ship without a set of samples that evoke the magic of Jimi Hendrix at his most freaked out. Even though these sounds were all created from an acoustic guitar (again, I think!), the manipulations do include the kinds of sweeps and harmonic excitations that the great master was fond of.

Developers tend to fall in love with the permutations that their products are capable of producing. For me, the number of presets is a bit too high; quite a few of the instruments are variations on a theme that the user could be left to explore on his own. I would also like to see an audition button. As things stand you have to load an instrument and strike a few notes on your keyboard controller to get to know it.

Notwithstanding these minor complaints, Fractured Guitars is a beautiful sounding library that’s worth every penny you’ll pay for it.

Big news out of NAMM from MOTU, particularly for Digital Performer fans who moved over to the Windows platform and had to switch from their beloved workstation because it was only coded for the Mac.

DP 8, due to be released in the Spring of 2012, will operate on on Mac OS X and Windows 7. Stay tuned for a full review in the near future.

Sure, you have the chops to become a highly recognized rock musician whose peers include Leslie West, Jack Bruce, and Hall & Oates. But can you turn those skills into a real business like Joe Franco has done?

Seriously folks, Franco, who worked his way up the New York rock ladder in the mid-70’s, has toured throughout the world, written a well respected book on the art of his craft (“Double Bass Drumming”) and, for the last 15 years, owned a highly successful audio post production facility, Beatstreet Productions, located in the Flatiron district of Manhattan.

Joe’s no stranger to the pages of Mix, but we thought we’d catch up with him and see how the last several years have treated Beatstreet.

Mix: Joe, how has the audio post industry changed in the last five years or so?

Joe Franco: “Budgets have tightened up, particularly in the last couple of years. Some of the PBS shows we work on are having a harder time finding grants and sponsors. Our business trimmed back as a result of these changes, but we’ve been fortunate enough to pick up shows on Nickelodeon, Playhouse Disney, and Adult Swim.

“We’re also writing music and doing audio post work with a few overseas companies located in the UK, Italy and France. FTP servers have been a game changer, particularly in the area of globalization. Other than time zones, working with someone in Europe is no longer much different from working with someone across town.”

Mix: Has the impact of the home studio revolution maxed out?

Franco: “Probably. If we made a living recording bands we’d be in trouble! Fortunately, our core business is music and audio post for network television series.”

Mix: What’s the latest piece of technology you’ve fallen in love with?

Franco: “Our SNS San Storage System. I can’t imagine carrying around drives like we did in the old days. Our storage is unseen; it lives in a four space array in our machine room. The volumes can be shared by all six of our Pro Tools rigs. They come up as icons on a desktop, cloud-like. It’s great!”

Mix: Are you playing much these days?

Franco: “Not as much as I’d like to- running Beatstreet takes up most of my time. I played drums recently and produced Eddie Ojeda’s solo album. Eddie was the guitarist in Twisted Sister. As you know, I played with that band in 1987.

“I recently played on Kansas guitarist Steve Walsh’s album, and also worked on projects from electric violinist Mark Wood and guitarist Zak Soulum. Both of these will be released later this year. My 70’s band Good Rats, plays an annual reunion show at BB King’s. The next one is on March 31st- check it out!”

Mix: Any final words of wisdom?

Joe Franco: “I’m glad to have found a niche in audio. I read your blog on “Glad All Over.” Dave Clark made sure the drums were mixed HOT! I loved that song, and “Bits and Pieces.” Classics!

Someone once said that a generation is defined not by the most outstanding popular music it produces, but by lesser examples that manage to capture its collective imagination. Wait, nobody ever said that-I just made it up. Still, as I scrolled through my iTunes master playlist just now and tapped on the Dave Clark Five’s (semi) classic single, “Glad All Over,” the thought popped into mind.

For those of you who lived through that era (“Glad All Over” was released in November of 1963), no explanation of the times is required. As for the rest of you-ha ha, you missed a real treat! Seriously, folks, the sixties were gear!

The marketing machine quickly recognized that well scrubbed alternatives to The Beatles would appeal to kids and their parents, who saw groups like The Monkees, Gerry and The Pacemakers, and The Dave Clark Five as less threatening. It would be a mistake to dismiss the output of these bands, though. Some of the songs-The Pacemakers’ “Ferry Cross The Mersey,” the first Monkees single,“Take The Last Train To Clarksville” for example-were finely crafted and well produced.

Dave Clark was the drummer and business mind behind the group that bore his name. He had an ego large enough to shatter established performance practice and under Dave’s direction the drum set was moved to the forefront, where he banged away freely without any apparent concern for timekeeping. Keyboardist and lead singer Mike Smith was the kid with musical training, however, and it was Mike who wrote and delivered “Glad All Over.”

Rock writers dream of unearthing three chord hits, and apart from the bridge, which introduces a fourth chord (the lowered sixth, which ultimately leads the final chorus up a semitone), “Glad All Over” is a quintessential example of this, the Holy Grail of pop artifacts.

