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New Developments in Music Technology
jonerik writes "The Christian Science Monitor has this article on acoustic and electronic music technology, including a visit to MIT's Hyperinstruments lab, which has developed a series of Music Shapers; ball-shaped musical toys which are covered with 'a patented thread containing sensors that react to the way the child handles them. The child manipulates a preprogrammed "little seed" of music and helps it "grow" by the way he or she shapes it.' Also worth a read is this article (free reg required) on the Line 6 series of bass and guitar amp emulators, which do a pretty decent job of mimicking various amp or amp/stack combos; from a '53 Fender Deluxe to a mid-'60s Vox AC-30 to the sludgy murk of a '70s Orange stack. 'Line 6 uses a technology called modeling to measure the characteristics of a particular vintage amp, from the distortion of its original tubes to the resonance of its speaker cabinet. The company has developed a way to reproduce those measurements in a powerful D.S.P., or digital signal processing, chip that contains models of dozens of classic amps.'"
I bought a line6 over a marshall about 3.2 seconds
after pluging into one. It's also nice not having
to redo your tube bias if you accidentally knock
the thing. It's great for touring. If you play
guitar, you have to try one of the line6 amps
out. Also, it's got really cool blinking lights.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
Look here for a review of a Line 6 amp simulator way back in October 2000.
No fee required there, btw.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
You can use it in combination with a service (pay per month) that lets you download "tones" - amp and effect combinations that model the sounds on specific songs. So you just search for "Comfortably Numb" and you've got a pretty damned good version of the tone. It also comes with tab and backing tracks for a lot of tracks, plus other backing tracks for different chord progressions. Even without subscribing to the service you can rip your own CDs or use your own MP3s and play along to them, and even play them at half speed. Great stuff, and it sells for about $170.
For more details see this review
Take a look at this quote...
"Then in 1983, three crucial innovations hit the music world, sparking a digital revolution. PC and Macintosh computers became widely available; Yamaha brought out a keyboard-based music synthesizer called the DX7 that could make an unprecedented number of new sounds; and computer and music companies established MIDI..."
Well, The DX7 was launched in 1983, but every other 'fact' in that bit is just plain wrong.
When there are lots of magazines and websites that concentrate on nothing but music technology, how on earth did The Christian Science Monitor get picked as an authority on the subject?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
My guitarist for my favorite band (Thrice) uses Line 6 modelers. They are definitely awesome, and I've demoed a line 6 amp in the shop and it is well worth your money. They are still kind of expensive for someone like me though. But then again, you get what you pay for. For musicians on a budget, I think the drastically cheaper multitrack digital recorders on the market now are much bigger news. I just put in an order for a Fostex MR8 last night. Its a digital multitrack recorder that meets my needs for around $300. I've been doing a lot of feature comparing and review reading and stuff and it is cheaper than some of the others but it is better. Plus it uses compact flash memory instead of some buddy proprietery storage. It has a USB for doing .wav outs. etc.
The Line6 amps/modelers are a step in the right direction. This type of technology is defintely going to replace vintage tube amps eventually.
It's unfortunate that they sound like shit compared to the real thing. I tried out several of their products recently and nothing touched a real tube amp. It still sounds synthetic and digital.
They're getting closer though, another 5 years and they might have something.
Amplitube is quite awesome at emulating some of the best amps out there. I've started using this as an alternative to mic'ing my triple rectifier at my studio, simply because the amount of control you get is so much greater (IE changing the amp after the guitar was recorded)
Also, Sonic Foundry's Acoustic Mirror does a great job of mimicking any environment, even the charicteristics of a piece of equipment (vintage mic or amp).
I believe both of these products have demo versions you can try out, and they are both directx plugins (so use with Sound Forge or some other audio editing app).
'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST
Weezer used line6 equipment on their last tour. Both guitars and bass used Pod Pros. (One of their rack mounted units). They didn't use any amps. They said they a/b'ed the pods against amps and couldn't really tell the difference. In fact, they liked the pods better in some cases.
One of the main reasons for using the pods is that they got a much "cleaner" stage sound -loud amps are hard to control in the mix. This was essential for them because it was during their wacky tour where they played weird locations like bowling alleys and 7-11's -all small, uncoventional venues.
Personally, nothing has yet been able to replace a real amp for me...
