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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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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...
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
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!
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