Sound On Sound joined several other music technology companies participating in the South-West's premier Music Technology showcase: Analogue To Digital Expo 2010 at the Exeter Phoenix venue on Saturday 6th March. Now in its second year, it was a day of back-to-back events, workshops and masterclasses all organised on a casual 'drop-in and see' approach.
Almost every room in the building was given over to one sort of event or another and it also made full use of the Sound Gallery Studios in the basement too.
Sound On Sound hosted two Q&A panels featuring SOS's resident PC specialist Martin Walker with SOS Forum moderators Max Hodges and Andy Rockett plus Shure's Graham Logue answering a variety of questions about recording technology, mic placement, playing live, compression techniques and much more. Max and Andy also ran a rolling guitar set-up workshop in the SOS room where people dropped in with their guitars for a little bit of TLC from the boys.
The whole event had a great feel about it, with a real buzz throughout the day with people just turning up with their laptops and set up in the cafe or along corridors, bashing out interesting sounds and giving mini performances.
To give you a taste of what you missed here's a list of the workshops and masterclasses which took place throughout the day.
Ableton LIVE 8 workshops.
Allen & Heath - demos.
Arturia ORIGIN sessions.
Drumscapes - Live sampling/Ableton Live masterclass run by live performance artist Jon Sterckx. Showed how to create tracks using acoustic and vocal percussion played, sampled and processed live.
Euphonix were demonstrating their Artist series (MC Mix, MC Control and MC Transport).
Mansons Guitar, the Exeter-based shop showed off a range of goodies.
IK Multimedia - ran AMPLITUBE demos.
M Audio/Avid/Digidesign one-to-one PRO TOOLS sessions.
Native Instruments GUITAR RIG 4, TRAKTOR DJ and MASCHINE.
Orchid Electronics - showed off their range of D.I. boxes and Acoustic Guitar Pre-amps.
Prism Sound - Orpheus and MMA-4XR preamp were demoed all day in the recording studio along with TF Pro outboard.
Joe Moretti, the UK's official Propellerhead demonstrator (Apple certified teacher) ran three workshops across the day.
Quested Monitors were on show and in use throughout the centre in the various studios.
SADiE gave a mastering workshop: covers Mastering and Editing, and the DAW workflow of a mastering engineer.
Shure & Fender microphone placement workshops, using their latest G-Dec amps, plus rolling Radial DI and Phase Align demos.
Sontronics - test station with a selection of condenser and ribbon mics.
TF Pro - exclusive showed off Ted Fletcher's (not yet released) ribbon and mid-side stereo mics.
Time & Space - Software instruments workshop covering Sample Logic's MORPHESTRA and Spectrasonics TRILIAN bass synth. Using Sample libraries in your Production – workshop covering practical uses of sample collections with Iain McKenzie.
Peter Peck of Yamaha ably showed off the Tenori-on in their hands-on demos.
If you live around the south-west of the UK don't miss it next year !
Click on the photos in this story to see more.
Check out the event's web site too. www.analogue-to-digital.com and the Sound Gallery www.sound-gallery.net