I HATE digital effects, and being what in people used to call a "shoegazer" band means I use a lot of effects. I'm always tripping over stomp boxes in shows. I'm also a die hard tube amp user, but I thought I'd check out the Line6 and see what all the fuss was about. It was a good amp, and I came REAL close to buying it. Sure, you could tell that it wasn't a pure sound, but it was a GOOD sound.
I didn't buy it however (can't really afford a new amp at the moment), and had to go back to playing through 1 amp.
Has anyone played through one of Fender's Cyber-Twin's yet? It supposedly reroutes the analog signal path to achive different amp sounds instead of digitally emulating them. I haven't had the chance to play on one, and I'm wondering how they sound in application.
i'm the jedidiahmarkfoster your parents warned you about
Years ago, I graduated from MIT in EE. I did two projects of some relationship to this article - 1) a thesis on modeling of tube amp behavior and 2) a toy that would "improvise" classic blues endlessly. I was amazed that Minsky in AI loved the blues toy. It was really very simple and drew upon my experience as a local professional guitarist around Boston at the time. I tried to tell them that in my mind it was really a dumb trick, but those experiment music types just couldn't get over it... I got a prize that year. The tube amp was more fun. I used a 1960 Fender Tweed Vibrolux as my subject and created a "block model" of the time/function elements that required combination in a non-linear fashion and left it at that. It involved quite a few long time constants in the description, which is often an area where amp simulators fall apart. At the time, implementing the device in hardware would have been prohibitively expensive, and so I left it on paper and got out of school. I decided not to pursue engineering much after that, other things to do. I have used the Line6 products, and they are very good as the technology progresses. However, they don't really sound or feel that much like my real old Fenders. Instead, they use certain preconceived notions of how people use the amps and cater to those tastes. For example: I don't like to overdrive my old Fender Deluxe Reverb much - that is for rock guys, and I don't do rock anymore. The Line6 products will do a good job of mimicing a "cranked" old amp, but fails to capture the subtlety of one that is instead turned up only to "4". I love that sound! My $0.02
Not sure how this got to be +5 Insightful, because its a bit confused about the fundamentals of digital audio. The question is, how fine do the slices need to be cut before you can't tell the difference between a series of digital slices and an analog waveform? If not 24-bit tech, what about 128? Erm... I think you're confused. The bit-rate determines dynamic range (how loud/quiet you can go) and precision (how many fine steps of loudness you can have). 128 bit would be ludicrous overkill, since 32-bit audio is floating point, beyond which there arent really any gains to be made. (Modern DAWs, plugins and so on already operate at 32 or 64 bit internal precision). What you appear to mean is more sample rate- if not 44.1Khz tech, what about 96 or 192Khz? Well, better believe the high end of the production world is already firmly used to working at these sample rates. Many pros swear they sound much much better than 44.1 or 48K. I always wonder why audiophiles claim to be able to hear the "digital-ness" of audio. The ear is being fooled into hearing a series of discrete steps as a wave - but at 44.1Khz its 44,100 steps every second. Film/TV is only 24-30 frames a second, no one complains they can still "feel" the frames!! The point is, no one can really hear a substantial quality difference beyond 16 bit, 44.1Khz, but they CAN hear the artifacts introduced by carrying out DSP - especially repeated DSP - all at these rates. They can also hear the artifacts introduced by the (usually shitty) ADCs and DACs on consumer kit. But the fault isnt in the bitdepth/sample rate itself. Do the DSP higher up (ie, ADC/record in 24 bit, process in 32 bit, mix down to 24 bit, master in 24 bit and finally dither to 16 bit with a quality algorithm) and a 16bit 44.1Khz wave is not in itself incapable of reproducing analog.
Check out these articles:
MIDI Files & Copyrights - Standing At The Crossroads - International MIDI Association Bulletin, Spring 1993
MIDI Song File Distribution and Computer Bulletin Boards - Keyboard June 1993
24 bits @ 96 KHz is beyond the ability of the human ear to discern any differences.
In fact, with a good antialiasing filter, 16 bits @ 44.1 KHz will put you below the noise floor of all but the best amplifiers and cover the whole range of human hearing. Problem is, an antialiasing filter suitable for 16/44.1 is VERY tough to design without causing distortions in the range of human hearing. 24/96 is easy to develop a suitable antialiasing filter for.