A simple anthem to puppy love (“You say that you love me. You say that you need me.”) delivered in call and response fashion, “Glad All Over” retains its appeal today, nearly a half century after it entered the charts. It peaked here in the States at number six.

The Dave Clark Five had a couple of other successful singles. The best of the bunch, “Catch Us If You Can,” came from the film of the same name, a weak facsimile of “Hard Day’s Night.” Like all the other groups that piggybacked on top of The Beatles, The Dave Clark Five had a limited upside, and when they disbanded in 1970 it was without the hysterical sense of loss that numbed Beatles fans felt when that illustrious quartet called it quits. Still, for those of us who were there- and the rest of you who wish you were!-Glad All Over” remains a signature song from the sixties.

“Glad All Over”
Columbia DB (UK), Epic (USA)
Writers: Mike Smith, Dave Clark
Producer: Adrian Clark

Makemusic (www.makemusic.com) releases a new version of its flagship product, Finale, each year. Sometimes the advances are radical, other years less so. Finale 2012 offers users who rely on the Garritan Orchestra instruments that have shipped with the product for the last several years increased flexibility in instrument assignment, more control over the audio engine, greater implementation of the Unicode standard, a significant simplification of the score spacing function, and a printing option that, while not sexy, is the new feature I find most useful.

If you’re a power user who integrates score creation software into a fully loaded work station environment, the advancement in Finale’s audio engine may not interest you. I hit Finale after a score is completed, and therefore have little experience routing staves to the instruments from the Garritan library. However, it’s obvious that the new, highly customizable Score Manager feature will be extremely attractive to writers who need to maximize control over Finale’s internal audio play back functions. Each year Makemusic moves a few steps closer to developing Finale into a stand alone DAW for composers who need to verify the accuracy of their scores solely within this environment.

Let’s face it: spacing remains the most problematic aspect of all notation products. Allowing for fluid placement of all the symbols and articulations that make up a score is simply a difficult job for any program to handle. All of us have had frustrating moments entering a forte symbol and then having to grab and place it where we thought it was originally stamped.

I write several large orchestral works a year, and spacing of systems is an issue that I have to deal with. In 2011 Makemusic made it easier to grab individual systems and move them around without disturbing neighboring ones. The new Space Systems plug-in goes a step further. You can grab an individual page, several, or the entire score and experiment with the different spacing options… very helpful.

Most of my scores are written on a Windows 7 machine. Previous versions of Finale forced me to load Cute PDF, a free app that acts as a go between between Finale and the PDF format. This year Windows users have been given the gift of elimination- scores can be saved as PDF docs directly, and in addition to the convenience factor there’s another huge advantage: Finale 2012 uses its own page size functionality, not the computer’s, so the size of the score you output is aways correct. Save an 11 x 17 score as PDF, and you can print the PDF will print to either an 8.5 x 11 or 11 x 17 inch printer accurately.

If you use this application and are interesting in streamlining your workflow, FInale 2012 is clearly worth considering.

Ok, I admit it… I kind of choke up every time I hear Andy Williams break into “It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year.” Forget the fact that his hot as can be ex-wife was convicted of killing her model good looks ski bum boyfriend, this track speaks to the family get togethers that seemed mythical in the universe my birth family inhabited.

Obviously, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” sung by anybody- I prefer Judy Garland’s original, from the film musical “Meet Me In St. Louis,” is a tear jerker for all but those who spent some time in the Muqtada al-Sadr “kill whitey” training schools. And yet, year after year, I keep spinning the late great Donnie Hathaway’s “This Christmas.”

Maybe it’s because we know that this gifted young artist tossed himself out of a mid-town Manhattan hotel room, but whatever the reason, Donnie managed to conjure up the joy and magic of Christmas without denying the genuine pain that’s part of this coveted holiday for so many people who live on the fringe, the outskirts.

Whoever gets your vote, I wish you Peace, Joy and SOUL (wait, isn’t that how Don Cornelius signed off of every episode of Soul Train?) throughout the holidays, and beyond.

I first met Andy Bloch at the Mannes College of Music back in the mid-1970’s when we were both students of the great guitarist Fred Hand. Fred; there was no one like him back then, and few players can hold a candle to him today.

Andy has gone on to preside over Human (www.humanworldwide.com), a hugely successful music production company with offices in New York, Los Angeles, London and Paris. We spent about an hour on the phone the other day catching up.

Gary Eskow: “How has the music for advertising business changed in the last five or ten years.”

Andy Bloch: “In a couple of important ways. The collapse of the recording industry has forced artists to find alternate income streams. As a result, more and more tracks are available for television and radio use, and these sync licenses have had a detrimental impact on the amount of original scores that commissioned.

“This development has made it critically important that we deliver tracks that have the aural polish of masters, even when we’re submitting demos. If a client is listening to your demo over an iPad and you’ve only had half a day to put the track together, you’re at a clear disadvantage when the next cut he or she plays is from an artist who spent six months making a record.

