Slashdot Mirror
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.
Do we look forward to the day when the recording industry has intervened with guitar manufacturers and the only guitars you can buy are MIDI guitars that have embedded technology to prevent playing of copyrighted music?
This well end up in techno / rave music, I just know it :) DJs can't resist anything technological that makes new sounds... On the other hand, that works out good for me, since I have no musical talent and love techno music...
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
> 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.
Great! Now I can miss a note and make it sound like I missed the note on a classic amp! I want a technology that makes ordinary people sound like classic musicians.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
'Line 6 uses a technology called modeling'
Modeling, eh? I imagine that might have applications throughout science.
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
Even more interesting is the Variax, a guitar that contains a software algorithm to model other guitars. Plugged in, the guitar can sound like a banjo, sitar, '58 Gibson Les Paul, Telecaster, Acoustic 12 string, you get the picture. As in the amps, its not 100% of the original, but this terrain is akin to where we were with computers in 1980.
This stuff has been around for years and although it is getting quite good, the experienced guitarist can still pick apart a digital and analog amplifier easily. Modeling amps have a limitation where they model only one setting of any one amplifier. They only sound correct at a given setting, and don't respond well to picking dynamics the way a real tube amp does. Tube amps sound so different from day to day, depending on so many variables, and there's just nothing that can come close to emulating that yet.
I use a Line6 POD in the studio, but outside of headphone jamming and last-second recording, I would much rather plug into my Mesa Mark IV or my Rivera TBR-1SL. Digital amplifiers just don't "feel" right. They don't seem organic enough and sound overprocessed and compressed. They're getting better, and the replacement of tube amps by digital equivalents is inevitable, but that day is not today. Maybe in 5-10 years.
If you honestly cannot tell the difference between the best digital modeler and the real deal, you do not have a ear for the guitar.
Music Shapers will enable children to more efficiently find frequencies and harmonics with the maximum annoyance factor.
;-)
Honestly, they are just embroidered round pillows, with 70's style designs on them. I'm sure they were originally developed for stoners.
The Line 6 amp is neat though; any word on when this amazing technology called "modeling" and "DSPs" can be used for other purposes?
...
There is this dominant misconception in the experimental music community which equates advancement in interactivity with branching. There is the implication that people want to follow potential branches down certain paths in a musical piece, like they do in a game. When I studied music, one of my teacher, Elliott Carter remarked on this problem that in music there was a 'best branch' and that branch should be the composition.
I don't believe that people get anything out of explorable musical branching. They miss the powerful attitudes and completeness of the gestalt of the combination performance and composition statement.
This type of research also mistakenly equates play and exploration with the acquisition of musical knowledge. Playing with layers of music, turning off and on beat patterns, minimalist chord patterns (pretty much what these squishy toys do, btw) does not teach one how to compose. It may teach them to listen, but not in the same way that something like the Suzuki method does. There are plenty of stupid Flash toys on the web which allow you to make music like this. What do you garner from this play?
To me, this all rings of rationalizing the computing experience as an art education experience by re-thinking musical education in such a radical way that music itself is re-evaluated (to my thinking mis-evaluated).
And this is research for self-promotion. You'd be amazed how often this guy, Machover gets in the press with these toys and his Hyper-Instruments. Sure, they're fun to play with, but give a kid a drum set and a few lessons and (s)he'll really learn something. Music.
idealord music
If the musicians strike, the producers say they'll substitute "virtual orchestras" without any live players. They believe audiences won't be able to tell the difference.
This might apply for some Broadway shows, but the majority of productions depend on the interaction between the conductor and the performers. I perform in a renaissance dance troupe, and not only will our musicians adjust their playing for what we're doing, but there's a palpable energy in our interactions with the band. Actors and dancers aren't machines; performing to recorded music can be unforgiving.
I also noticed this watching Cirque du Soleil's new production Dralion -- one of the acrobats in a "solo" took a misstep needed and a moment longer to get back into position; the musicians slowed minutely to give him time to recover.
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
What you get is a sequence of digital slices lined up in a way that mimics the original waveform. The problem is that it sounds grainy and "processed", and its easy to tell the difference between that and the real thing.
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? Maybe it will be too expensive to truly capture analog sounds with digital technology.
This is a real problem, because fewer and fewer companies make tubes any more and there are a lot of us guitar players who still are not satisfied with the way these modelling amps sound.
Perhaps the advent of quantum computing will provide the solution. After all, if something can be both a particle and a wave, then maybe we will have real waveforms to work with in order to create sounds.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
To go with my banjo...GOD! how could I have been SO shortsighted...
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...
How many 300-year-old songs didn't last, though? I bet 99% of it was crap back then too.
