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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.'"
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.
Amps come and go, but I stand by my reasons for keeping the Fender Deluxe that I've had since 1976. I do like to use cab simulator effects, but there's something important about the gestalt of a guitar, an analog distortion pedal, and a tube amp, that you just do not get with any other gear.
There's also the fact that my Deluxe is loud as fuck and has only failed me once in almost 30 years (a power supply problem in 1981.)
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
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
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.