“Fortunately, great strides have been made in the area of mastering plug-ins. We have 14 composers working out of our NY and LA offices, and all of them have their own mastering chain. For a grand you can pick up the Waves Mercury bundle or something comparable. I love the Waves CLA-2A compressor; throw that across the main buss and your tracks pop. Like it or not, we have to be aware of the importance of competing with mastered records in terms of volume. I love the Sonnox plug-ins. The Inflator is great, and when I’m in a pinch, with no time to master a track in detail I’ll throw on the Sonnox L2. The plug-ins that Tony Maserati designed for Waves are a necessity for me as well.

“Having a clean signal path into your DAW is obviously of critical importance. It’s amazing to me how little you have to spend on quality microphones. The MXL mics are outstanding. Knock-offs made in China, they sound great. For $129 or so you get a condenser and pencil microphone. We recently conducted a shoot out between a U87 and the MXL mic. The $4,000 you spend on the 87 gives you an incrementally better, more wide open sound. If you have the money to drop, great, go ahead.

“There are so many companies making excellent mic-pres and compressors. All you need is a couple of channels of high quality analog gear and you’re good to go.”

GE: “I remember spending a small fortune putting together 3/4” reels and sending them out back when I had a music production house. The industry eventually switched over to DVDs. Do you still send out reels?”

AB: “No! Of course, it’s still important to have reps who go into meeting with ad agency personnel, and they’ll take a DVD or two with them. No one wants you to send them a reel anymore, though. They just want you to provide them with a link.”

GE: “Has the internet opened up new distribution opportunities?”

AB: “Yes. If you go to our site and click on SPECIAL PROJECTS you’ll be taken to a link to an album (“Under The Holiday Star”) that we recently recorded for Stella Artois, which they’re releasing as a free download on their site.

“We recorded this album live at our studios. The idea was to track eight classic holiday songs with a 60’s French vibe. It was a lot of fun to do. You remember Gordon Minette, right? He’s one of our writers. We tracked the eight tunes at his place, and mixed and mastered them at Fluxivity (www.fluxivity.com) over in Brooklyn.

“Fluxivity is a great place to work. They’ve got a classic Neve board over there, and during the three days we spent working there I didn’t hear a single click or pop. Matt Shane was the mastering engineer, and I recommend him highly.

GE: “You’ve had an office in Los Angeles since 2004. Do you still go out there as frequently as you used to?”

AB: “No, in large part because the integration of our facilities through the web has gotten so much tighter. On any given day we’ll have between 60 and 80 jobs in our database, in various forms of developments. We are in constant contact with our LA office as well as those in London and Paris, but there’s very little need for me to be anywhere but here, which is great. It’s easy to stay on top of things from wherever you are, at any time.”

Ten years ago some industry analysts believed that modeling would replace samples as the top dog in the virtual instrument world, perhaps as early as the day we are now living in. Creating instruments based on psycho-acoustic calculations that can compete with recorded sample libraries has proved difficult, however, albeit with some interesting exceptions.

Applied Acoustics Systems (www.applied-acoustics.com), a company based in Montreal, Canada, was founded in 1998 by Marc-Pierre Verge and Philippe Dérogis. Engineers and musicians, the pair were well suited to bringing modeled instruments to the market, and their line- particularly Lounge Lizard EP-3, which many keyboardists feel is the most realistic replication of the Fender Rhodes- and Ultra-Analog VA-1, a personal favorite of mine, has proved popular with both pros and amateurs. AAS released a new product, Chromaphone several weeks ago, so this seemed like a good time to catch up with them.

Eric Thibeault joined AAS immediately after graduating from college. He’d interned at the company and so the transition was smooth. “I was studying electrical engineering here in Montreal,” says Thibeault. “I was able to do two internships prior to graduation. They offered me a job, and I’ve been here ever since, for about ten years.”

I remember liking the voicing characteristic of Strum Guitar. “Right, that’s a nice feature. You can activate a setting that will translate a three note piano triad into a full bar chord, voiced as it would be on the guitar, which makes the performance much more realistic sounding than it would otherwise be.”

So, where are we in the evolution of modeling technology? “Still advancing. Chromaphone is a clear development in this area. In the past we’d send a signal from one resonator to another; a modeled guitar string, for example, would be fed into the model of a physical object, the body of a guitar.

“Now we have an equation that emulates the acoustic energy that’s shared between these two objects. Simply put, in the past one object influenced the other, now the influence is bi-directional. A piano has many of these kinds of couplings going on at all times. To effectively recreate its sound you need to model all of these interactions. Chromaphone bring us one step closer to that goal.”

And how does the market look from the perspective of Applied Acoustics? “There are two ways to look at it. Apple just reduced the price of the Logic Pro 9 Bundle by several hundred dollars. That’s great for the user, and potentially for companies like ours, because the user will have cash left over to purchase products like the ones we make. On the other hand, Logic is packed with features, so they will most likely wade through all of them before looking beyond the boarders of Logic!”