These 'sophisticated hyperinstruments' AKA 'Load of Balls', look to me like re-packaged tamagotchi technology.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
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
...You slashdotted line6's site!
Tomorrow you will find a new tone in their database available for download, called "Slashdot," when you pluck a string, nothing happens.
The neutrality of this sig is disputed.
I agree Line6 amps sound about a thousand times better. But after about 0.32 seconds, I went and gat a real tube amp. Later I got a brand new SG. Then a Musicman bass. And I still spent less money than I would have if I got the Line6.
On a side note, I'd much rather get decent wah modelling. Why does all modern wah (analog or digital) sound like dog shit when compared to a really old wah (one of those 2 square foot ones)? I know the old inductors used non-linear cores, I know that was a large factor in the response. I know other people know this. But I don't know why nobody makes a good wah wah!
And as to the Variax being "plug and play", the Roland synth system is available factory-installed on a multitude of guitars, including Fenders.
Okay, I'm not a parent, but I play one on TV.
I'm not strictly a luddite, either, but I think it's tremendously important that toys given to children not be technological black boxes. The true fallout of the current generation of playstation zombies won't be any sort of attention span issues or predilection towards violence, but the total lack of intellectual stimulation and natural curiousity brought on by the use of toys that discourage (or forbid, thanks to the DMCA) tinkering and explorative destruction/reconstruction.
Hey - I don't work for any of these companies or own their stock. But I do own several vintage Fender & Marshall amps, tons of discrete audio processing gear, and have a nice home studio. I have to say that my Line6 AxSys 212 amp, coupled with Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge 6 audio software, allows me to tap into an incredible array of sonic possibilities that would be very time consuming and expensive using non-digital technology. Sure, there are some disadvantages (such as the learning curve - digital is very different than analog, but that shouldn't be much of a problem for the ./ crowd) but overall the quality can be amazing. For example, I compared a master tape recording, utilizing a 65' Fender Deluxe Black Panel amp, Sennheiser 421 mics, and multi-track analog tape, against the equivalent Line6 patch (seasoned to taste of course) direct to disk. I could not tell the guitar tracks apart (and yes you can get feedback at low volumes if that's your cup o' tea)! Coupled with the enhanced productivity and relatively low cost, digital modeling is an attractive alternative to the old school way of processing a signal chain. Not to mention that you can do all of this in the privacy of your headphones, or your apartment, or with the baby sleeping, etc. Very high bang for yer' buck ratio, in my opinion.
Since the Line6 products at the time were cheaper, they sold better. Tube amp purists wouldn't touch either product, so it was left to those of us who either didn't care, or weren't irrationally biased against the fledgling technology. I guess to many people, any difference in sound between the products was worth the savings in buying a Line6. Plus, Line6 seemed to have the far superior marketing team. So while Johnson struggled to carve out their little niche, Line6 grew and flourished.
Now, unfortunately, Johnson has all but gone out of business (I believe they were a spin-off of Digitech, which is still going strong). I bought a J-Station about 2 years ago and have loved it as well. Again, I felt it sounded slightly better than the Line6 Pod, but then maybe I was biased for Johnson by then. It's too bad that they didn't have the marketing team to compete better and stay alive - as many of us here say, diversity and competition is always a good thing.
Other companies have been entering the fray in the last couple of years (Fender Cyber-Twin, etc), so certainly there is still some competition and great things to look forward to in the future. I'm just a little sad that I won't get to see what the Johnson engineers might have come up with next. Hopefully they're still working on similar things, either at Digitech or other companies.
One of these days I'll have to pick up a Pod (or whatever the Line6 equivalent is these days) just to add more sounds to my arsenal. Should be great.
Say hello to zMac.
The real question....
Does the Line6 amp go to 10 or 11? Because 11 is one louder than 10!
I have a Line 6 Guitar Port and all I have to say is that it is absolutely FANTASTIC! For $150 you get 6 classic guitar amps + effects + cabinets emulated 100% digital straight into your recording software and it sounds great.
Now, of course, you can ALWAYS get a better sound in a recording studio with the real equipment, but you are going to spend $1000's of dollars doing so.
I wish I had had this thing before I bought my Mesa Boogied DC5 a few years ago. I absolutely hated that guitar amp! If I had had a Line 6 Guitar port, I could have experimented with amps and effects and determined long ago that I should have bought a Marshal amp. I know you can try them out at the store (and you still should), but the hours you can spend with the Guitar Port narrowing down the list of possible candidates is worth it.
Digital music technology has come a long way (and boy is it getting cheap). If you haven't checked some of this stuff out (especially the Line 6 brand hardware) you're really doing yourself a disservice as a musician.
Bryan
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.