Problems ensue when you are processing the data, though. If you process 16-bit data in the DSP with 16 bits of precision, then at every step in the processing chain you'll likely have rounding errors. Such errors accumulate.
For 16-bit data, I believe most people use DSPs with 24-bit internal precision at a minimum. For 24-bit DSPs, 32 is probably the minimum. I don't know what the likes of Line6's products use. A floating-point DSP would do VERY well for eliminating rounding errors, but those cost $$$.
Interestingly enough - These amps try to use a model of another amplifier's nonlinearities to emulate the nonlinearities of said amp. In my line of work, we do the exact opposite. (Correcting for nonlinearities in RF amplifiers to minimize distortion of any form.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"Korg basically hired *one guy* to come up with all of the sounds used in their Triton and Karma synth workstations - and these are their flagship units!"
Bullshit -- I know several of the voicers for this unit and work with one of them. My company does 3rd party sound design...I know my partner was one of many 3rd party designers, and there are quite a few within the company.
Besides, there are several great sounding Wahs these days. My BadHorsie doesn't sound like the old Morleys but it sounds good on its own (it was designed by a specific artist for his specific needs). I have a few pure digital Wahs that don't emulate anything, but work well on their own...and I have a few ancient ones that are good but noisy as well and I couldn't use them on any of todays recordings unless I needed to go for a very specific sound and the realism was more important than the noise floor. By the time you run a do-noiser on these, you are back to the same 'plastic' sounds of the digital ones.
Clif Marsiglio
Sonikmatter.com
I've been the proud owner of a Johnson Amplifer's J-Station for some time now which is also an amp modeler. Does a good job for $150 bucks, flash upgradeable and sounds great. Fully user programmable presets, and several internet sites have sysex files available for it.
I've also seen several wars going on between the owners of Line 6's and Johnson's offerings. But both really do a good job for the money.
-- Rick
This might apply for some Broadway shows, but the majority of productions depend on the interaction between the conductor and the performers.
I've seen an interesting device called a Radio Baton being used around here once or twice. It requires some basic coding skills to really use it correctly, but it gives one person quite a bit of control over a whole performance. The basic idea is that you have a recorded sequence of notes in a computer, and whenever you hit a sensitive table with one of the batons, it activates the next note in the sequence. Also, the spot on the table that you hit changes the amplitude of the sound. So one person could ideally control a whole orchestra of sounds and keep the pacing as necessary.
Here's one website on the device. Google up more if necessary. And if you believe that computer-generated samples will never completely sound like the real thing, check out information on a program called Gigasampler, a revolutionary program which learned to read music samples from ROM instead of RAM, allowing for extremely large and complex samples, far closer than anything else I've heard so far.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
I have been a long-time tube snob, and the Line 6 amps were the first solid state stuff I ever bought. Until Line 6 stuff was well known, guitarists would come up to me in droves at gigs (yes, I actually play in public regularly, and get paid well for it) and compliment the tones. The newest cadre of amps (the Duoverb and the Flextone III) are amazing and really capture the "breath" of the real tube stuff. The modeling improves as the available DSP's get faster.
The PODs are fantastic, the new PODxt especially, but the proof's in the pudding. Almost every recently-recorded song you hear on the radio or on an album was probably aided with a POD. Engineers love it when I bring them in to the studio because they don't have to work hard to get a great sound that fits perfectly in the mix. I have only heard complaints about the gear on the Internet (go figure), and never from real live working musicians.
And the new Variax is great. At its current price point it is incapable of replacing a good vintage "real" guitar, but it plays just like any other guitar, and several of the models are dead accurate. The 12-strings are a little off (as would be expected), the banjo, sitar and other resonator models (dobro, tricone) are surprisingly great, and the Strat, Teles, and Les Pauls are unbelievable. And the guitar just feels good; it's not a geek toy that looks like a guitar, it's an actually decent guitar that just happens to do amazing things.
Put the guitar together with a new Vetta and you just spent about $3,000 to reproduce about $150,000 worth of vintage gear, much of which is more fragile and scary to gig with than the far less expensive Line 6 stuff. I don't work for these guys but I do not hesitate to recommend them to other musicians. If you actually play for pay, you can't afford not to check them out.